My kind of town - Pontremoli, Tuscany
Penny Richards director of Pringle Richards Sharratt, whose recent projects include Shrewsbury music school (AT120).

I completely adore Pontremoli. Pontremoli is a small town in the northernmost part of Tuscany called Lunigiana, which I am lucky enough to be able to visit several times a year. It has all the best qualities a town can have: several very good bars, one or two stylish clothes shops, the arms and munitions store, a market on wednesday and saturday, and a pretty cathedral square. And you can do the entire town on foot without getting exhausted.

My ideal morning in Pontremoli is a Saturday in the summer, when the market stalls are in full swing and there is a lot of very good linen clothing on sale. Breakfast should be taken in the Caffé degli Svizzeri. This marvellous Liberty Style bar has original oak panelling and Tiffany-ish lights (rather deftly converted to take compact fluorescent lamps) and some clever tables and chairs designed so that the chairs fit under the table on the diagonal. It makes easily the best cappuccino in town and is a good place to settle down with the local paper.

By lunchtime we have normally gravitated towards Bar Luciano; very picturesquely positioned in the cathedral square, this is my mother-in-law's favourite bar. It offers an excellent aperitivo della casa, which is very refreshing in the hot weather, but the service can be rather slow and so we don't go there every day. The bar is also well positioned for the cathedral doors, from which a bride and groom regularly emerge during the course of the morning. On a saturday this bar is usually surrounded by about six trucks selling food - salami, cheese, dried mushrooms and roast chicken. If you get the timing right, you can order a chicken to be roasted while you have an aperitivo and then take it home to eat for lunch.

If you are with a rowdy group of teenagers (as I often am), then the bar to go to is Alvaro's, otherwise known as Bar Moderno. Located in the new town on a five-way crossroads, it has a 1950s swooping facade and some classic bulbous plastic ceiling tiles in French blue. The lighting is very harsh but the ice creams are worthy of diplomas, as proclaimed by numerous certificates behind the stainless steel counter. Tony the barman always seems to know what we are going to order, even when there are about 15 of us and the orders diverse: kiwi granitas, toasts, beers and gin and tonics. I always have the aperitivo, which is broadly speaking Campari and Martini Rosso, served at room temperature. 
Then on the other side of town in the Piazza Italia there is Bar Piccadilly, the sort of place you go if you want to watch a football match on television or play on the pinball machines. As a family we have a collection of geriatric pinball machines, so it is interesting to see how their design has moved on into the twenty-first century. This bar also is well located for market day, since it is adjacent to the part of the market which sells lawn mowers and strimmers, and is good for people-watching as it has a very varied clientele. 

Piazza Italia is rather mundane - no bush-hammered stones with staggered joints, just a crude surface of asphalt and a lop-sided array of heavily pollarded acacia trees. But it is an excellent venue for evening events, including last summer's football match between two teams of boxer dogs (Juventus vs Milan), dressed in the appropriate strip. It's that sort of piazza.

The most enigmatic bar in Pontremoli is Bar Fina, which is on the old Parma road and attached to the side of a Fina petrol station. This bar has a curious fascination - probably because we have never been there - and it is always patronised by a group of elderly men (playing Scopa, we imagine).

On a market day, I always check out the rather smart clothes shop Federico e Gussoni. I rarely buy anything but I nevertheless go there, partly because they have two very pretty tabby cats that lounge among the Max Mara on display in the window. Further down the via Cavour is a marvellous old-fashioned cobbler, who sits in the arched window of his shop with his glasses perched on his nose. 

All the services are so good in Pontremoli. Sunglasses are mended on the spot, usually free of charge. Watch straps are bliss - you can have them changed over the counter and 10,000 lire (£3) buys a subtly coloured lizard strap (the sort that I paid more than £35 for back in the Fulham Road). Black and white photographs are developed within the hour; cars are repaired without waiting for parts to arrive from a dealer; cappuccino machines are mended during the course of a day, including a new pump, and the repair costs next to nothing. Any defective coffee machines I have in London I bring to Pontremoli to be repaired. And everybody is so helpful. Why can't it be like that here?

The end of a successful morning in Pontremoli means dashing to the flower stall just as they are closing and buying as many gladioli and miniature rosebuds as I can carry. The smell of the damp flowers in crisp brown paper is quite magical.