Forget Florence – try Lucca

Better located, conveniently compact and free from busloads of tourists, the city of Lucca is emerging out of the shadow of Florence. Tourists and holiday home buyers are discovering that the northern Tuscan province is an excellent alternative to Chiantishire. 

Within an hour of both Pisa and Florence airports, it’s the perfect weekend getaway, but it’s also a great base from which to explore the fashionable beach towns of the Tuscan coast or Cinque Terra. 

Lucca is above all famed for its walls. Not just the impressively intact 4.2 km long Renaissance one that encircles the city, but the chunks of Roman-medieval ramparts. Allow around an hour to stroll around the tree-lined mura the width of a road, admiring the elegant villas built by silk traders and its ancient towers and campaniles backed by the Apuan Alps.

Lit up at night, the walls are equally impressive, and you can glimpse the oak trees sprouting out of the ‘tower of the trees’, the red-brick 45-metre Romanesque-Gothic square Guinigi Tower, a status symbol for a wealthy family of the 1300s. 

Amongst the many tempting piazzas large and small for a coffee or aperitivo is Piazza San Michele, a vast square with its Romanesque cathedral where operatic composer Giacomo Puccini once sang in the choir – it’s one of the city’s reported 100 churches.