Vijay Pattni for BBC TopGear – The small cobblestoned city of Lucca in central Italy boasts one of the oldest and best-preserved Renaissance walls in all of Europe, able to trace a line right back to 180 BC and the founding of the Roman colony of Luca.

Nestled within these fortifications you’ll find a wellspring of culture including a palace once owned by a powerful Italian family, a litany of historic churches with one dating back to the 12th century, and famed Italian composer Puccini’s actual house.

You’ll also find a beleaguered Top Gear writer forlornly attempting to get a small car out of the city. As Jeremy, Richard and James found out over a decade ago, Lucca – achingly pretty, bursting with history, a postcard of Renaissance Italy – is a bloody maze.

So benvenuti mi amici, where your correspondent comes to you live from… somewhere in the small cobblestoned city of Lucca in central Italy! Thankfully nobody appears to have noticed that photographer Olgun and I are completely lost in this cultural epicentre tucked away in Tuscany, because we’re in perhaps the epicentre of Italian automotive culture.

Yes, it’s a classic Fiat 500, the original nuova cinquecento, which is as much a symbol of small cars as it is of Italy itself. It’s also the reason why we’re accidentally creeping through a pedestrian zone after taking a wrong turn and nobody is shouting at us for going the wrong way.

First released into the world in 1957 as a successor to the perhaps even more adorable topolino (literally, ‘little mouse’), the 500 was a small, rear-engined slice of Italian ingenuity.

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