Lucca | The City You Cannot Photograph

Lucca, in February, and what survives when nobody comes to look

We came in through Porta Santa Maria on a Tuesday afternoon in February, with the sun low and the wind off the Apuane sharp enough to flatten Sophia’s coat against her, and there was nobody there. The cobbles were wet from rain that had stopped an hour earlier. A man in a green trench was walking a dog. Two old women were having a conversation on a bench inside the wall, slowly, in dialect, with long pauses. We had moved to Pietrasanta three weeks before, and Lucca was thirty minutes away, and we had decided to drive over for the afternoon and see what the nearest real city looked like, and what it looked like was a city without anyone in it.

This is not actually the case in Lucca. There were people. There are always people in Lucca. But on a cold February Tuesday, the people in Lucca are Lucchesi, going about their day, and not the buses from Florence and the cruise excursions from Livorno that run through the historic center between April and October. We walked Via Fillungo down to the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, the elliptical square that an architect named Lorenzo Nottolini, whose other major work is the Chain Bridge at Fornoli, which we have written about before, laid out on the foundations of the old Roman amphitheater in the early nineteenth century. The square is the shape of the arena. The shops in the curve are in what used to be the stalls. We sat on a stone bench and Sophia ordered an espresso from a bar with three tables and two of them empty, and the woman behind the counter, who was about sixty and had her hair done in the way that Lucchese women have their hair done, asked where we were from, and when I said Hungary and Sophia said Pietrasanta she nodded and corrected the order to un caffè e un caffè macchiato, because she had decided which of the two of us drank what. She was right. That was our first conversation with a Lucchese.

I want to tell you what makes Lucca different from every other city in Tuscany, and to do that, I need to take a small detour through the question of photography.

If you take a picture in Venice, anyone can tell you are in Venice. If you take a picture in front of the Florence Duomo, anyone can tell you are in Florence. The Pisa tower, obviously, is the Pisa tower. Rome has the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Colosseum, and twenty other things that are not the Colosseum. Siena has the Campo. San Gimignano has the towers. The whole modern tourist economy of these cities runs on the fact that the city has a single iconic image, and the image can be reproduced on a postcard, on an Instagram, on a refrigerator magnet, and the visitor goes there and stands in front of the image and takes the picture, and the picture proves the visit, and the visit, in some accounting, is justified.

Lucca does not have this. Lucca has nothing photographable. The walls are four kilometers long and remarkable, but when you take a picture of yourself on top of them, you could be on any park promenade in Europe. The Piazza dell’Anfiteatro is beautiful, but its beauty is only legible from above, which means from a drone or from the top of a tower, neither of which is how a normal visitor encounters it. The Torre Guinigi has those holm oaks growing on top of it, which is a wonderful thing, but you have to know what you are looking at, and you cannot include the trees in a photograph of yourself standing under the tower because they are forty-five meters above you. The Cattedrale di San Martino is a fine asymmetric Romanesque cathedral that looks, in a photograph, like every other fine asymmetric Romanesque cathedral. The Volto Santo, the medieval crucifix that has been venerated here since 742 and that draws pilgrims even now, is a small, dark thing inside a small, dark chapel and is impossible to photograph in any way that means anything to anyone outside the religion. There is no one image of Lucca. You can take a thousand photographs in Lucca, and none of them, on their own, will tell anyone you have been in Lucca.

This is, I have come to believe over the years that we have been visiting, the secret of the city. Lucca is unrepresentable, and because it is unrepresentable, it has been spared the fate that has befallen everywhere else.

