With its pink-hued medieval churches, tree-lined city walls and a famously excellent regional cuisine, Lucca seems the perfect Tuscan city. But that charm is precisely what has made it the latest battleground in a tug of war between the romantic Italy of the popular imagination and the more complex reality.
Lucca’s center-right city council recently stirred much contention and accusations of racism by prohibiting new ethnic food restaurants from opening within its gorgeous historical center.
This is, after all, a walled city. Many shops have been in the same families for generations. Some locals proudly trace their lineage, or imagined lineage, back to the Etruscans, who founded Lucca before the Romans took over about 180BC. With so much history, change comes hard.
Lucca is “very closed,” said Rogda Gok, a native of Turkey and the co-owner of Mesopotamia, a kebab restaurant, in the heart of the historical center.
“In Istanbul there’s other food, like German and Italian; it’s no problem,” she said. “But here in Lucca, they only want Luccan food.”
In this deeply conservative city, where even Sicilian food is considered ethnic, there are already four kebab houses, testaments to Italy’s growing immigrant population and the fact that many Italians, especially young ones, like eating non-Italian food. Offering kebabs for the equivalent of US$5, the restaurants are also a bargain in difficult times.
Under the new law, these four can stay, but the banning of new ethnic and fast-food restaurants within the city walls has struck many here as contrary to the rules of free-market capitalism and the notion that Italy can offer more than visions of its long-dead past.
Yet those dreamy visions of Tuscany — rolling hills, olive groves, the bicycle paths on Lucca’s tree-lined Renaissance-era city walls — are exactly what draw the half-million tourists a year that the city relies on to survive. Lucca is not the only city caught in this struggle. Siena and other Tuscan cities have also banned fast food in their historical centers.
This month, Venice dropped a controversial plan to allow Coca-Cola to place vending machines throughout the city, one of many corporate sponsorships that help support its infrastructure from the crushing weight of the tourism that today is its lifeblood.
In Lucca, the kebab ban has also struck a chord.
“It’s shameful,” said Renata Barbonchielli, a Lucca resident, as she stood outside a bakery downtown. “Of course there should be kebabs. We have to have openness here.”
Lucca allowed the kebab shops to open in the first place only because city officials did not know what they were, Filippo Candelise, a Lucca City Council member who handles economic development, said in a recent interview in the medieval palazzo that houses city government.
Candelise defended the new regulation as essential for Lucca’s future.
“We absolutely reject the ‘racist’ label,” he said. “We simply want to preserve our cultural and historical identity.”
Indeed, visitors from countries that pride themselves on openness do not necessarily bring the same perspective to Lucca.
“An American wants to find a typical ‘osteria,’ not a Chinese restaurant,” Candelise said.
Barbara Di Cesare, a spokeswoman for the city, showed e-mail messages from around the world, lauding the new norm.
“You are right to keep Lucca’s charm,” one German tourist wrote. “We come to Lucca every year because we want to see and live Italy, not New York.”
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