Attractions

Cumulative Tickets -- Museums in both the Villa Guinigi and the Palazzo Mansi are covered by a cumulative ticket. It costs 6.50€ ($8.45) for adults and 3.25€ ($4.25) for children under 18 and seniors over 65. Another cumulative ticket, 6€ ($8), is available for the Museo della Cattedrale and the Church and Baptistery of San Giovanni e Santa Reparata.

Walking the Walls

The walls are Lucca's defining characteristic, and they make up a city park more than 4km (2 1/2 miles) long but only about 18m (59 ft.) wide, filled with avenues of plane, chestnut, and ilex trees planted by Marie Louise Bourbon in the 19th century. The shady paved paths of Lucca's formidable bastions are busy year-round with couples walking hand in hand, tables of old men playing unfathomable Italian card games, families strolling, children playing, and hundreds of people on bicycles, from tykes to octogenarians.

Rent a bike and take a Sunday afternoon spin, peering across Lucca's rooftops and down into its palace gardens and narrow alleys, gazing toward the hazy mountains across the plane, and checking out the 11 bastions and 6 gates. The 1566 Porta San Pietro, the southerly and most important gate into town, still has a working portcullis, the original doors, and Lucca's republican motto, "Libertas," carved above the entrance. You can also visit a photo archive and some of the tunnels under the bastions daily from 10am to noon and 4 to 6pm. You must make an appointment in advance (8am-2pm) with CISCU, the International Center for the Study of Urban Walls (tel. 0583-496-257; www.ciscu.it), located in the gatehouse at no. 21 near the San Paolino bastion (south of Piazzale Verdi on the west end of town).

The defensive walls you see today -- a complete kidney-shaped circuit built from 1544 to 1654 -- are Lucca's fourth and most impressive set and perhaps the best preserved in all of Italy. About 12m (39 ft.) high and 30m (98 ft.) wide at their base, the ramparts bristled with 126 cannons until the Austrian overlords removed them. The walls were never put to the test against an enemy army, though it turned out they made excellent dikes -- there's no doubt the walls saved the city in 1812 when a massive flood of the Serchio River inundated the valley. Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi was governing Lucca at the time from her villa outside the walls, and when she tried to get into the city for safety, the people didn't want to open the gates for fear of the surging waters. Lest they let their princess -- and, more important, the sister of Europe's emperor -- drown, however, they hoisted her highness over the walls rather unceremoniously with the help of a crane.

The Patron Saint of Ladies-in-Waiting

Just beyond the font inside San Frediano is the Cappella di Santa Zita (Chapel of St. Zita), built in the 17th century to preserve the glass-coffined body of the saint and painted with her miracles by Francesco del Tintore. Zita is the patron saint of ladies-in-waiting and maids everywhere who, as a serving girl in the 13th-century Fatinelli household, was caught sneaking out bread in her apron to feed poor beggars on the street. Her suspicious master demanded to know what she was carrying, to which she answered, "Roses and flowers." She opened her apron and, with a little Divine Intervention, that's what the bread had become. Every April 26, the Lucchesi carpet the piazza of the nearby amphitheater with a dazzling flower market to commemorate the miracle and bring out the glass coffin containing her shrunken body to the front of the church to venerate.