Italy · Old Town
Lucca
A self-guided walking tour of the Lucca Old Town, every street in two days.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Lucca is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 38.7 km
- Time
- about 11 hours
- Streets
- 217
- Steps
- no streets with steps
- Start point
- Cattedrale di San Martino
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Cattedrale di San Martino 1,500 points
Go along the columns under the portico one at a time. Not one of them matches its neighbour, nobody signed them, and the whole row takes a minute. Then look up, because the thing sitting above them is not symmetrical, and it was not an accident.
Piazza Anfiteatro 500 points
The only ways in are short tunnels beneath the buildings, and going through one is the entire point. Out there you are in an ordinary lane. Ten paces later you are held in a ring and there is nothing rectangular left anywhere. Come early, before the tables go out.
San Michele in Foro 500 points
The wall you are looking at is taller than the building behind it. Walk round the side and you can see daylight through the top of it. Then get back across the square and look at the very top, where something is worth the crick in your neck.
Torre Guinigi 500 points
There are trees on the roof. Real ones, in real soil, at the end of a climb with no lift in it. Get up there and the whole level lies out flat under you, and you will spend a while working out which lane you were just eating.
Baluardo Santa Croce 250 points
The western corner of the wall, and the easiest place to get up on top of it. Once you are up you are level with the chimneys and looking into gardens nobody meant you to see. There is more of this one under your feet than you would guess from up there.
Basilica di San Frediano 250 points
The upper half of this one is glass and gold, and there is far too much of it to take in from the doorstep. Cross the square, look from over there, then come back. Pick a day with sun in it. Under a grey sky it is a wall.
Chiesa di San Francesco 250 points
The space in front of this one is the widest open ground inside the wall, and after the tight lanes it feels like coming up for air. Sit on the steps if your legs want it. Behind it there is a cloister, and the people using it now are not the ones it was built for.
Piazza Napoleone 250 points
The biggest open ground inside the wall, and at noon in July the only shade in it worth having. In summer a stage goes up and the town turns out for it. The long building down one side is where this place was governed from, and it still looks like it knows that.
Porta Elisa 250 points
Come in through this one and the way ahead of you does not bend once. It runs clean across town and out the far side, which is a Roman idea of a road and nothing like the lanes it crosses. The name cut over the arch is the odd one out on this wall. Walk under it and find out why.
Eating
Actual food.
Lucca keeps its own list. The city names the foods it counts as Lucchese, and the list reads like a walk round the walls. A red bean from the plain. Tordelli for Sunday. Tripe that was once sold hot on the walls. A sweet bread still raised on a starter kept since 1881. The rest of Tuscany is out there. I eat in here.
Meat and fish
Tordelli lucchesi
Fresh pasta round a filling of leftover roast and boiled meat, greens, and stale bread softened in broth. Meat ragù goes on top. For generations it was the Sunday plate. Every family has its own recipe, so every trattoria has an opinion. I only have an appetite.
Sources: Comune di Lucca, Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Trippa alla lucchese
Tripe, the cut a farm kitchen used so that nothing went to waste. In town it had its own trade. The trippaio cooked it and sold it hot on the walls and in the squares. Street food, long before anybody gave it an English name. Now it sits on trattoria tables in the centre.
Sources: Comune di Lucca
Biroldo
A round, pressed sausage of pig's blood and pork, spiced with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, with pine nuts and raisins in it. Lucca and Pistoia call it biroldo. Elsewhere in Tuscany it is buristo. The raisins turn up in the bread here too, and I respect a town that commits.
It is a winter product. In summer most places will not have it.
Sources: Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana), Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani
Vegetarian
Buccellato di Lucca
A sweet bread shaped as a ring or a long loaf, bronze on top, with aniseed and raisins in it. It is sold on the day it is baked. A Lucca proverb says anyone who comes here and skips it has not really been. I take proverbs about bread very seriously.
Bakeries differ. Some doughs carry butter, lard or egg and some carry none of them. Ask at the counter.
Sources: Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana), Comune di Lucca
Torta coi becchi
A sweet pie filled with chard, bread soaked in milk, pine nuts and raisins. The shortcrust makes a crown round the rim, and each point is a becco, a beak. The region's recipe notes insist it must never be confused with Pisa's torta co' bischeri. I would not dare.
Sources: Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana), Comune di Lucca
Necci con la ricotta
Chestnut flour, water and a pinch of salt, cooked for two or three minutes between hot plates of stone or steel. They come off soft and brown and get rolled round ricotta while still warm. Woodcutters in the chestnut hills once ate them cold in the forest. I would have waited for the warm ones.
Sources: Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Vegan
Farinata lucchese
A thick soup of puréed red Lucca beans, black kale and cornmeal, soft enough for a spoon. The bean is a local variety, and farmers here once paid for baptisms and funerals with it. A bean that settles your accounts deserves a good pot.
