Capannori

Capannori means huts: the name comes from capannule, and the r in place of an l is typical of the Lucca dialect. It grew up around a chapel: in 745 a monk stopped here, built it in honour of Saint Quiricus, and houses began to rise around it. Today it is an archipelago of forty villages in the plain of Lucca, one of the largest comuni in the province, running from the Pizzorne uplands to Monte Pisano — and it would be larger still if in 1913 Porcari had not left to become a comune of its own.

It is famous for two records at opposite ends: the historic villas of the Lucca nobility — the Villa Reale of Marlia, where Paganini played, the Torrigiani, the Mansi — and being the first comune in Italy to declare itself Zero Waste, an environmental laboratory studied all over Europe. At San Martino in Colle lives the Oak of the Witches, the monumental old tree that popular tradition ties to the tales of Collodi. The neoclassical Nottolini aqueduct crosses the countryside on arches worthy of the Grand Tour. During the war, in the Compitese, a camp for Anglo-American prisoners was turned by the Italian Social Republic into a concentration camp for Jews and political detainees: the comune has gathered those places into a memorial trail, together with the acts of solidarity that saved many. This is the lesser Tuscany that is not lesser at all.