Lucca, Italy

Lucca is a walled city that spent seven centuries as an independent republic in a peninsula that mostly wasn't — one of the last, and effectively the last, until Napoleon's sister Elisa Baciocchi arrived in 1805 as its uninvited duchess. Everything about the place still reads as self-sufficient: a flat, compact core enclosed by a perfect ring of Renaissance fortification, its silk-merchant towers, its own basilicas, its own composer. Where Florence and Siena fought each other into submission or Medici absorption, Lucca simply kept its gates shut and its accounts in order, and the result is a town that feels lived-in rather than performed, a working Tuscan city that happens to be extraordinarily beautiful.

The wealth came first from silk: by the eleventh century Lucca's weavers were rivaling Byzantium, and the fortunes built the merchant towers that still poke above the rooftops, crowned in one case — the Torre Guinigi — with seven holm oaks planted on its summit terrace, roots and all, six hundred years and still growing. The walls came later, a hundred-and-fifty-year building campaign begun in 1504 against a Medici invasion that never materialized; Lucca was never besieged, and in the 1820s Napoleon's sister had the ramparts replanted as a public garden instead. Giacomo Puccini was born inside them in 1858, three streets from where his statue now sits.

Walking is really the only way to understand Lucca, because the walls insist on it: four kilometres of tree-lined rampart, wide enough for a boulevard, encircling the entire historic centre at rooftop height, used today by joggers, cyclists and every local out for an evening passeggiata. Inside, the streets are flat and improbably legible, opening without warning into Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, an oval square whose ring of houses still traces the seating of a second-century Roman amphitheatre buried beneath them. Nothing here needs a car, a map, or much of a plan — just time enough to loop the walls once at dusk, when the light off the ramparts turns everything the colour of Tuscan stone.