Lucca is the most liveable city in Tuscany and the least celebrated. The walls — sixteen metres of Renaissance fortification, wide enough at the top for a tree-lined promenade — have kept the city intact for four centuries. No traffic within them. No chain hotels. No Airbnb towers. Just a medieval street plan that still works, a weekly market in the Roman amphitheatre, and a population that seems genuinely unbothered by the fact that they live somewhere extraordinary.

The tourists come for the day from Florence and Pisa and leave by evening. This is their mistake. Lucca at night, when the day-trippers are gone and the restaurants fill with locals, is an entirely different city.

The Garfagnana begins twenty minutes north — a valley carved by the Serchio river between the Apuan Alps and the Apennines. Marble mountains on one side, chestnut forests on the other, and villages that have been making the same cured meats and cheeses for as long as anyone can remember. Most visitors to Lucca never look north. You should.