Lucca | The City You Cannot Photograph

Lucca, in February, and what survives when nobody comes to look

We came in through Porta Santa Maria on a Tuesday afternoon in February, with the sun low and the wind off the Apuane sharp enough to flatten Sophia’s coat against her, and there was nobody there. The cobbles were wet from rain that had stopped an hour earlier. A man in a green trench was walking a dog. Two old women were having a conversation on a bench inside the wall, slowly, in dialect, with long pauses. We had moved to Pietrasanta three weeks before, and Lucca was thirty minutes away, and we had decided to drive over for the afternoon and see what the nearest real city looked like, and what it looked like was a city without anyone in it.

This is not actually the case in Lucca. There were people. There are always people in Lucca. But on a cold February Tuesday, the people in Lucca are Lucchesi, going about their day, and not the buses from Florence and the cruise excursions from Livorno that run through the historic center between April and October. We walked Via Fillungo down to t…