Italy · Old Town
Lucca
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.
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.
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
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 230streets
- 1,948dots
- 30.8km of street
- 40.1km on foot
- 11.5hours 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.