Palazzo Ducale

Lucca's Ducal Palace brings together the city's civic and ducal histories, from the medieval fortress of Augusta to Renaissance and later remodelling and the royal apartments created for Bourbon rulers.

Why it matters

Every capital building in Lucca competed for the title of the city's political heart; this one held it longest. The site began as the core of the Augusta, the great fortress the condottiero Castruccio Castracani had built in 1322, so extensive that the city portal records it as covering nearly a fifth of Lucca and thought impregnable. When Pisan occupation ended and the fortress was torn down in 1369 by Lucca's own people, the palace inside it was spared and returned to its role as seat of government — and kept that role under the republic, the Napoleonic principality, the Bourbon duchy and Italian Lucca. What stands today is a composite: Bartolomeo Ammannati gave the building its imposing sixteenth-century face, Filippo Juvarra refined it in the eighteenth, and Lorenzo Nottolini enriched the interiors for Maria Luisa di Borbone. The palace's courtyards and decorated state rooms preserve evidence of its changing civic and courtly roles.

What to notice

The monumental facade frames two courtyards with distinct architectural character. The Cortile Francesco Carrara carries the jurist's monument at its centre; the Cortile degli Svizzeri, once quarters for the Swiss guards who defended the Republic of Lucca, shows a rusticated portico below an upper loggia. Between the two courtyards, the neoclassical Passaggio delle Carrozze — a Nottolini work — was built to let carriages cross the building under cover. The monumental Scala Regia, the Galleria delle Statue with its stuccoes and classical marble statues, the Quartiere di Parata and the decorated Appartamenti Reali preserve the character of a royal residence. Their mythological frescoes, gilded stuccoes, Carrara-marble fireplaces and walnut doors with bronze reliefs record its courtly decoration. The most lavish room is the Sala delle Guardie, also called Sala Ademollo, covered by an extensive fresco cycle devoted to Emperor Trajan. The Teatrino di Elisa was a small theatre built for the princess; she performed there, and it was demolished in 1872.

Context and history

The palace's biography is the Duchy's in stone. After the fortress's demolition in 1369 the surviving palace served the restored commune and then the republic as its government seat. The sixteenth century brought Ammannati's redesign; the eighteenth, Juvarra's contribution to the building's modern appearance. Napoleon's sister Elisa, ruling the Principality of Lucca and Piombino from 1805, chose the palace — then called Palazzo dei Principi — as her centre of public and political life and in 1806 opened the square in front of it, Piazza Napoleone, to showcase the building. The Congress of Vienna turned the principality into a Duchy under Maria Luisa di Borbone in 1815, and her reign completed much of what Elisa had begun: schools, the Botanical Garden, roads, the aqueduct. It was for Maria Luisa that Nottolini turned the interiors into a sumptuous royal residence. After unification the building moved into public hands, and its halls now carry the memory of two very different histories: the Risorgimento and Italian emigration, represented in collections housed in the palace. On the square outside, Lorenzo Bartolini's 1843 statue of the duchess with her son Carlo Lodovico keeps watch over the whole sequence.