Palazzo Bernardini

This guide to Palazzo Bernardini in Lucca starts with an oddity: the third ground-floor window along the facade has stood empty for five hundred years, ever since a stone panel meant to fill it kept cracking on the pavement each night in the 1520s. It's the house Martino Bernardini raised from 1517 for one of Lucca's leading banking families, at a time when the city's silk and lending houses financed business across Europe. You'll hear how the rough-cut ground floor and the lighter windows above spell out two different messages, and how the family kept building for two centuries, clearing the piazza itself in 1785. Look for the bronze door knockers cast as Moors' heads, worn smooth by centuries of hands.