with a
cintola of green and gold.

Lucca is the city of a great soldier, of one of the most charming of
Tuscan sculptors, and of Santa Zita. Lucca l'Ombrosa I call her, but she
is the city of light too--Luce, light; it is the patriotic derivation of
her name. For One came to her with a star in His bosom, the Star of
Bethlehem, that heralded the sweet dawn which crept through the valleys
and filled them with morning; so Lucca was the first city in Italy, as
they say, to receive the light of the gospel.

The foundation of this city, which alone of all the cities of Tuscany
was to keep in some sort her independence till Napoleon wrested it from
her, is obscure. She was not Etruscan, but possibly a Ligurian
settlement that came into the power of Rome about 200 B.C., and by 56
B.C. we have certain news of her, for it was here that Caesar, Pompeius,
and Crassus formed the triumvirate. Overwhelmed by the disasters that
befell the Empire, we hear something of her in the sixth century, when
S. Frediano came from Ireland, from Galway, and after a sojourn in Rome
became a hermit in the Monti Pisani, till in 565 John III made him
Bishop of Lucca. It seems to have been about this time that Lucca began
to be of importance, after the fall of the Lombard rule, governed by her
own Dukes. And then the Bishops of Lucca, those Bishop Counts who
governed her so long, had a jurisdiction which extended to the confines
of the Patrimony of St. Peter. The same drama no doubt was played in
Lucca as in Pisa or Florence, a struggle betwixt nobles of foreign
descent and the young commune of the Latin population. We find Lucca on
the papal side in 1064, but in 1081 she joins the Emperor with Siena and
Ferrara; but for the most part after Pisa became Ghibelline Lucca was
Guelph, for her friends were the enemies of Pisa. Thus the fight went
on, a fight really of self-preservation, of civic liberty as it were,
each city prizing its ego above every consideration of justice or unity.

It was the fourteenth century that gave Lucca her great captain,
Castruccio Castracani, the hero of Machiavelli's remarkable sketch, the
sketch perhaps for the Prince. It is strange that Machiavelli should
have cared to write of the only two men who might in more favourable
circumstances have forged a kingdom out of various Republics, Lordships,
Duchies, and Marquisates of the peninsula, Castruccio degli Intelminelli
and Cesare Borgia.

It seems, to follow the virile yet