The territory of Villafranca in Lunigiana is located in the western part of the Magra valley in the province of Massa Carrara and it has a population of about 4,500 inhabitants. Despite the bombardments of the Second World War, it still has important architectures such as the church of san Giovanni Battista. The Ethnographic Museum of the Lunigiana can be visited in the surroundings.

The first built-up area in Villafranca must have risen in Castellaro where the Liguri-Apuani had presumably settled in a previous time and then they had moved near the castle of Malnido, the remains of which are still visible today. At that time, the fortress overlooked one of the passages to the Francigena way, a path controlled by the emperor that linked northern Europe with Rome and favoured trade and the accommodation facilities of the villages near it.
The town's toponym came from an ancient villa near Bagnone called Villa Franca. With time, it became a stronghold and one of the doors to the town. The chapel near the fortress, instead, became the modern church of San Giovanni. Without any doubt, the villa and the castle were originally two autonomous social and juridical complexes.
The absence of any citation regarding these two places in the Archbishop of Canterbury's diary (990-994), namely a point of reference in the historiography of the Francigena way, leads us to suppose that they actually developed after the year 1000. It is known that Frederick Barbarossa gave Malnido to the feudatory Obizzo Malaspina in 1164. Before that date, both villages and the village of Groppofosco depended upon the parish of San Cassiano.
In 1191, instead, a place called "Lealvilla" was first cited in the travel diary of the king of France Philip Augustus. Its new name, Villa Franca, leads to think that it probably was a free town without any feudal imposition. Therefore, it was probably outside the Malaspina's properties and had a well-consolidated middle-class town identity. This lasted until the XII century, when the powerful lords of the Lunigiana got possession of the whole territory and withdrew the autonomous statutes of the villages like Villafranca.
After the division of the family in two branches in 1221, Villafranca entered the estates owned by Corrado dello Spino Secco. In 1266, it became a marquisate. In the following years, all the area underwent many attacks by those powers interested in the rich Val di Magra. Villafranca fell under the Sforza and was occupied by the Spanish for a short time, too, when they arrived in Tuscany at the half of the XVI century.
In 1815, after the French occupation, the territory of the modern town was split between the dukedoms of Parma and of Modena according to the Congress of Vienna. Villafranca recovered its unity and its autonomy in 1859, after the Risorgimento uprisings, and entered the Kingdom of Italy. During the Second World War, the town was bombarded and lost many of its most important architectures. Among them, the Castle of the Malaspina, of which only the remains exist today, the church of Saint Francis and the historical church of San Nicoḷ. It rose with the castle of Malnido, of which only the belfry was saved.