Lucca is the Tuscan city that kept its walls. While its neighbours tore down their fortifications to grow, Lucca left a complete ring of Renaissance ramparts standing around the old town, and today the four-kilometre circuit is a tree-lined park where locals cycle, jog and push prams above the rooftops. Inside, the grid of the Roman colony still shapes the streets, Romanesque churches stand on almost every square, and the pace stays slow. It is an hour and a quarter from Florence by train and about twenty minutes from Pisa, yet it feels like a different, quieter Italy.
It is also a city best understood by ear. Every landmark here has a story the stones alone will not tell you: why an amphitheatre became a piazza, why oak trees grow on top of a tower, why a wooden crucifix draws a candlelit procession each September. The self-guided audio guides let you wander freely and press play when something catches your eye, starting with the Mura di Lucca themselves, whose bastions and gates explain how a small republic stayed independent for centuries.
Piazza dell'Anfiteatro and Via Fillungo
The most photographed spot in Lucca is a square that is really an ellipse. Piazza dell'Anfiteatro follows the outline of a Roman amphitheatre from the first or second century BC that once seated around 10,000 spectators. Over the centuries houses grew onto the ruins, and in the 1830s the architect Lorenzo Nottolini cleared the interior to create the open oval you see today, entered through four narrow gateways at the cardinal points. Its audio guide walks you through that transformation while you sit with a coffee under the curved facades.
A short stroll away, Via Fillungo is the main shopping street, a medieval lane of pastry shops, old cafes and towers, and a few steps beyond it stands the Basilica di San Frediano, whose golden mosaic of the Ascension glitters across the facade and whose chapel holds the patron saint Zita.
Climb the Guinigi Tower
Lucca's skyline has one unmistakable silhouette. The Guinigi Tower, built in 1384 for a family of silk merchants, rises 44 metres and carries seven holm oaks on its roof, planted in earthen basins so that a small garden crowns the climb of 230 steps. The audio guide tells you why a merchant clan put trees on a tower, and what the view means: the oval of the amphitheatre, the ring of the walls, the Apuan Alps to the north.
For a second panorama, the Torre delle Ore, the city's clock tower, offers 207 steps and a mechanism you can hear ticking as you go up.
The Duomo and a city of a hundred churches
Lucca has been called the city of a hundred churches, and the finest is the Duomo di San Martino. Consecrated in 1070 and given its marble facade in the 1200s, it has an oddly narrow right-hand arch because the bell tower was already standing when the front was built. Inside, the Volto Santo, a wooden crucifix of a robed Christ that legend attributes to Nicodemus, sits in a small temple by Matteo Civitali, and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto is one of the tenderest sculptures of the early Renaissance. A Tintoretto Last Supper hangs nearby.
Across town on the old Roman forum, the Chiesa di San Michele in Foro stacks tier upon tier of striped columns beneath a gilded archangel, and the lively Piazza San Michele in front of it is where the city meets for an evening walk.
Puccini's Lucca
Giacomo Puccini was born here in 1858, into a family that had supplied the cathedral's organists for generations. The Puccini Museum - Casa natale di Giacomo Puccini occupies the apartment where he grew up, with his Steinway, letters and costume sketches, and its audio guide pairs the rooms with the music. A few streets away, the Teatro del Giglio is the opera house where his works are still staged, and a bronze Puccini sits in the little square outside his house, cigarette in hand.
Piazza Napoleone and Palazzo Pfanner
When Napoleon gave Lucca to his sister Elisa Baciocchi in the early nineteenth century, she cleared a block of medieval buildings to create Piazza Napoleone, a plane-shaded square in front of the Palazzo Ducale di Lucca, the seat of the old republic's government. On the northern edge of the old town, Palazzo Pfanner keeps a formal Italian garden of statues and lemon trees beneath the walls; the Pfanner family ran one of Italy's first breweries here in the eighteenth century.
Beyond the walls
The countryside around Lucca holds three sights worth the short trip. The Acquedotto Nottolini, built between 1823 and 1851, marches across the fields south of the city on more than 400 brick and stone arches. North up the Serchio valley, the Devil's Bridge at Borgo a Mozzano is a medieval hump-backed crossing with a legend attached to its name. And the Villa Reale di Marlia, once Elisa Baciocchi's country residence, opens its gardens and water theatre to visitors.
Getting there and around
Lucca sits on the Florence to Viareggio railway line; the station is a five-minute walk from the southern walls. Once inside, everything is flat and close together, so the natural way to explore is on foot with earphones, or by renting a bicycle for a lap of the ramparts. Most of the old town is closed to cars, and the sights listed here are all within a fifteen-minute walk of each other.