Wednesday-Thursday, 12-13 november 2025, Lucca

We have visited Lucca before, and enjoyed it enough to return more than once. On this trip, we walked through familiar parts of the old town, and also saw some interesting places that were new to us.

Under the church of San Giovanni are some nicely excavated Roman ruins. Here’s what you can see from the church floor, showing how far below the earlier buldings were:

One walks along a metal pathway through the ruins, where the signage provides some history without overloading detail.

Even more than the structures (baths, ovens, etc.), I like to see mosaics. Somebody put these tiles together 2200 years ago:

Back out on the street, it’s almost a requirement here to show respect for opera composer Giacomo Puccini, born here in 1858:

The intact city wall that surrounds Lucca is not the medieval wall, but its replacement dating from the Renaissance. The use of cannons doomed the earlier vertical stone wall, making it necessary to build a much thicker wall of earth and brick. It took about a hundred years to complete, protecting the Lucchese from those nasty Pisans and Florentines.

We walked the entire circuit, as we have done before, enjoying the view of the old town and glimpses of the modern city beyond the highway.

The landscape around the wall is beautifully maintained, even in the many areas that are not readily accessible from above or below:

Finally, another window display, not as glamorous as those in Milano, but maybe more unusual in the decorative fauna: