The river Serchio affords water-power for numerous factories. The most important industries are the manufacture of jute goods (carried on at Ponte a Moriano in the Serchio valley, 6 m. N. of Lucca), tobacco, silks and cottons. The silk manufacture was in troduced about the close of the 11th century, and in the early 16th formed the means of subsistence for 30,000 of its inhabitants. The bulk of the population is engaged in agriculture. The water supply is maintained from the Pisan mountains by an aqueduct built in 1823-32 with 459 arches.
The ancient Luca, commanding the valley of the Serchio, is first mentioned as the place to which Sempronius retired in 218 B.C. before Hannibal, after his defeat at the Trebia (q.v.). It was here that Julius Caesar in 56 B.C. held his famous conference with Pompey and Crassus, Luca then being still in Liguria, not in Etruria. In the Augustan division of Italy Luca was assigned to the 7th region (Etruria) ; it was a meeting point of roads—to Florentia (see CLODIA, VIA) Parma, Luna and Pisae. Though plundered and deprived of part of its territory by Odoacer, Luca appears as an important city and fortress at the time of Narses, who besieged it for three months in A.D. 553, and under the Lombards it was the residence of a duke or marquis and had the privilege of a mint. The dukes gradually extended their power over all Tuscany, but after the death of the famous Matilda the city began to constitute itself an independent com munity, and in 1160 it obtained from Welf VI., duke of Bavaria
and marquis of Tuscany, the lordship of all the country for 5 m. round, on payment of an annual tribute. Occupied by the troops of Louis of Bavaria, sold to a rich Genoese Gherardino Spinola, seized by John, king of Bohemia, pawned to the Rossi of Parma, by them ceded to Martino della Scala of Verona, sold to the Flor entines, surrendered to the Pisans, nominally liberated by the em peror Charles IV. and governed by his vicar, Lucca managed, at first as a democracy, and after 1628 as an oligarchy, to maintain "its independence alongside of Venice and Genoa, and painted the word Libertas on its banner till the French Revolution." In 1546 Francesco Burlamacchi, made a noble attempt to give political cohesion to Italy, but perished on the scaffold (1548) ; his statue by Ulisse Cambi was erected on the Piazza San Michele in 1863. As a principality formed in 1805 by Napoleon in favour of his sister Elisa and her husband Felice Bacdiocchi, Lucca was for a few years wonderfully prosperous. It was occupied by the Nea politans in 1814 ; from 1817 to 1847 it was governed as a duchy by Maria Luisa, queen of Etruria, and her son Charles Louis; and it afterwards formed one of the divisions of Tuscany.
(T. A.)