Cattedrale di San Martino

Lucca Cathedral wears the city's history on its face: a twelfth-century portico so determinedly asymmetrical that one bay is squeezed by the older bell tower, marble loggias carved from 1204, and inside, the Volto Santo and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto.

Why it matters

San Martino is the seat of Lucca's archbishops and the city's principal monument, but its appeal is stranger and more personal than that title suggests. A first church stood here in the sixth century, and the bishop's seat moved from the older complex of Santi Giovanni e Reparata to San Martino in the course of the eighth century. The cathedral you see was begun around 1060 by Bishop Anselmo da Baggio — who became Pope Alexander II — and consecrated in 1070, with Matilde di Canossa present, an event that ties Lucca directly to the great papal-imperial dramas of the eleventh century. The building then grew for six more centuries: Gothic rebuilding of nave and transepts in the fourteenth century, completion of the exterior and the Sacrament and Sanctuary chapels by the seventeenth. On the Via Francigena, it was a fundamental stop for pilgrims heading to Rome, who came above all to venerate the Volto Santo, the wooden crucifix that is Lucca's holiest object. Art history stacks up alongside: a Ghirlandaio, a Tintoretto, a Fra Bartolomeo, and the sculpture in which the Renaissance arrived in Lucca.

What to notice

Begin with the facade, because its flaw is its signature. The portico — built in the twelfth century — has one right-hand bay narrower than the others, forced by the pre-existing bell tower, and generations of Lucchesi invented legends to explain the asymmetry. Above the portico rise tiers of small colonnettes and bichrome marble inlays laid out from 1204 by Guidetto da Como, with relief cycles of the Months and the Stories of Saint Martin; on the architrave, works associated with Nicola Pisano include a Deposition and a panel of the Annunciation, Nativity and Adoration of the Magi. On the pier beside the bell tower, find the labyrinth carved in stone in the twelfth or thirteenth century, inscribed with the story of Theseus and Ariadne — a pilgrim's emblem of the winding road to salvation.

Inside, three works anchor the visit. The Volto Santo, a carved wooden crucifix of the late eighth or early ninth century which tradition says reached Lucca in 842, stands in Matteo Civitali's octagonal marble temple of 1484. The tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, carved by Jacopo della Quercia between 1406 and 1410 for her husband, the lord of Lucca Paolo Guinigi, after her death at twenty-seven in 1405, is the sculptural masterpiece of the Italian Quattrocento in this city. And on the north side hangs Tintoretto's Last Supper of 1592–94, painted with his son Domenico — a Venetian counterpoint to Ghirlandaio's altarpiece of 1479 and Fra Bartolomeo's panel of 1509.

Context and history

The cathedral's building history is unusually legible because each phase answered the city's politics. The eleventh-century consecration made San Martino the stage of the reform papacy: its founder-bishop sat as Alexander II while Matilde of Canossa's lands ringed the city, and Lucca's position on the Francigena turned the church into a pilgrim engine, centred on the Volto Santo whose arrival the city still celebrates each September with the Luminara procession on the eve of the Holy Cross feast. The thirteenth century gave the west front its marble dressing; the fourteenth rebuilt the body of the church in Gothic forms with the tall, austere nave visible today; the sixteenth and seventeenth finished the chapels and the exterior decorations, work concluded in 1637. The chapter, the music and the treasury all grew with it — the cathedral's organ bench employed the Puccini dynasty for 124 years, from 1740 to 1864, the family tradition that produced Giacomo. Since 2016 the adjacent bell tower has been part of the visit, and the complex's museum keeps the liturgical treasures a working cathedral cannot safely display.