Piazza Napoleone

Lucca's largest square was cut, not inherited. In 1806 Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister and ruler of the city, had a block of houses demolished to give the ducal residence a courtly setting. The long, tree-lined rectangle remains a major civic space in Lucca.

Why it matters

Piazza Napoleone is the clearest statement of the brief Napoleonic era in a city otherwise defined by its medieval and Renaissance fabric. Power had clustered on this ground for centuries before the French arrived: the official city tourism portal traces the site back to the lordships of Castruccio Castracani in the fourteenth century and Paolo Guinigi in the fifteenth. What Elisa did here was radical for Lucca — houses, shops, warehouses, a tower, an archive and even the sixteenth-century church of San Pietro Maggiore were swept away so that the Palazzo dei Principi, today's Ducal Palace, could stand before an open space instead of a tangle of lanes. The square carried Lucca's public and political life through the nineteenth century and remains a ceremonial civic space. The square also illustrates urban transformation: one side preserves a ducal facade, while the surrounding blocks retain traces of working-class Lucca.

What to notice

The Ducal Palace faces the square: this is the only place inside the walls where Lucca opens onto something close to a royal forecourt. Lorenzo Bartolini's marble statue of Duchess Maria Luisa of Bourbon with her young son, carved in 1843, still presides over the space — a portrait of the Restoration inserted into a square built for the Bonapartes, after the statue originally planned for Napoleon himself was never made. Rows of planes replaced the elms that originally framed three sides, and their height softens the scale of the surrounding palaces. On the north side, an arched passage leads into the Corte del Biancone, the old fish-market quarter, where low houses with wooden beams and fourteenth-century fronts surround a courtyard. To the south, the square meets Piazza del Giglio in front of the Teatro del Giglio.

Context and history

The square belongs to the Principality of Lucca and Piombino, the state handed to Elisa Baciocchi and her husband Felice in 1805. Work began the following year under architects Giovanni Lazzarini and Pierre-Théodore Bienaimé, levelling dwellings, the post office, the salt warehouses and the church of San Pietro Maggiore. The name honoured Elisa's imperial brother, and the layout deliberately turned the pre-existing residence — refashioned across the previous century — into the centre of the principality's representation. When the Congress of Vienna shuffled the map again, Lucca passed to Maria Luisa of Bourbon, Duchess from 1815 to 1824, who continued the transformation Elisa had begun; her 1843 monument by Bartolini marks that second dynasty. Through the rest of the century the square hosted the political and social life of the new province, and the Ducal Palace passed to public institutions — today it houses the Prefecture and the Province. Modern interventions included the removal of parking in 1998, repaving and archaeological excavations that briefly exposed foundations of buildings demolished in 1806.