ABSTRACT
Nearly the entire town of Lucca has maintained its original Roman form due mostly to the walls that still surround it today. Like other Roman settlements, Lucca was laid out in a gridiron pattern with two principal axes at right angles to one another at its center: the decumanus maximus and kardo maximus. This larger grid was further subdivided into a smaller street grid. At its center was the forum, now the Piazza San Michele with its San Michele in Foro, with the amphitheater at the town’s periphery. Except for slight street modifications, such as the addition of the fourteenth century Palazzo Augusto just south of the main piazza and its growth outward to successive new fortifications, Lucca’s plan has remained relatively undisturbed from its inception in the second century AD (Braunfels 1988: 58).
