Beautiful Lucca Italy


The beautiful colors of historic Lucca.

I have always wanted to visit Lucca.  It is the best example of a walled city that is the most intact in all of Italy.  It is a highly impressive Renaisiannce era defensive walls that encircle the historic city center.



We really appreciated this town because it was not crawling with tourists. It was just a nice amount of tourists and locals. We had the opportunity to walk 3/4 of the wall and the wall is 4.2 km around the town. There are different entry points in from the surrounding area outside the walls of Lucca. 




Highly decorative church in Lucca


Church pillar supports.  The amount of marble carving on this was mind boggling and it was in such good shape for hundreds of years old.



There are many churches in the walled city and palazzo buildings and many of the palazzo have been made into hotels.  We stayed in one of the Autograph Collection Hotels which faced one of the many squares. 
There are numerous little outdoor restaurants and coffee shops and cute little shops to visit while walking the surrounding area. 
You can see the hills and mountains in the distance and they are quite stunning. 
Up on the wall looking down into Lucca

Surrounding area


There are a lot of trees that have been planted on top of the wall and on the outside of the wall which adds further to the beauty. 
This wall is so well preserved because it is covered in earth predominantly on the one side leading up to the top where it is quite a wide berth. They would have needed this, which would have enabled canons and carts etc to get up to the many strategic areas of the wall.  The wall has a lot of ramparts and dilapidated towers and a total of 10 strategic points around the wall for defense. 
We explored inside the wall which had large cavernous areas most likely for troops to sleep and storage.

Me inside the wall

Many people would not venture inside the wall but we did and it was pretty cool.

Outside of the wall

Inside the wall it was beautifully lit up for discovery.

There are 11 strategic areas on the wall which jut out called bastions or bulwarks eliminating dead zones where attackers could hide.  The wall was much taller than it looked.

There was an interesting conglomeration of buildings that were designed in an oval.  They called it the Anfiteatro or theater.  I am assuming that inside this large area of buildings was the town theater?
Curved buildings forming the large oval

Two entrances in and out of the oval

There was an Opera Puccini that was scheduled for the night that we were leaving and that was very sad for me because we could have stayed in this pretty little town for two nights if I would have known. I do love the Opera and Italy is the place to see one.
Lucca is a beautiful town that is worth a visit.

A gorgeous church.

There are many towers in Lucca.

Doorway eye-candy into the church.





A quaint window is commonplace in Lucca.



A building that still needs to be restored.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Climbing Mt. Solmar with The Dogs, Los Cabos, Mexico

Image
We heard about this climb from Darren's niece who had done the exact climb last week.  Whenever you do a search on hikes in the Los Cabos area, this Mount Solmar hike does not come up.  I would highly recommend it though because it was a great deal of fun and it was challenging.  I went with 3 friends and to top it all off there was a bunch of dogs walking with us up the mountain.   Enrique runs a Dog Training Center.  He started this hike with dogs to train them most likely. And now people join him for free and climb up Mount Solmar with the dogs. The dogs love it and they are barking and in a bit of a frenzy before you go.  You take an Uber or drive your car to the dog training center and you wait in line at 8:00 a.m. this hike accompanied by dogs is available every morning except Saturday.   Kent, Joelle, Craig and I in the line-up to get into see the dogs and start the climb. Enrique led us into the compound and gave us a talk on the area...
Read more

Ixtapa Island- Ixtapa, Mexico

Image
This is Coral Beach on Ixtapa Island The kids wanted to go to Ixtapa Island because this is where the best snorkeling is located in the Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo areas.  When we first started asking around and getting price quotes for this, we were getting prices anywhere from 90 - 110 American per person for a day trip to Ixtapa Island.  Anyone who knows us know that we hate organized tours because you get herded around like cattle, you don't get to make your own decisions and 90% of the time they are a rip-off for something that you can organize yourself.   Once the kids found out how expensive it was they began to research this trip and they realized that it's quite achievable to do without a tour or a tour guide for a fraction of the cost. We first took a taxi from Hilton Grand where we were staying to Playa Linda, where the Pier is located for the water taxis.  Our taxi from the Hilton Grand cost 300 pesos to get the 4 of us to Playa Linda where a lot of marke...
Read more

Kuilau Ridge Trail - Kauai, Hawaii

Image
My son Dax wanted to do this trail because it was in the interior of the island in the Rain Forest of Kauai. Some unusual Dr. Seuss like plants behind Kim. There is quite a bit of parking available before and after the bridge. There are washrooms available, they are super gross of the non flushing kind and the smell was really bad worse than your average outdoor Biffy. The trail begins at the yellow metal gates and there is a lot of elevation to climb up for the first section.  Eventually you get to the pretty views of a multitude of greens. You can literally take a ton of photos because every view is gorgeous! The forest is thick with some scary steep drop offs but the trail is wide enough for safety  You can continue for a longer trail for another 3.2 miles past the bridge but our hike was already going to be 2 hours round trip so we stopped at the bridge. That was enough beauty for one day. I highly recommend this hike and gave it a 5 out of 5 because it was moderately chal...
Read more