Lucca was founded by the Etruscans and became a Roman colony in 180 BC. The rectangular grid of its historical center preserves the Roman street plan, and the Piazza S. Michele occupies the site of the ancient forum.
Plundered by Odoacer, Lucca appears as an important city and fortress at the time of Narses, who besieged it for three months in AD. 553, and under the Lombards it was the seat of a duke who minted his own coins. It became prosperous through the silk trade that got a start in the 11th century, to rival the silks of Byzantium. In the 10th and 11th centuries Lucca was the capital of the feudal margravate of Tuscany, more or less independent but owing nominal allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. After the death of the famous Matilda of Tuscany, the city began to constitute itself an independent commune, with a charter of 1160. For almost 500 years, Lucca was an independent republic.
Internal discord afforded an opportunity in 1314 to Uguccione della Faggiuola to make himself master of Lucca, but the Lucchesi expelled him two years afterwards, and handed over their city to the condottiere Castruccio Castracani, under whose masterly tyranny it became for a short time a leading state of central Italy, rival to Florence, until his death in 1328. Castracani's tomb is in the church of San Francesco. His biography is Machiavelli's third famous book on political rule. Lucca managed, at first as a democracy, and after 1628 as an oligarchy, to maintain its independence alongside of Venice and Genoa, and painted the word Libertas on its banner till the French Revolution. In 1805 Lucca was taken over by Napoleon, who put his sister Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi in charge as Princess of Lucca. After 1815 it became a Bourbon-Parma duchy, then part of Tuscany in 1847 and finally part of the Italian State.
Of the Romanesque cathedral of San Martino that was begun in 1063 by Bishop Anselm (later Pope Alexander II), the great apse with its tall columnar arcades and the fine campanile remain, the nave and transepts having been rebuilt in the Gothic style in the 14th century, while the west front was begun in 1204 by "Guidetto" (Guido Bigarelli of Como), and consists of a vast portico of three magnificent arches, and above them three ranges of open galleries enriched with sculpture.