Renaissance city walls of Lucca, Tuscany, Italy, turned into a public walkway in the 1800s.
Lucca, Tuscany, Italy: city walls constructed in the 1500s and 1600s and turned into a public walkway in the 1800s. There were four stages of construction of Lucca’s city walls: the first, of which few traces remain, was Roman; the second in the 1000s and 1100s was medieval; the third, in the second half of the 1300s and first half of the 1400s involved extending existing walls; the fourth was in the 1500s and 1600s. Construction of the Renaissance walls was decreed by the Republic of Lucca in 1504 in response to expansionist moves by the Medici and advances in warfare techniques that had rendered the medieval walls obsolete. Work on the walls began in 1545 and was completed around 1650. It was carried out by important military architects from Modena (Jacopo Seghizzi), from Milan (Alessandro Resta), and from Firenzuola (Ginese Bresciani), together with general architects from Urbino (Baldassarre Lanci, Francesco Paciotto, Pietro Vagnarelli, and the brothers Matteo and Muzio Oddi); the only architect from Lucca to participate in the work was Vincenzo Civitali. Growing on the walls today are centuries-old trees which were planted to consolidate masses of earth. In the 1800s, Duchess Maria Luisa of Bourbon commissioned royal architect Lorenzo Nottolini to arrange the walls as a public walkway.
Size: 3872px × 2592px
Location: Renaissance city walls, Lucca, Tuscany, Italy
Photo credit: © Terence Kerr / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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