26km (16 miles) W of Montecatini; 72km (45 miles) W of Florence; 335km (208 miles) NW of Rome.

A progressive and urbane city Lucca has an graceful landscape that includes churches and palaces, fragile facades and art nouveau shop fronts, all standing on broad avenues. John Ruskin studied his architecture here inspired by the symmetry of the buildings. The Romans laid the original roads and these were later developed into stately boulevards lined on both sides with lush green trees. There are very few cars on the roads as most of the population of Lucca prefer to do their traveling on bicycles.

Music is the lifeblood and the cultural tradition of the city. The "singing school” in the city was started as early as A.D. 787, and this cradle of musical geniuses gave the world Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), the composer who invigorated chamber music in the 18th century with such compositions as his famous Minuet no. 13, and the operatic genius Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), whose Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Turnadot, and La Bohème have become some of the world's favorite operas.

Lucca is a city that has a very long past, and archeological remains suggest its plains were inhabited more than fifty thousand years ago. As a Roman municipum, it was the site of the First Triumvirate between Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 56 B.C. In A.D. 47 Bishop Paulinas, a disciple of St. Peter's brought a third-generation Christianity here, making Lucca the first Tuscan city to convert. It was a major halt for pilgrims and crusaders coming from northern Europe along the Francigiana road, and in 588 the local clergy got a passing Irish pilgrim, the abbot Finnian, and made him their bishop, changing his name to "Frediano."

The great local hero was Castruccio Castracani, he chased out the armies that had conquered Pisa 1314, and went on to annex Pisa itself and sort of established a local Luccan empire by capturing both Pistoia and Voltera. He would have probably defeated the armies of Florence also, but was struck down by malaria in the year 1328. The angry Pisans recaptured their city and ruled over it till 1369 when Charles IV granted Lucca its independence. The proud, if somewhat unimportant, city stayed a free commune for 430 years. Napoléon presented it to his sister Elisa Baciocchi as a principality in 1805, and in 1815 it was absorbed into the Tuscan Grand Duchy.