"Villas of Lucca: The delights of the countryside" illustrates the models and modes of the useful and the pleasurable that Lucchese society projected onto country living between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century; centres of territorial government, state residences, pleasure houses, theatres of artistic experimentation.

The volume describes all these in words and images, weaving in the themes of architecture, society, economics and culture, as well as mercantile and family history.