I will give you an example of what I mean. If you fly to Florence to spend three days in Tuscany, you will be told to take a day trip to Pisa. Everyone takes a day trip to Pisa. The reason for the day trip to Pisa is the tower, and the reason for the tower is that it leans, and the reason for the leaning is poor medieval foundations, and the entire economy of the day trip is the picture in which the tourist appears to be holding the tower up with one hand. The tower itself is not special. There are many others like it elsewhere in Italy. But none of them are leaning. None of them is presentable as an Instagram picture. There is a small mercy, by the way, in the fact that the tower does not stand in the dead center of Pisa. It stands in the Campo dei Miracoli on the northern edge of the city, separated from the Arno and the inner streets by a stretch of suburban sprawl. The tourists go to the Campo, take the picture, and most of them never see the rest of Pisa at all, leaving the inner city around the Arno mostly to the Pisani. Even if they do visit Pisa, they are off by the evening, so the evenings are special for the people in Pisa. The city itself is theirs again. If you have only one day, and you cannot stand the thought of standing in line to pretend to hold up an eight-hundred-year-old building, the alternative thing every guidebook will tell you to do, and rightly so, is to go to Lucca instead. (Unrelated, but if you want to see Venice properly, stay a couple of nights inside the city. 90% of the tourists who think Venice is a theme park leave the city by evening, so by night, you have the city for yourself. It becomes alive, magical, and very local after 9 pm.)

The Lucchesi will not thank me for telling you this. Lucca is what travelers who came to see Pisa wish Pisa were. It is small enough to walk around in a day, contained within the most beautifully preserved city walls in Europe, at four point two kilometers, layered with churches and palazzi from every century since Rome, full of bars where the espresso costs one euro, and the woman behind the counter will correct your order. You can walk into Lucca through one of the gates, spend six hours, walk out, drive to Florence in an hour, and you will have seen something that you cannot put in a photograph, and that will, for that very reason, stay with you. Almost every friend or family member we have recommended go to Lucca has said the very same thing: it’s much better than Pisa from a tourist's POV.

Now to the part of Lucca that took us longer to understand.

There is a thing about this city which I did not see on the first visit, or the third. I came from Hungary, where the great architecture you see in Budapest is the leftover of an empire that ended after WW1, and the buildings are dusty, and the families who built them mostly fled or were dispossessed twice in the twentieth century, by the Nazis and then by the Communists, and what you see is residue. I lived in London for years, where the great architecture is the visible result of an empire that ended only in living memory and that still has its Lord So-and-So and its country estates and its ancestral money, but London’s empire shine is on the surface of the buildings and the families inside them are reduced now to the National Trust tour and the photogenic spaniel. Lucca looks, when you walk it, like a city in which the money never left.

The Medici did not conquer Lucca. The Medici conquered everyone else. They took Pisa in 1406, Siena in 1555, Volterra by force in 1472, and they ended up running a Grand Duchy of Tuscany that absorbed every important Tuscan city except this one. The Republic of Lucca, alone among the medieval Tuscan republics, survived continuously from 1160 to 1799, six hundred and thirty-nine years, until Napoleon ended it. The reason Lucca survived is not, as the postcards imply, the walls. The walls are real and remarkable, but they were never used in a war. The only time the gates of Lucca were ever closed in earnest was on November 18, 1812, when the Serchio flooded. They bolted the doors and packed mattresses against them to keep the water out, and it worked.

The reason Lucca survived is that Lucca was rich, in the silk trade and in banking, and rich in a particular careful Lucchese way that did not produce conquerors but produced merchants. And the merchants did the sensible thing. They paid the Medici. Not in cash labeled as protection, but in tax and tribute and concessions and political alignment, century after century, formally as a sister republic, informally as a place that knew which way the wind was blowing. Florence got its money. Lucca kept its walls. And because Lucca was under the Medici umbrella, no one else dared touch Lucca either: the smaller signorie, the Modenese, the Genovese, the Pisani when they were independent, all knew that any move on Lucca would mean a move on Florence, and Florence was not someone you moved on. The walls of Lucca were never tested because Lucca had quietly arranged to be untouchable. This is not the heroic story, but it is the true one, and it is why every brick of every palazzo from the fifteenth century is still standing today, still owned, in many cases, by the descendants of the men who paid for it.

