2000 years of history and art

The reconstruction of Lucca's origins is still the subject of historical research today.
Its name "Lucca" derives from the Celtic-Ligurian word Close, what does it mean "marshy place" but also "light" and would have indicated a clearing in the vegetation. Recent archaeological discoveries instead suggest an Etruscan origin for the city.

However, it was the Romans who left the most evident traces of their passage with the foundation of the walled city and the orthogonal layout of the streets, in which the cardo maximus can still be recognised. via Fillungo - Via Cenami and the Decumanus Maximus, Via San Paolino - Via Santa Croce, the Forum, where today one of the most important and evocative squares of the city opens up, Piazza San Miochele and theAmphitheater, built in the second half of the 1st century AD outside the mighty city walls.

In the Middle Ages, important communication routes passed through Lucca, first and foremost the Francigena road of pilgrims and silk merchants which spread from the Mediterranean to the markets of Northern Europe. The weavers and merchants of Lucca enjoyed moments of great notoriety for the refinement of the fabrics they traded and political influence at the courts of Europe.

The city became a small but secure Republic protected by a new imposing city walls where she lived in contact with the world but sheltered from it until the arrival of the Bonapartes. Elisa was Princess of Lucca in the early nineteenth century. She was followed by Maria Luisa of Bourbon, and both worked to modernize the city, which had lived too long in isolation.

The result is a mosaic of times and spaces in which to always discover new glimpses and profiles.

un very long story of a city who has lived intensely through every historical era and has preserved the memory of each one.

Its best profile is precisely that of a city that has been able to change over the centuries, adding, removing, and adjusting large squares and small alleys, always with great delicacy to offer visitors an ever-new experience, ever-changing landscapes.

From the rigorous grid of the city founded by the Romans, to the winding streets of the medieval era onto which the large squares of the basilica churches open, from the imposing Renaissance walls to the rich eighteenth-century palaces of the silk merchants, from the desire for large imperial spaces that characterise nineteenth-century Lucca, to contemporary Lucca, in a balanced mix of all these eras and all lifestyles.