Conaway: The Lucca Model — a proposal
The Downtown Memphis can be seen behind the Memphis sign on Mud Island. (Patrick Lantrip/The Daily Memphian file)
Dan Conaway
Dan Conaway was a freelance columnist with The Daily Memphian from 2018 to 2025.
The Etruscans. Andrew Jackson, James Winchester and John Overton. Founders.
Some years ago, Nora and I had the pleasure of visiting Lucca, a small city in Tuscany on the Serchio River in a fertile plain near the Ligurian Sea — just think of, for reference, the Mississippi Delta.
We have a little art from there, and I was looking at it and thinking about Lucca this morning. And about us.
The center of Lucca — for our purposes today, we’ll call that the city — dates back to the third century B.C. and is distinctively contained within a huge Renaissance-era stone wall. The top of this wall is so wide it’s actually a thoroughfare for people, their dogs and their bikes. The open city center began as a Roman amphitheater dating to the first century — you know, like AutoZone Park and FedExForum dating to the beginning of the 21st century.
The more recent parts of Lucca, say the last 600 or 700 years, lay outside the wall — we’ll call them the suburbs.
There are crenellated overlooks at regular intervals on the front of the wall for the purposes of defense. At one corner, there’s a tall stone tower.
Since history shows that Lucca was much more interested in music and food than they were in conquest and acquisition, the battlements were really for waving at the armies of, say, Sienna and Florence as they went by on the way to fight each other, and the huge doors more for dramatically throwing open when, say, Pisa or Venice wanted to drop in for trading, eating and partying.
That tall stone tower has no catapults or vats for boiling oil to pour on invaders but rather a garden. Trees are growing up there on the top today — just like here with no fort anymore in our Fort Pickering and no more ironclads below our Bluff.
The composers Puccini, Alfredo Catalani and Luigi Boccherini, and other noted musicians and artists came from Lucca — like our Elvis, Sun and Stax. Foodies have been coming to Lucca for centuries to train, to experiment, to enjoy — like people come here for barbecue. Our own Grisanti family looks to Lucca for inspiration. Really.
Dante spent time in Lucca — the temperature of any August afternoon in Memphis being a parallel to any of his circles of hell.
Lucca cloth, silk fabric woven with silver and gold threads, was a very popular textile throughout the medieval period — yeah — just like cotton.
The city’s citizens were so prominent over the years that a Pope, Lucius III, came from Lucca, and Pope Gregory XII hosted a convocation there — and the COGIC convention is coming home to us. The city once made all the key decisions for all of Tuscany — just like Crump did for all of Tennessee.
As you can see, we’re practically sister cities.
Beginning in 1160, Lucca became the second largest city after Venice to remain an independent state for five or six centuries, complete with its own constitution.
I think that’s a great idea.
Let’s make Memphis an independent city-state.
I mean, the rest of Tennessee can’t stand us. The legislature blames us for, well, the basic decline of the human race. Our own suburbs do the same and toss figurative rocks across their border at us daily. The majority of our population doesn’t look like the majority in the suburbs, and certainly not the supermajority in the legislature.
Not in color. Not in gender. Not in thought. Not in need. Not in deed. Not at all.
The health and well-being of our poor are ignored. Federal help for our working poor is rejected by our own state. Decisions about the health of our women and the rest of their lives are made by men. Decisions made about health care are closing community hospitals across the state and risking lives every day. Decisions about what our children can read and learn in Memphis are made by people from towns the size of a Cracker Barrel. Our governor is giving our public school money to private schools, and many of those schools might as well have pews in place of desks.
I mean, come on. This ought to be a cinch.
Let’s just go our separate ways. They’ll say good riddance.
Mississippi and Arkansas are already other states that share our border. We have to negotiate with both to get anything done, and we have to wrestle with both to land new industry and federal support.
Nothing new there.
Germantown and Collierville, and Bartlett and Arlington and Lakeland who want to be Germantown and Collierville, and Millington who just wants to survive, all want to have nothing to do with Memphis. They all think they’d do just fine without us.
Nothing new there.
Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty will not represent us.
Nothing new there.
So, let them all go, and let us take a shot on our own. They’ll all applaud.
We’ll keep the headquarters companies here, FedEx, International Paper, AutoZone and the rest.
We’ll keep the Grizzlies, the Redbirds, the 901 FC, and we’ll keep the arts, and the museums, and the restaurants, and the music, and, well, most of everything that makes this part of the world this part of the world.
We’ll keep the colleges, too. And the riverfront. And the arenas. And the airport. And Graceland. And Beale Street. And the zoo. And the history.
We’ll keep our police force and, in fact, increase it in size and compensation. They will live here. They will be in more neighborhoods, and they will engage in those neighborhoods. On their corners, with their churches, in their schools and community centers. They will use technology and statistics as fellow officers.
