Lucca, despite its small size, is a real survivor. It was founded by the Romans, and it's really striking to see it from above. That oval in the centre used to be the amphitheatre where gladiators would duke it out. Any trace of the Roman buildings is long gone, but the town grew around it, so the centre is still dominated by this now non-existent Roman building. You can even see the corridors that the gladiators would use to enter the amphitheatre, which are now arcades built through the houses to allow pedestrians to get to the center. Hard to describe, but it's pretty cool.

Like all the rest of Tuscany, the citizens of Lucca devoted most of their time to civil war. The Guinigi were the dominant family in Lucca, which they demonstrated by building the tallest tower on their fortress palace. The tower was used as a watchtower to spy on the other families, and to shoot at approaching enemies. All the big families had their own towers, albeit shorter, and, unique to Lucca, thought it would be nice to plant trees up there as well. They were wrong.

Despite the incessant warfare, they even had a brief taste of empire in the early 14th century, capturing Pisa and Pistoia, and laying siege to Florence until their ruler died of Malaria. The mini-empire crumbled shortly thereafter, but amazingly, while the rest of the Italian city-states were being gobbled up by the Pope, the French and the Spanish, tiny Lucca, along with Venice, were the only two to retain their independence. Lucca was able to stay a free republic until Napoleon's invasion in the early 1800's, whereupon it was finally annexed to the rest of Italy.

The city has two major churches, the Duomo, which is the cathedral, and San Michele, which everyone mistakes for the cathedral. San Michele is the one that looks very majestic from the front, until you peer around back and see that the facade is a fake, with a much smaller church hiding behind the oversize facade. But it's a very pretty sight in a grand plaza. The actual cathedral is done in a similar style (it's Pisan for those of you who are connoissuers of Tuscan church architecture) dominating its own somewhat dusty square.

71. Lucca

The next day we spent the morning successfully obtaining Somchai's visa, which was a bit anti-climactic. After spending two days trying to get a three day extension, I was expecting lots of ribbons and wax seals to evidence this obviously valuable document. Instead, the policeman asked us for a piece of paper, and he wrote something on it and signed his name to it. And that was it. When we left the country, we handed the scribbled on paper to the immigration officer, who looked at it curiously, then threw it away. So that was a total waste of time and we didn't even get a blog pic out of it.


Afterwards we took the train to Lucca, a small prosperous and not altogether interesting city nearby Florence. It comes highly recommended as a place to escape the tourist hordes and see the real Tuscany, but I think only the first half of that recommendation is true. It's like a mini version of Florence, very pleasant but nothing outstanding, and also not very lively. Like Pisa, it was once much more important and larger than at present, so everything feels a bit underutilised. It's most famous feature is its city walls, which were built around 1500 and completely enclose the city. City walls generally add immeasurably to my enjoyment of a city, but these were a little too pretty. Immaculate from outside the city, from atop the walls they looked too wide and too green, and functioned as the city park and jogging track. They did provide nice views over the city's rooftops as we circled the city.