Lucca city guide

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Guinigi Tower

Text guide

Lucca, Italy ✳

Fortifications & parks

Lucca City Walls

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See how a wall designed for artillery became a broad public promenade.♫

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Full story · About 2 min read✳

Lucca tour guides

Five free written Lucca guides explain the city walls, Piazza Anfiteatro, San Martino, San Frediano and Guinigi Tower. Read with photos and a map.

Lucca City Walls guide · See how a wall designed for artillery became a broad public promenade.

Piazza dell'Anfiteatro guide · Find the Roman arena in an oval square that owes its open centre to a nineteenth-century architect.

Cathedral of San Martino guide · Read an uneven facade, a carved labyrinth and the Holy Face as parts of Lucca's pilgrimage history.

Basilica of San Frediano guide · Move from a public mosaic of the Ascension to the smaller-scale stories inside a working church.

Guinigi Tower guide · Read a merchant family's ambition in a tower topped by living holm oaks.

More places nearby

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Piazza dell'AnfiteatroLucca

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Cathedral of San MartinoLucca

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Sources and photo credits

Photo: Lucca.city walls01.jpg by Georges Jansoone (JoJan) · CC BY-SA 3.0. Resized and compressed; cropped for display.

Lucca city guide

Explore Lucca

Lucca's history is easy to recognise in shapes. The thick walls surround the old city, the amphitheatre survives as an oval square, and a garden crowns the Guinigi Tower. These five written guides explain what those forms reveal, then take you closer to the carved facade of San Martino and the mosaic above San Frediano's entrance.

Use the walls for an overview rather than an obligation to complete a circuit. Piazza Anfiteatro and San Frediano lie in the northern part of the centre; the cathedral lies towards the south. The Guinigi Tower gives a different view of the city, though its story can be enjoyed from street level. Choose individual guides according to the time and access you have.

Choose a short story or read more detail with 5 free guides to the city’s landmarks and neighbourhoods.

How the city keeps an old shape

The walls explain the scale of Renaissance defence and the later public promenade. Piazza Anfiteatro shows another kind of survival: houses and a nineteenth-century clearance retained the outline of a Roman arena.