Torre Guinigi
At the corner of Via Sant'Andrea and Via delle Chiavi d'Oro, a medieval brick tower rises forty-five metres above the rooftops of Lucca — and at the very top, seven holm oaks grow from three stone flowerbeds, their roots somewhere inside the seventh storey. It is a genuinely strange sight from the street below: a grove in the sky, swaying slightly in the wind.
You reach it via 230 steps and 28 flights of increasingly narrow staircase. The climb takes the better part of an hour. What waits at the top is a small, quiet garden with an unobstructed view north to the Apennine foothills and south across the soft Tuscan plain.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it for early morning — the tower opens at 9am (9:30 in winter) and the first hour is genuinely calm. Late afternoon also works well: the light from the west catches the brick across Lucca's skyline, and the oaks cast actual shade. The combined ticket with the Torre delle Ore is worth it if you plan to climb both in a day.
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Book directly at the providerHow Torre Guinigi came to be
Lucca's merchant families built towers in the latter half of the 14th century the way others built country houses — as declarations of standing. The Guinigi family, silk traders and bankers, raised their tower around 1384, seven stories of fired brick and stone with decorative cornices and narrow windows in the local Romanesque-Gothic manner.
Paolo Guinigi, who became Lord of Lucca in 1400, refined the adjoining residence and is credited with planting the original tree at the tower's summit. He ruled until 1430, then fell from power, was imprisoned, and was executed by Francesco Sforza. A drawing from around 1600 already shows the rooftop garden in place; the current holm oaks date to a 19th-century restoration. Descendants of the Guinigi family donated the tower to the city in 1968.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring and autumn keep the climb manageable — mild temperatures and thinner crowds. Summer mornings before 11am are tolerable; summer midday is not. In winter the tower closes earlier and the oaks are bare, but the view north to the hills is clear.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.