The Person Behind My Search for a Home in Lucca

Those who know me well, family, friends, and many dear clients, know about my lifelong obsession with Lucca. More recently, they also know about my search for an apartment to buy here. This walled Tuscan city, west of Florence and a half-hour east of Pisa, has one of Italy’s highest qualities of life. It remains a city for its residents first, rather than one overwhelmed by tourism.

It is the city of Giacomo Puccini, a place of concerts and chamber music, and the “city of one hundred churches,” architecturally rich without ever feeling overrun.

Lucca’s Renaissance walls, as much as its piazzas, are the city’s living room.

Dogs, visitors, and most of all, locals are there from dawn until nightfall.

The broad, tree-lined promenade is ideal for walking, cycling, roller skating, strolling, eating gelato, chatting, and meeting friends. “Ci vediamo sulle mura?” “Shall we meet on the walls?” is what I hear all day long. With exposure on all sides, the promenade catches always at least some summer breeze, and the city’s commitment to its arboreal canopy means nearly the entire route is shaded. The variety of trees is remarkable. Some 700 plane trees share the promenade with holm oaks, poplars, elms, lindens, magnolias, ginkgoes, cedars, horse chestnuts, tulip trees, camellias, and palms. Native Tuscan species mingle with ornamental trees introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the former fortifications were transformed into today’s four-kilometer (2.6-mile) public park.

Lucca’s residents are primarily Tuscans, most of them Lucchesi whose families have been here for generations. But there is also a cosmopolitan group of North Americans, Europeans, and Antipodeans who have learned Italian, or are learning it, and are as much at home here as any native.

But this month I’m not in Lucca. Not because there isn’t plenty happening, including some of the year’s finest chamber music, opera, and concerts, but because my friend Paola Mondello is on holiday, as is much of Italy. She is my eyes and ears on all things real estate in Lucca. Without her, I lose my sixth sense.

I have enough Lucchese friends and colleagues to hear when unadvertised properties quietly come onto the market for rent or sale, but I would never consider making a purchase without Paola, of RE/MAX Viva.

She zips around town, alla lucchese, on her bicycle. Every day she talks with friends, colleagues, shopkeepers, and neighbours. As a result, she is extraordinarily well connected. She is tenacious, warm, funny, direct, and highly logical.

That logic is essential because navigating real estate in Italy requires a complete change in mindset for anyone accustomed to the North American system. In the United States and Canada, the seller is typically represented by a listing agent and the buyer by a buyer’s agent, each with a fiduciary duty to their own client. If both parties agree, one agent may represent both buyer and seller in a dual agency arrangement. In most transactions, the seller pays the commission. Italy, as ever, operates differently. The agente immobiliare is a neutral intermediary legally bound to both buyer and seller from the outset. For an outsider, that structural neutrality can easily feel like a conflict of interest.

This is where Paola’s background becomes invaluable. As a transplant from Piedmont who has spent twenty-five years in Lucca, she occupies a unique vantage point. She is deeply embedded in the local network, yet fully aware of how unfamiliar the Italian bureaucratic machinery can be to an outsider.

North American buyers typically arrive expecting rapid communication and complete transparency about potential liabilities. Italian real estate, by contrast, still relies heavily on word-of-mouth listings and a complex web of structural compliance checks (conformità urbanistica). Paola acts as a vital bridge. She anticipates the specific anxieties of foreign buyers, explains the role of the notaio, breaks down the real tax implications, and investigates the history of centuries-old properties before an offer is ever written.

While I know Lucca well enough to hear about unadvertised apartments through the grapevine, there is a vast gulf between finding a property and safely closing on it. Without a licensed professional who understands both the hyper-local Lucchese market and the expectations of a foreign buyer, the process is simply too high-risk.

So for now, with Italy paused for its August holiday, my apartment search is paused as well.

The right property will still be there when the country returns to work and when the person I trust most in Lucca real estate is back at her desk. Until then, my patience seems a very small price to pay.