Camaiore

Camaiore is the Campus Maior, the greater field, and it stands on the via Francigena: in Sigeric's itinerary it is the twenty-seventh stage, and the archbishop of Canterbury called it Campmaior. The first document naming the village is of 984, but the monastery of San Pietro — the badia — was already here in 761, in Lombard times, and took the shape it has today in the twelfth century, partly through the bequests of Matilda of Canossa. The town as we see it, though, is an invention of Lucca: in the thirteenth century the Lucchesi attacked and took the Camaiore castles, nearly all of them allied with Pisa, in order to secure themselves a safe access to the port of Motrone, and then enlarged the borough on a preordained plan — a terranuova — in the same period in which they were building Pietrasanta from nothing.

In 1374 Lucca fortified it with a crenellated wall nine metres high, thirteen projecting turrets and four gates; the walls stood for five centuries, then in the eighteen hundreds it was the town council that decreed their demolition, and today a couple of hundred metres remain, much lowered. There is also a triumphal arch, which the Republic of Lucca raised in the fifteen hundreds to thank Camaiore for the loyalty it had shown during the Revolt of the Straccioni. At Corpus Christi the procession passes over carpets of coloured sawdust more than forty metres long, which the craftsmen lay in a single night, from late afternoon to first light: they used to be of flowers and myrtle, and were replaced after 1844, when the duke of Lucca came to the procession. And there is another thing that happened here first: after the province's first motor race, in the year twenty-six, Camaiore held the first officially homologated Italian women's motor racing championship, and Gilda Colli won it in an Amilcar. At the Lido the beach continues the sandy front between Viareggio and Forte dei Marmi; and the tordelli camaioresi, with their ragù, insist on their extra «d».