Gallicano is on record from the year 771, in a parchment kept in the bishop's archive of Lucca which speaks of the purchase of a house by bishop Peredeo. The name is of predial origin and comes from the Latin personal name Gallicanus; in the village, though, they tell that it was the legionary Cornelius Gallicanus, to whom these lands were supposedly given by the Romans as a reward for his deeds. In 1347 Gallicano became the seat of a vicariate; in 1370 its people, egged on by Rolando Antelminelli, an exile from Lucca, rebelled against the Lucchese, but after about a year the troops of the Republic, commanded by Giovanni degli Obizi, took the castle back and forced the village and the whole vicariate to swear loyalty again. From then on Lucca and the Este dukes of Modena spent generations disputing Gallicano, and the reason was commercial: here hemp was grown and woven, and along the Turrite there was fishing. It took pope Nicholas V to settle the matter, assigning the vicariate back to the Lucchese Republic.
The borders, afterwards, went on moving. In 1847 Gallicano was joined to the Este Garfagnana in execution of the clauses of the treaty of Vienna; with the Risorgimento it passed to the house of Savoy and, with the whole Garfagnana, to the province of Massa in 1859; and only in 1923 did it return to the province of Lucca. The church of San Giovanni Battista was rebuilt in 1486 at the will of Domenico Bertini, apostolic secretary of that same pope Nicholas V, and on the front one reads his motto, UT VIVAM VERA VITA; inside there is a crucifix of the sorrowful type attributed to the Master of the Camaiore crucifix, a follower of Giovanni Pisano. The church of Santa Lucia, along the old via Clodia Nova, in the days of Matilda of Canossa had a monastery attached to it depending on the abbey of Frassinoro: a privilege that Frederick Barbarossa confirmed in 1164, and that an earthquake in 1721 put severely to the test. The pieve of San Jacopo, on the other hand, was built inside the castle walls in the fifteenth century to replace the old pieve, which was older than the year one thousand.
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📅 Every year, on 25 July; the Palio di San Jacopo every two years
Gallicano celebrates Saint James on 25 July. Every two years, on that day, the Palio di San Jacopo is held, with floats built by the town's different boroughs.
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Outside Gallicano, but an easy day trip away.