Some kitchens start it with sausage or pancetta. Ask before you order.
Sources: Comune di Lucca, Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Zuppa di farro
Emmer soup, a dish of the Lucca countryside and above all of the Garfagnana, where the grain carries a protected name. The herbs are wild thyme and winter savory. Emmer is a very old grain, and I have a soft spot for anything that has been around this long.
Ask whether the soup was made with meat broth or pancetta.
Sources: Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Frate lucchese
A ring of yeast dough about fifteen centimetres across, fried to order and turned in sugar. It is hollow, with nothing piped inside. The name means friar, after the shaved crown friars once wore. A kiosk on Piazza San Michele has fried them since 1893, and you wait in front of the fryer. Waiting is my best event.
The kiosks only open for the city's fairs, above all Santa Croce in mid September. They fry in peanut oil.
Sources: Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali della Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Late breakfast
Pizzeria da Felice the old one
Via Buia 12
In 1910 Felice Marchi started baking castagnaccio here for the people who came down from the Garfagnana with chestnuts and charcoal. It became a pizzeria in 1950, and the same family still runs it. A small room near San Michele, with cecina by the slice and castagnaccio in winter. More than a hundred years of feeding people off the hill road. I call that a regular.
Sources: Ministero della Cultura, Very Nice Travels (Patrick McKinnon), Street Food 42
Dinner
Trattoria da Gigi the old one
Piazza del Carmine 7
Luigi Giannini opened this in 1962 as a bar and trattoria feeding the workers at the Carmine market. The pair who took over in 2002 kept his wife's dishes on the menu, tordelli included. A handful of tables inside and the old market square outside. I like a lunch built for people with work to get back to.
- Mon09:00–15:00, 19:00–22:30
- Tue09:00–15:00, 19:00–22:30
- Wedclosed
- Thu09:00–15:00, 19:00–22:30
- Fri09:00–15:00, 19:00–22:30
- Sat09:00–15:00, 19:00–22:30
- Sun09:00–15:00, 19:00–22:30
Sources: Il Tirreno, La Nazione (Lucca), Vetrina Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Il Mecenate come for the one thing: the tordelli with meat ragù
Via del Fosso 94
A trattoria in an old dye works along the Fosso, the canal through town. The same cook has run the kitchen for over twenty five years. Order the tordelli under their meat ragù, then the bread pudding from an eighteenth century recipe. This room used to dye cloth. With that ragù, the tablecloths still run the risk.
- Monclosed
- Tueclosed
- Wed12:30–15:00, 19:30–22:30
- Thu12:30–15:00, 19:30–22:30
- Fri12:30–15:00, 19:30–22:30
- Sat12:30–15:00, 19:30–22:30
- Sun12:30–15:00, 19:30–22:30
Sources: Guida MICHELIN Italia, Cook_inc., Vetrina Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Osteria dal Manzo where locals go
Via Cesare Battisti 28
An osteria a few steps from the classical high school, in rooms where a Lucchese eating house run by two brothers used to be. Tordelli, soups and fresh pasta are made in house. The menu was built on the old weekly calendar, salt cod on Friday and boiled meats on Thursday. I approve of a kitchen that knows what day it is.
- Mon19:30–22:30
- Tue19:30–22:30
- Wed19:30–22:30
- Thu19:30–22:30
- Fri19:30–22:30
- Sat19:30–22:30
- Sunclosed
Dinner only, and closed on Sundays.
Sources: Gazzetta Lucchese, La Nazione (Lucca), Vetrina Toscana (Regione Toscana)
Checked 13 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Lucca.
The name is older than anything written about it. The best reading takes it from a Celtic-Ligurian root, luk, a marshy place, and the reference of record puts a question mark after even that. So the address is a wet spot in a plain. Somebody drained it, squared it off and built a city on top, and I have been lying in the dry part ever since.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Flat ground, and that is most of the reason. The town sits on the left bank of the Serchio in a tight and very fertile plain, and the Romans put a walled quadrilateral down on it, a little out of true along the north side. Nothing here climbs. For once I can recommend a level with no hills in it and mean that as praise.
Sources: www.treccani.it; www.treccani.it; www.turismo.lucca.it
Why then
When the first stone went down.
180 BC. That is the year Lucca was made a Latin colony, which is the Roman way of saying the paperwork now exists. The plan they drew that year is the plan you walk. Seven hundred years later, at the start of the 8th century, the city turns up as the seat of the Lombard duchy of Tuscany, so by then somebody important had already decided this was the good corner of the plain.
Sources: www.treccani.it; www.treccani.it
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 570–800
The Lombards. Their rule settles in around 570, and by the start of the 8th century the city is the seat of the Lombard duchy of Tuscany. That is a large title for a market town on a flat plain, and it is the first time decisions about this place get made inside it.
