Lucca 2026

Italy and I go back a long way.

Florence was first. I arrived wide-eyed, studying architecture and living on my own for the first time. Everything felt enormous, not just the city, but the experience of being there. By the time I spent a summer working in Pisa, I had friends, spoke the language, and had begun to understand what it was like not simply to visit Italy, but to have a life there.

Decades later, Lucca entered the story.

We've been establishing Lucca as a base for our music tours for some time now, returning with handbell musicians and singers and gradually getting to know the city through rehearsals, concerts, meals, walks, and all the ordinary moments in between. But this year was different. We spent the entire month of June there.

A month changes your relationship with a place. You stop thinking quite so much about what you should see and start noticing what happens around you. And in Lucca, an extraordinary amount happens around you, especially music.

We say that music is everywhere in Lucca, which sounds suspiciously like something written by a tourism office. Except it really is. Turn a corner and someone is practicing piano through a second-floor window. Walk past a church or a school and there is commotion inside, followed eventually by music. Every few Sundays, some community band from a small town in the region seems to have arrived at the Duomo to participate in a festival.

There is a Puccini concert every night. Every night.

And then there is the Lucca Summer Festival, with the peculiar ability to book both people you didn't realize were still performing, yes, you, Tom Jones, and people you never thought you'd have the chance to experience live. We didn't actually see Ludovico Einaudi. We heard him from elsewhere in the city. In Lucca, I think that counts.

Of course, this June we were adding our own music to all of that.

First came the handbells. Ringers arrived from different places and suddenly the rehearsal room was full. Bells were unpacked, tables covered, music opened. A week later, there was a concert. Then the bells went back into their cases, people hugged goodbye and headed home, and for a little while Lucca became quiet again, at least our version of it did.

Then the singers arrived.

That's one of the things I loved about staying for the whole month. We got to watch these temporary little communities appear, become intensely real for a week, and then disappear again. In between, Alex and I were still there, walking the same streets and eating in the same places, while Lucca simply carried on being Lucca.

And don't get me started on the food. We have a new favorite restaurant that I'm not going to tell you about because then you'll all go there and ruin it. Not really. Ask me. I'll tell you.

A month also gives you permission to stop sightseeing. Sometimes you sit in Piazza dell'Anfiteatro and unapologetically be a tourist. Other evenings you join the Lucchesi for the passeggiata along Via Fillungo. After dinner, you climb onto the walls and walk because they're right there and because you can.

We call it: Stroll, not Scroll.

And then another group arrives, and suddenly you get to share all of this.

For a week, our travelers become ceremonially Italian. I have rules. If you're going to speak loudly, please do it in Italian. Use considerably more of your hands. If you packed the wrong white trainers, we may need to go shoe shopping. Unless they're one of those famous white low-rise jobbers that happen to be fashionable at the moment, in which case apparently you're ahead of me.

You learn the coffee. You learn the gelato. You begin to understand the pasta. By the end of the week, I like to think everyone leaves just a little more Italian than when they arrived. At the very least, they're better at the gelato.

We'll save gnocchi for next time. We still need to work on the pronunciation.

And there is an entire world just beyond the walls. Lucca sits in the valley of the Serchio, surrounded by hills. Head into them and there are wineries and villas, stone bridges over whitewater, mountain villages, even a town submerged beneath a modern reservoir. Go the other direction and the coast is barely twenty minutes away by train.

We did some of that. We shared some of it with our groups. But after a month, I think one of the things I appreciated most was realizing that I didn't always need to go anywhere.

When I first lived in Italy, I wanted to see everything. Florence was a marvel around every corner, and I was at an age when I wanted to absorb all of it. By Pisa, I had begun to learn how simply to live in Italy.

And now there is Lucca.

This June, some of my favorite moments weren't the ones when we were going somewhere new. They were walking a street we'd walked dozens of times already, hearing music through an open window, recognizing someone, returning to the same restaurant, watching one group leave and waiting for another to arrive.

Maybe that's what a month gave us: not enough time to become Lucchesi, but enough time to stop feeling like we needed to see Lucca and simply enjoy being there.