Lucca doesn't care about your selfies
Sunday Espresso III.
Buona domenica!
I’m not sure when we’ve flipped from making memories to keeping memories. But now it seems the entire journey is about taking pictures rather than making memories. And these pictures are like fast food junk. Readily available, served for you, and you don’t even need to understand anything, just consume, stand in the postcard, capture your - I’m sure very unique - version of it, and call it a day trip.
Look at what Pisa has become. I bet 95% of people who take pictures of the tower have no clue what they are photographing, other than “an old leaning tower.” They stand there in line, taking selfies and stupid pictures. If I were the council of Pisa, I would lock down the entire area and start charging a 20 EUR entry fee per person. It has two entry points inside the walls anyway, so this could be done easily.
Pisa is the epic example of this trend. Any Italian town that has anything to photograph, a panoramic view, a grand piazza, some towers, or a canal with palazzos, any landmark great for selfies, is a victim of overtourism. And the kind of overtourism that means, how should I put it politely, not the most well-educated or culturally curious tourists.
This is exactly why I love Lucca a lot. Lucca has almost nothing to offer for selfies.
Only the initiated few or locals would know that this picture was taken in Lucca.
The city has no unique landmarks. The churches can be anywhere in or around Tuscany. The walls, yes, they are intact, but that’s true for many other Italian cities with preserved medieval walls. The Piazza Amfiteatro is sort of unique. It is also a tourist trap with horrible, fake Italian restaurants, but no one would travel to Lucca for that square.
Lucca has almost nothing to offer for the generic tourist. It’s not Siena with its grand piazza and tower. It’s not Volterra with dramatic panoramic views of the Tuscan valleys. It’s certainly not Firenze. And 30 minutes away, there’s Pisa, with its tower, which acts as a magnet for tourists. Lucca, well, Lucca is left alone. And I couldn’t be more thankful for that.
This is the city that still belongs to its original inhabitants, the Lucchesi. The people who paid the ransom to Firenze for centuries from their wealthy merchant fortunes just to be left alone and protected by the Medici. Lucca was never invaded and was never ruined. And it still stands, on its own, quietly.
This time, most Tuscan cities are not overrun by the armies of the Medici but by hordes of group travelers and people who’ve read Eat, Pray, Love and are trying to find something they've lost, hoping they will find it by eating pasta and slurping Aperol on an Italian piazza. It will never happen, of course, but Lucca cares almost zero about these dreams.
It’s a perfect city, and I hope it won’t get ruined, ever. We’ve visited Lucca this week, it’s 40 minutes from our house. To read more about the city, check our Feature about Lucca.
Alla prossima,
Peter
Pietrasanta, 17 May 2026
Our new guide: The Apuan Alps
After our guide to Versilia, it made sense to continue the journey towards the Apuan Alps. If I say “Tuscany”, not many people think about the beaches of Versilia, and I am 100% certain, almost no one thinks about the mountains behind them. It is the best-kept secret of Tuscany, a hyper-local experience, and a trip worth a detour from the cypress hills and Chianti.
This guide is about how to approach it.