Lucca and Pisa: Walls, Towers and Puccini

Western Tuscany offers two cities of a very different character from the wine-and-cypress landscapes of the south. Lucca is the most elegantly preserved walled city in Italy. Pisa contains, in a single piazza, three of the most important Romanesque buildings in the Western world.

Lucca's Renaissance walls are four kilometres in circuit, ten metres high and twelve metres wide at the base — wide enough, at the summit, for the double avenue of planes and lindens that were planted along their length in the early nineteenth century and that now constitute one of the finest tree-lined promenades in Italy. The walls were completed between 1504 and 1645 as a defensive system against the Florentine Republic that Lucca, as an independent merchant commune, had reason to take seriously; they were never needed for defence, and they have been serving since the Restoration as an extraordinary elevated park that allows you to walk the entire circumference of the historic centre at rooftop level, looking down into the gardens and courtyards of the medieval and Renaissance city below. This is the correct introduction to Lucca: from above, at a pace determined by your own curiosity.

Inside the walls, the city preserves its Roman street plan — the straight decumanus and cardo lines of a Republican colony founded in 180 BC — with a clarity that centuries of subsequent building have complicated but not obscured.

The Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, whose curved perimeter exactly follows the shape of the Roman amphitheatre over whose demolition layer the medieval houses were built, is one of the most charming enclosed piazzas in Tuscany: an elliptical domestic space of domestic scale, entirely surrounded by buildings of varying heights and centuries, opening onto the surrounding streets through four narrow archways. The Duomo di San Martino preserves in its right transept the Volto Santo — a Byzantine wooden crucifix of uncertain age, believed in medieval Europe to have been carved by Nicodemus from memory and transported miraculously to Lucca in 782 — whose cult made the city one of the most important pilgrimage stops on the Via Francigena for five centuries.

Puccini in Lucca: The Living Musical Tradition

Giacomo Puccini was born in Lucca in 1858 into a family that had supplied the city's church musicians for four generations, and though he spent his adult career between Milan, Torre del Lago and the world's opera houses, Lucca has never released his memory. The Casa Natale Puccini on the Corte San Lorenzo preserves the composer's birth room with its original furnishings and a collection of manuscripts and personal effects — including the Steinway upright on which he worked through the final act of Turandot — in conditions of intimate biographical directness that the great opera museums of Milan and Vienna cannot replicate.

The Teatro del Giglio, Lucca's neoclassical opera house of 1817, programmes a winter opera season and a summer chamber festival of notable quality; we arrange private box access and, where possible, access to the stage during rehearsals, for guests whose interest in Puccini's music extends to the physical conditions in which it was performed.

Pisa: The Piazza dei Miracoli and Its Hidden Treasure

The Campo dei Miracoli achieves something architecture rarely achieves: three extraordinary buildings — the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Leaning Tower — placed on a single expanse of green lawn in a composition so apparently inevitable that it seems the result of natural law rather than human design.

The Cathedral, begun in 1063 in the aftermath of a Pisan naval victory that brought extraordinary wealth and ambition to a previously modest city, introduced the Pisan Romanesque style that would spread across Sardinia, Corsica and the western Mediterranean in the following century; its bronze doors, its Cimabue mosaic and its Nicola Pisano pulpit place it among the most art-rich religious interiors in western Tuscany.

We arrange exclusive pre-opening access to the Tower — climbing its 294 steps in the first light, before any other visitor has arrived, for the view over the Campo and the city from the bell chamber — and private visits to the Camposanto Monumentale, the Gothic cemetery on the piazza's northern edge, whose Triumph of Death fresco — painted by an unknown master in the 1330s and badly damaged by bombing in 1944 — remains, in its restored state, one of the most powerful medieval paintings in Italy.

The Lucchesia: Olive Oil and the Garfagnana

The hills around Lucca produce extra-virgin olive oil of exceptional quality — the Frantoio-dominant Lucchesia variety, harvested early for a peppery, grassy intensity that fades with time into a rounder, more complex character — and the November and December harvest period coincides with the first cold of the season to create one of the most sensory-rich agricultural experiences in Tuscany: the nets spread under the trees at dawn, the fruit falling with the first frost, the freshly pressed oil tasted that evening on a slice of saltless Lucchese bread with a glass of local Vermentino. The Garfagnana valley north of Lucca — chestnut forests, Apuan marble quarries, farro cultivation, medieval villages on high spurs above the Serchio river — provides the natural complement to the city programme for guests who want to understand the full geographical range of western Tuscany.

The Leaning Tower at the moment the gate opens, at seven in the morning, with the Campo dei Miracoli entirely empty — the Cathedral and the Baptistery still in shadow, the Tower catching the first light — is one of the genuinely unexploited pleasures of Tuscan travel.

The Essentials

Best season: April–June for spring light; October–November for olive harvest

Signature experience: Pre-opening Leaning Tower ascent and private Camposanto visit; Puccini evening at the Teatro del Giglio

Stay: Lucca historic-centre hotels or a Lucchesia villa with its own olive grove

Combine with: Florence (one hour east), Cinque Terre (one hour west), Volterra and San Gimignano

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences,your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

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