I learned this most concretely on a trip to Villa Mansi in Capannori, about 5-10 kilometers north of the city walls of Lucca, where we went on my birthday, on a whim, by accident. Villa Mansi was originally built in the sixteenth century and was bought in 1675 by Ottavio Mansi, a silk merchant who had done very well, who renovated it in the high baroque style and laid out the gardens with a hydraulic park. The villa is open for tours. You buy a ticket. A young Englishman in a tweed-ish jacket comes to meet you, introduces himself, turns out he is the caretaker of the premises, and walks you through three centuries of frescoed rooms with a slight but real authority of someone who knows where every door leads. At the entrance, a huge Bernese Mountain Dog was sitting down in a patch of sunlight, watching us. The dog was called Leopoldo. The Englishman scratches his ears. He is the family’s, he says. The descendants of the original family still own the villa. They live upstairs, with a Bernese mountain dog, while a tweeded Englishman walks us, two Japanese men, and a British couple around through the staterooms of their summer house, three hundred and fifty years after the silk merchant bought it, and they have been doing some version of this for as long as anyone can remember. By the way, the family got rich hundreds of years ago because they stopped buying silk from China and started sourcing locally, cutting logistics costs and controlling the entire production line from silk to the finished dress. Just sayin’.

This is what I mean about Lucca. The history did not stop. The buildings are not preserved. The buildings are still in use, by the same families, in the same way, three centuries on. There are very few places left on earth where this is true at scale. Britain has it in pockets, but the great houses are mostly run by trusts now, and the families have migrated to flats in Chelsea. France has the châteaux of the Loire, but the families are usually quiet about it. Germany has its Schlösser and its lingering nobility, but the country has had a hard twentieth century and a careful relationship with its old aristocracy. Italy, surprisingly given everything, has more of this still alive than the rest of them, and Tuscany has more of it than the rest of Italy, and Lucca has more of it than the rest of Tuscany, and the reason Lucca has more of it than the rest of Tuscany is that the Medici did not come, and the Napoleonic period was brief, and the Risorgimento was kind to private property, and the world wars happened elsewhere, and Lucca, the city that bought its way out of every century, has the longest accumulated continuous money of any small city in Italy. Or in the world, maybe.

You feel this when you walk the streets. The shops on Via Fillungo are the brand-name shops of any prosperous European city, but the buildings they are in are five hundred years old, and the upper floors are still residential, and the residents are sometimes the descendants of the people who built the building. The bars are old and confident. The art galleries do not display tourist watercolors. The bookshops have actual books in them, and the woman behind the counter knows what is in the windows of the other bookshops on the street, and what each of them is missing, and where you can find what you want if she does not have it. The restaurants do not have menus in three languages. They have the same dishes their mothers cooked. Tordelli Lucchesi, which we mentioned in another piece — the small Lucchese half-moon ravioli stuffed with meat, dressed with a meat ragu, eaten in winter — is the local pasta, and you eat it at a table with a paper tablecloth in a room that has been a restaurant since before America existed. The wine is Lucchese, from the hills above the city. The Buccellato bread with anise and raisins is from Lucca specifically (the Sicilian buccellato is a different beast). Lucca has its own everything, in the way a place that was a republic for six and a half centuries can afford to have its own everything.

The first afternoon, in February, when we walked back out through the gate at sunset, the wind had picked up, and the light on the brick of the walls had gone a particular pink that I have only ever seen on Lucchese brick. Sophia said something I have remembered. She said: This is the only city we have been to in Italy where I would actually live. I knew what she meant. The other Italian cities are remarkable to visit and exhausting to live in. Florence is a museum that has not slept in forty years. Venice is dying in slow motion. Rome is glorious and unmanageable. Siena is a film set that closes at six. Lucca is the city you could walk into on a Tuesday in February and rent a flat above a bookshop and become, slowly, over a few decades, a Lucchese.

We did not. We live in Pietrasanta. But we go back, often, and most often in the off-season, when the city is what it always is — small, prosperous, slightly amused by the world, and impossible to photograph.

The Lucchesi prefer it that way. They paid for it.