Porcari

The first document that names the place is dated the thirtieth of April 780: three Lombard nobles left Calci to settle at Porchari — and the name was already there before them. The village grew on the Francigena, between Lucca and Altopascio, on a stretch that the water often took back: the lake of Sesto rose and fell with the rains and with the height of the Arno's bed, and the marsh lasted until the middle of the eighteen hundreds. In Sigeric's itinerary Porcari is the twenty-fifth stage, and the archbishop of Canterbury wrote it Forcri. The position was good for another reason too: the Cassia was crossed here, and standing on the shores of the lake the village was a way through towards Florence, Pisa and Lucca.

On the hill above the houses there was a castle, of the twelfth century, where the family that took the place's name settled; it was destroyed three times and became the last bulwark of Lucca's defence. The most important battle fought here goes by another name: it is the battle of Altopascio, of 1325, in which Castruccio Castracani got the better of the general of the Florentine Republic — and it was fought on Porcari's ground. It earned Castruccio the title of duke of Lucca from Louis the Bavarian. Of the castle nothing can be seen: on the top of the hill there is a single house, which they call La Torretta, and the excavations of 2006 proved that it is built on the castle's remains; when Emanuele Repetti wrote his dictionary of Tuscany, in 1841, the castle must still have been there, because he says that it sits on an isolated hill. Once the wars were done Porcari became a marginal corner of the Lucchese state, and it stayed a hamlet of Capannori until 1913.