For botany enthusiasts and the curious, a tour of the nineteenth-century Walls, which once served as fortifications became the most beloved urban promenade, with long tree-lined avenues and the colors of the seasons.
As long as they were military buildings, the trees served mainly to reinforce the embankments and consolidate the construction.
The wall rested on three internal steps, and the walkway was merely a military walkway. Willows, poplars, elms—the same sturdy trees that grew wild in the Lucca plain, with strong roots and undemanding features—grew here to reinforce the structure. These were not gardens, however: access to the bastions was forbidden to civilians, as it was a "military zone," and was guarded by armed guards stationed in the "casermette" (small barracks) above the bastions and in the "castelli" (castles) above the gates.
In the 19th century, their military vocation having long since lapsed, their natural destiny seemed to be to transform into an urban park.
Originally conceived by Princess Elisa, it was Duchess Maria Luisa of Bourbon who initiated the construction of the "public promenade." The route begins in Piazza Napoleone, in front of the Doge's Palace. It winds through plane trees, then toward the Caffè delle Mura, and then along avenues of plane trees to the carriage roundabout at the Baluardo San Paolino.
From then on, the bastions, which had until then housed parade grounds and soldiers, were embellished with romantic gardens and shady avenues and opened up to the public for strolling. The existing trees were replaced with more elegant, fragrant, and above all orderly rows of plane, holm oak, and lime trees, on each side, alternating with exotic ginkgo bilobas, cedars, camellias, tulip trees, araucarias, maples, and horse chestnuts from the New World and the Far East.
Lucca's trees are almost all here, above the walls. Within the walls, there are a few well-protected gardens, where you can only occasionally peer out of large windows to "spy" on the natural spectacle. Or they can be found even on the towers, like the "hanging garden" of the Guinigi Tower, whose holm oaks, planted at the summit, signaled the tower from afar.
