Piazza dell'Anfiteatro

From the air, Lucca's Piazza dell'Anfiteatro reads like a fingerprint of Roman engineering: a closed oval of tall, pastel-coloured houses whose curving back walls trace exactly the line of the arena that stood here almost two thousand years ago. Standing in the middle, there are no straight streets in sight — only a continuous ring of façades, shutters and ground-floor shops, broken by four arched passages at the ends of the ellipse. A cross cut into a paving stone marks the centre, where the axes between the four gateways meet.

The amphitheatre was built in the Roman town of Luca, generally dated to the second century AD; at its height it is said to have held some 10,000 spectators on around eighteen tiers of seats. After antiquity its masonry was not demolished but absorbed: houses, storerooms, a salt depot, a powder magazine and a prison were gradually wedged into the arena and built against the old arcades. In the Middle Ages the space was known as the "parlascio", a corruption of the Latin word for amphitheatre that took on the sense of a place where citizens gathered to talk. The Roman arena floor now lies about three metres below today's paving, and of the four entrances only the lowest follows one of the original openings.

The square as it looks today is a work of the nineteenth century. Around 1830 the Lucchese architect Lorenzo Nottolini cleared the small buildings crowding the interior, opened a street that follows the outer curve of the ellipse, and turned the recovered oval into the city's food market, which remained there until the first half of the twentieth century. Lucca itself, a Roman colony from 180 BC and later a prosperous silk-trading republic, is best known for the complete ring of Renaissance walls that still encloses its old town, now a tree-lined promenade, and for being the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini. The original Roman street grid survives inside those walls, and the amphitheatre square sits in its north-eastern quarter.

Getting there

The square is in the historic centre of Lucca, inside the city walls. Pisa International Airport (PSA) is about 20 km to the southwest. Lucca railway station, on the Viareggio–Florence and Pisa–Lucca lines, lies just outside the southern walls, roughly 1 km from the square.