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Lucca once bristled with towers — around 130 of them, built by merchant families who measured status in brick and altitude. Two survive in climbable form. That number tells you something honest about this city: it is not a preserved medieval dreamscape, it’s a place that has been lived in hard, pulled down, rebuilt, and lived in again. The oaks on top of Torre Guinigi are still there because generations of Lucchesi decided they were worth keeping, watering, and pruning. Someone still hand-winds the clock in Torre delle Ore. Custodianship, in other words, is not an abstraction here. It’s a job someone does on a Tuesday.
So here’s a practical climb-by-climb guide to both towers, plus the elevated spots nobody puts on the postcard.
Short answer: both, in one afternoon, on a combined ticket. But if you only have the legs for one, here’s the comparison.
| Torre Guinigi | Torre delle Ore | |
|---|---|---|
| Height | 45 m (148 ft) | 50 m — the tallest |
| Steps | 230, over 28 flights | Wooden internal staircase |
| Signature | Rooftop holm oak garden | Working clock mechanism and bell |
| Crowds | Busy — it’s the icon | Noticeably quieter |
| Best for | Sunset photos, rooftop panorama | Height, atmosphere, space to breathe |
Torre delle Ore, as Visit Tuscany notes, “with its 50 metres, is the tallest of the 130 towers to have been built in the city since Medieval times” — and it and Guinigi are the only two left standing in visitable condition. Guinigi, per Wikipedia, runs to “45 metres (148 ft) with a total of 230 steps over 28 flights to reach the top.”
The verdict: Guinigi for the photograph you already have in your head. Torre delle Ore for the one you didn’t expect. They’re a few minutes apart on foot, which makes the combined ticket the obvious call. If you’re still working out the logistics of arriving at all, start with getting to Lucca from Pisa, Florence or Rome — the train is both the cheapest and by a long way the lowest-carbon option.
The Guinigi family built this thing around 1384, at the height of their power, and it’s “a typical example of local Romanesque-Gothic architecture” — red brick, stone detailing, a tower-house rather than a pure defensive stack.
What saved it was the garden. Built of red brick and topped by several ancient holm oaks, Guinigi is, as My Kind of Italy puts it, “perhaps the most famous tower in Lucca because it is now the only one remaining with old oak trees in a little garden at the top.” Lecci — holm oaks — in a planter forty-five metres above a Tuscan street, with root systems that someone has to manage, soil that has to be maintained, and a drainage problem that has been quietly solved and re-solved for centuries. That’s the real story of the tower. Not the family. The maintenance.
The climb itself: 28 flights, stone stairs for the lower portion, a metal staircase for the last stretch. Landings throughout, so you can stop without blocking anyone. At the top you get the Duomo di San Martino, San Frediano’s gold mosaic façade, the perfect oval of the Roman amphitheatre, and on a clear day the Apuan Alps ridging up to the north.
Torre delle Ore sits on Via Fillungo at the corner of Via dell’Arancio, and dates to the 13th century. It passed through several noble Lucchese families before the city took it on. The Italian Wikipedia entry gives the address precisely: Via Fillungo, Via Arancio 1 and Via Fillungo 20.
Inside, you climb beside the clock mechanism — still wound by hand — and end up close enough to the bell to feel it in your sternum if your timing is unlucky. The wooden staircase is what makes this climb memorable. It creaks. It switchbacks through the tower’s hollow interior with the mechanism turning somewhere above you. It feels less like a monument and more like being let into the back of a workshop.
And then there’s Lucida Mansi. Posarelli Villas tells the version most Lucchesi will give you: a noblewoman who bargained thirty extra years of beauty from the devil, then tried to outrun the clock by climbing this tower to stop the hands before midnight. She didn’t make it. Every city keeps a story about vanity and time; Lucca just bolted hers to a working timepiece.
Via Fillungo itself is worth the slow walk between towers — see our guide to Via Fillungo shopping and market days for which shops are family-run and when the antiques come out.
Both towers sell single tickets, but they’re almost always offered as a pair, sometimes bundled with other civic sites like the Orto Botanico. The combined ticket is cheaper than two singles, and since the towers are a three-minute walk apart, there’s no practical reason to split them.
A few things to know before you turn up:
The money matters here. These are municipally managed sites, and the entry fee feeds back into the upkeep — the oaks, the stairs, the clock. Buying the combined ticket at the tower rather than through a reseller keeps more of it where it belongs.
Guinigi’s 230 steps over 28 flights take most people 10 to 15 minutes at a steady pace with a breather or two. Almost 150 feet, for those thinking in imperial. It’s not a mountain. It is relentless, though, and the upper metal section is narrow.
Passing etiquette: descending traffic yields to climbers where the landings allow, because stopping mid-flight with a queue behind you is worse going up. If a tour group is coming down, wait at the bottom. Three minutes of patience beats ten minutes pressed against a brick wall.
Accessibility, plainly: neither tower has a lift, and neither is wheelchair accessible. If you have knee trouble, vertigo, or a toddler who wants to be carried, the walls are a better bet. Carrying capacity on the Guinigi terrace is genuinely limited — it’s a small garden, not a viewing platform.
Wear shoes with grip. Carry water in summer. Leave the big pack at your accommodation; you’ll be grateful on the narrow sections.
Guinigi’s fortified tower house and roof garden is a golden-hour place. Late afternoon light comes in low under the oak canopy and lands warm on the terracotta roofs, with the Duomo campanile framed between branches. Go about ninety minutes before sunset.
Mornings favour Torre delle Ore, where the extra five metres of height and the sun behind you over the western rooftops give you clean, flat light with no squinting into glare. On a clear day you’ll pick out the Apuan Alps to the north and the Monte Pisano ridge to the south.
Photo notes: shoot through the oak branches rather than around them — the foliage is the frame and the point. Bring something wide for the amphitheatre oval, which doesn’t fit comfortably into a phone’s standard lens. And skip midday entirely; summer haze flattens the Apuans into nothing. From up top you can also trace the streets of Puccini’s Lucca, which makes for a decent orientation exercise before you walk it.
San Frediano’s bell tower and that gold mosaic façade are better admired from Guinigi than climbed — the mosaic catches late sun and reads as a glowing square from above. The Duomo di San Martino campanile offers access in some seasons, often bundled with cathedral and museum entry; check locally, as arrangements change.
The free option, and in many ways the best one: the Passeggiata delle Mura. Lucca’s Renaissance walls run four kilometres around the city, tree-lined, level, and entirely step-free. The baluardi — the bastions — give you wide ground-level panoramas and are where the people who actually live here walk their dogs at dusk. If the towers are too much for your knees, this is not a consolation prize. It’s arguably the main event.
And when the towers close, several hotel terraces and rooftop bars inside the walls will sell you an aperitivo with a view. Look for ones that are family-owned; the difference lands in local wages rather than a chain’s regional office.
Worst window: 11am to 3pm in high season. That’s when coaches from Florence and Pisa disgorge day-trippers who have ninety minutes and a list. Avoid it and the towers feel like a different city.
A plan that works:
Shoulder season — April, May, late September, October — gives you the same towers with half the bodies. So does rain. Post-rain visibility is often the sharpest you’ll get all year, with the Apuans standing up clean on the horizon.
Build the rest of the day around things that keep money in Lucchese hands: a cooking class with a local family, or if you’re staying longer, a train-based day trip to the Cinque Terre. Slow beats comprehensive. The towers have waited seven hundred years; they’ll wait while you finish your coffee.
