Campanile della Cattedrale di San Martino

Beside the lopsided portico of Lucca Cathedral stands the city's tallest medieval tower: a Romanesque campanile of stone from the Guamo and Monte Pisano quarries, ringing with bells cast from the 1200s onwards. Opened to climbers in 2016, its 217 steps end in a full-circle view.

Why it matters

The campanile of San Martino is the highest tower in Lucca at about sixty metres, and unlike the better-known garden towers it belongs to the church rather than to a merchant family. Its base goes back at least to the twelfth century — possibly to the building campaign that Bishop Anselmo da Baggio, the future Pope Alexander II, promoted around 1060–1070 — and it originally stood free of the facade. That separation left a permanent mark on the cathedral itself: when the twelfth-century portico was laid out, one bay had to be narrowed to fit around the tower, producing the famous asymmetry that makes the west front instantly recognisable. The tower opened to the public only in August 2016, after a restoration that returned the bays' slender columns to view, so for most of its history this was a working bell loft, not a viewpoint. Climbing it now puts you inside the cathedral complex's most vertical space, with the bells around you and the whole Lucca plain at the windows.

What to notice

The tower tells its age in its materials and levels. The sturdy rectangular base is built of pietra di Guamo, with stone from the quarries of Santa Maria del Giudice at the foot of Monte Pisano; above it rise five storeys whose openings grow from single lights to groups of four, the first three levels dating to the second half of the thirteenth century and the upper orders, in white limestone of San Giuliano, completed between the late 1200s and the early 1300s. Ghibelline merlons crown the stack.

In the bell chamber, the ring is a small museum in itself: the oldest bells go back to the end of the thirteenth century, two were added in 1320 and 1324 — one bearing the effigy of the Volto Santo, the city's holy face, the other of Castruccio Castracani, Lucca's lord — and later castings follow in 1473, 1626 and 1772. Restoration scars are worth reading too: lightning damage repaired in 1630 and 1645, further campaigns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the 2016 restoration whose most charming result is the lion-head capital recovered during the works, now displayed at the entrance.

From the top, the panorama runs in a full circle over the city and the Lucca plain, from the Monti Pisani across to the green hills of the Pizzorne — a different view from the tree-topped Torre Guinigi, because here you read the cathedral roof and the medieval street grid from directly above.

Context and history

A bell tower next to a cathedral is furniture, until you notice how old this one is. The documentation and the masonry agree on a Romanesque origin at least as early as the twelfth century, standing apart from the church in the manner of the period. The great vertical push came in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when the five storeys and the white limestone upper orders took shape, and the first documented bells began calling the hours. The tower then lived through Lucca's political theatre at close range — Castruccio Castracani's face was cast into one of its bells in the 1320s, within a few years of his rule. Lightning struck more than once in the seventeenth century, prompting the repairs of 1630 and 1645, and maintenance recurred in 1819, 1830, the early 1900s and the 1970s. The decisive modern change came with the restoration completed in 2016, which freed the colonnettes of the bays from later pilastrini, conserved the fabric, and made the staircase safe enough for the tower's first regular public opening in its nine-hundred-year life.