Palazzo Pfanner

This guide to Palazzo Pfanner in Lucca is built around Pietro Pfanner, the city's surgeon, philanthropist and briefly its mayor in the early nineteen twenties, and the case of steel instruments now displayed in the rooms that were once his home. You'll hear how nineteenth-century medicine worked when one doctor delivered babies, set bones and treated nerves alike, trusting a steady hand the way an earlier era trusted a charm. The guide also traces the palazzo back to Felix Pfanner's brewery in the garden behind it, once filled with lemon trees, peacocks and liveried waiters.