Sources: www.treccani.it; www.treccani.it
- 800–1200
Counts, then margraves. Under the Carolingians the dukes were swapped for counts, and the march of Tuscany that grew out of that reached its height between the 11th and the 12th century under Matilda of Canossa. Nothing in the arrangement was settled by anybody who lived on these streets.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1187–1369
The commune. The podestà, the city's own appointed chief officer, shows up in the records in 1187, and from there Lucca handles its own affairs. Not the whole time: for a stretch of the 14th century the rights over the city sat with Pisa instead. An emperor's diploma of 7 April 1369 took every one of those rights back off the Pisans.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1369–1805
The Republic, and the word it put on its own banner: Libertas. More than four centuries of a small city between larger ones running itself, which is mostly an achievement of filing. It ends on 24 June 1805, when Napoleon signs a new constitution for Lucca and hands the place to his brother-in-law as a principality.
Sources: www.comune.lucca.it p. 5; www.treccani.it
- 1805–
The Bonapartes, the Bourbons, and after that nobody local at all. The principality ran until the Congress of Vienna settled the new duchy on Maria Luisa of Bourbon in full sovereignty. On 4 October 1847, in Florence, her son Carlo Ludovico signed the duchy over to the Grand Duke of Tuscany without the people of Lucca knowing. Tuscany was annexed by plebiscite in 1860, and that vote is the last time the question was put to anybody here.
Sources: www.treccani.it; www.treccani.it
The emblem
What the shield means.
This is not the shield. Lucca carries the balzana: a field cut straight across, silver above and red below, the city's own two colours, already on a civic seal by 1182 and confirmed by decree in 1931. Two stripes. At the size of an icon that is a flag for nothing at all. So the glyph is the thing nobody in this town can mistake, from any lane, in any weather: the tall square tower on Via Guinigi with a stand of holm oaks growing out of its roof, in a garden up there so old that a chronicle of the 1400s already draws a Lucca tower crowned with trees.
Sources: www.comune.lucca.it p. 5; turismo.lucca.it
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
Four of the streets in this level are Roman. The long north to south line is Via Fillungo running on into Via Cenami, the line across is Via San Paolino running on into Via Santa Croce, and the Romans cut everything between them into rectangles. Where the two axes meet, between San Giusto and San Cristoforo, is the original crossroads of the whole place. Two straight meals, and a couple of hundred lanes around them doing as they please.
Sources: www.turismo.lucca.it; www.treccani.it
The stone you walk past was paid for with thread. Lucca's silk work ruled western Europe, and the trade in figured silk cloth made the city rich enough to rebuild its own houses. The street signs still list the trades: Via dei Filatori is the spinners' street. Nobody has spun anything there in a very long time, and the name has not noticed.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Giacomo Puccini was born here on 22 December 1858, and he grew up in the house in Corte San Lorenzo, which is one of the yards in this level. His family had held something close to a monopoly on the music of this city for over a century before he arrived. I have listened to one family practise through the same wall for generations, and I would like it on the record that I never once complained.
Sources: www.puccinimuseum.org
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- via
- The plain word for a street, and here it is usually followed by what stood there. Via del Battistero, Via della Zecca for the mint, Via del Fosso along the water, Via del Panificio for the bakehouse. A street that tells you what it did for a living is my kind of street.
- corte
- A courtyard behind an arch, counted as a street because people live off it. Corte San Lorenzo, Corte del Pesce, Corte delle Uova, Corte del Gallo, Corte della Neve. Fish, eggs, a rooster and snow: somebody named these after whatever was going on in them.
- vicolo
- An alley. Vicolo del Fico, Vicolo della Felicità, Vicolo del Buongusto, Vicolo dello Stellino. A fig, happiness and good taste, all of them about as wide as I am long.
- piazza
- An open space, sized by its ending. Piazza San Michele is one, Piazzetta della Rosa is a small one, Piazzale Giuseppe Verdi is a big one. Italian settles the size of a square before you get there.
- san
- A saint, and this town has run out of neither. Via San Paolino, Via San Giorgio, Piazza San Quirico, Via Sant'Anastasio, Via Santa Giustina. Roughly one street in four is named after somebody in the calendar.
- -eria
- The ending for the place where a trade happened. Via Pescheria sold fish, Via Beccheria meat, Via Pelleria hides, Via Calderia had the cauldron makers. Four streets, four smells, and none of them there any more.
- baluardo
- A bastion, one of the blunt wedges in the circuit, and the ramp up to it gets called a rampa. Rampa Baluardo San Donato, Rampa Baluardo San Regolo, and the Casermetta Santa Croce is the little barracks on top of one.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Lucca in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 217streets
- 1,936dots
- 30.4km of street
- 38.7km on foot
- 11hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.