We will have a sound ordinance, and we will be loud in its enforcement.
And, yeah, we’ll keep the 7% sales tax we send to the legislature, and the 2.75% we charge. And all the taxes our businesses pay. But we won’t charge sales tax on food, or on school supplies, and other staples. And we’ll aggressively seek and accept every penny we can get back from the federal taxes we pay to support expansion of Medicaid and the replacement of our crumbling infrastructure.
We’ll do all of that because we’re keeping our poor, and we’ll keep crime, and take responsibility for both.
Unlike the legislature, we know that the poor are drawn to cities because of education, opportunity and services.
Unlike the legislature, we know that denying resources to education and services eliminates opportunity and increases crime.
Unlike the legislature, we will embrace public education, provide opportunity and support services.
Unlike the legislature, we will reduce crime by increasing hope and decreasing despair.
Unlike the legislature, we realize that our music, our food, our very culture — our personality — comes from our most challenged citizens, not our elite. We owe them our recognition and support, and payment is way overdue.
We’re going to keep our soul.
And we’re going to let people vote, regardless of their color, their belief, or their party — like the nation decided to do with the Civil Rights legislation of 1965, and like this part of the nation has been fighting ever since.
And we’re going to stay out of our bedrooms, our doctor’s offices, our classrooms, and any decision any of us makes about who we are, who we can love or what we can believe.
We’ll keep our guns, but we won’t carry them around openly to make statements. We won’t keep assault rifles — or bazookas — or shoulder-mounted missiles — and what we will keep will be licensed, subject to background checks and won’t be bought at local gun shows.
We’ll find and keep our common sense.
The franchises we’ll seek will be more like the Boys & Girls Club and less like Trader Joe’s and Whataburger, which seem to define our suburban excitement.
One of the first things we’ll do is make Wanda Halbert our ambassador to Jamaica. She’ll leave immediately.
Then we’ll get rid of those crowded, unreadable blue license plates and send you ... send you ... new much cooler ones. That won’t be difficult.
Then we’ll implement rank-choice voting ... which we’ve already voted to do twice. Twice.
Then we’ll officially eliminate extended term limits ... which we’ve already voted to do twice. Twice.
Then we’ll tell Memphis in May that they’re going to be in Tom Lee Park, so get over it and design your events to fit. Whine at a bar somewhere like the rest of us. Bartenders are trained for that.
Then we’ll turn our two biggest hospital systems into what they claim to be and as their names imply — not-for-profit and dedicated to care for the least of these.
Our flag will be mostly blue, and for a slogan, I recall a tee shirt Memphis Made Brewing came up with a few years ago. It featured the state of Tennessee with Memphis highlighted. The copy went like this, “When you’re bad, they put you in the corner.”
We can work with that.
Nashville was smart enough to consolidate decades ago and may want to join us in this effort.
They could force the legislature for the rest of Tennessee to decamp to, say, Hohenwald, or maybe Lebanon. After all, that’s the headquarters of Cracker Barrel. Maybe Pigeon Forge. They’ll get caught in traffic and won’t be able to convene. Not a bad thing.
They would also be close to Dolly Parton. They could learn a thing or two about compassion and education and the value of books from her. Not to mention, a sense of humor.
The Tennessee General Assembly has declared war on Memphis and Davidson County, on cities in general. We should return fire. I would include the governor, but he’s already owned by the legislature.
If all the cities of Tennessee got together and voted as a block, that might just be the broadside we need to get some of this done.
As I was thinking about all of this while shaving, I hit one of our Lucca pottery pieces with the corner of a towel and it fell off the wall and shattered.
Was that a sign that I’m on the wrong track ... or the first shot fired?
I’m a Memphian, from the City State of Memphis, and I’m bad. Mane.
Dan Conaway on demand
Never miss an article. Sign up to receive Dan Conaway's stories as they’re published.
Enter your e-mail address
Related stories
Strickland pushes for stronger federal and state gun laws
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland called Friday, May 27, for “strong federal laws with reasonable restrictions on weapons” and “stronger state laws punishing gun crimes and more intervention with those at-risk of using guns.”
Gooch Park mural offers ‘Slice’ of Memphis culture
The North Memphis mural will surround the park’s public pool and is named after a term for enthusiastically jumping into a swimming pool.
Clothes make the man, but that’s only half the story
“If that person says, ‘I like your outfit’ or stares or the car that drives by honks, it’s going to be a fun night,” said Mark Sandfoss, a zoologist with a flair for fashion.
Want to comment on our stories or respond to others? Join the conversation by subscribing now. Only paid subscribers can add their thoughts or upvote/downvote comments. Our commenting policy can be viewed here.