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Extract from the Lucca Travel Guides:
LUCCA
, 17km northeast of Pisa, is the most graceful of Tuscany's provincial capitals, set inside a ring of Renaissance walls fronted by gardens and huge bastions. It's quiet without being dull and absorbs its few tourists with ease.
The city lies at the heart of one of Italy's richest agricultural regions, and it has prospered since Roman times. Its heyday was the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, when the silk trade brought wealth and, for a time, political power. Lucca first lost its independence to Pisa in 1314, then, under Castruccio Castracani, forged an empire in the west of Tuscany. Pisa and Pistoia both fell, and,...
read the whole Lucca Travel Guides...
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