Lucca - is it a good home base

Do you plan to rent a car, or will you be depending on public transportation? Lucca has rail service, but Tuscany is rather large. Lucca would work for some places better than others. Refer to this map of Tuscany. As you can see, Lucca is nowhere near the center of the area; it's quite far to the north and is over near the coast. It has the further disadvantage of not being on a Freccia rail line, so it takes at least 80 minutes just to get to Florence.

Siena is about 2-1/2 hours away from Lucca by train. Cortona is at least 3 hours by train, and that doesn't get you all the way to the town; you need a taxi or bus to finish the trip. Volterra means 2-1/2 hours on the train and again you will also need taxi or bus. Those are all one-way travel times.

Certainly there are places much easier to reach from Lucca, but except for Pisa, most of the places commonly mentioned by posters on this forum seem to be a time-consuming trip from Lucca.

Have you made a list of the other towns you hope to visit?

May I suggest u stay in Siena in order to see Tuscany. We did this and found it quite easy by bus for many villages and then rented a car for more distant as in Orvieto, Deruta, Assisi, Civita d B etc.
I have stayed in Lucca and think it is too far for a Tuscany visit.

Lucca is a beautiful walled city but it is not a good base to explore Tuscany.

We stayed in Lucca for a week. Great base for exploring. Never ran out of things to do and visited some places few go.

Two bases, one more in the north, the other more south, would work better than one. Otherwise you will be spending an awful lot of time some of the days driving or train riding. Or, you can resign yourself to the fact that Tuscany has too many attractions to cover in a week. We spent some time in Tuscany a couple of years ago. I researched all the places we wanted to visit. Then, I checked the driving times from some base possibilities. My rule of thumb was 1.5 hours of driving, max, in one direction. That helped me select our places to stay. We had more time than you do, so we had 3 bases plus a few days in Florence.

Hi there, Does anyone know how I can get in contact with one of Rick Steves' tour guides - Nina Dierckx. I believe that she lives in Lucca and I would like to hire her for a tour. Thank you!

It depends on the places you want to explore.

Lucca tends to be a bit far to the west for many of the most famous towns tourists like to visit.

For the most famous destinations you should stay around Siena or at least between Florence and Siena.