Lucca’s old town is encircled by fortified walls, which date back five centuries to the Renaissance. (Rachel Lewis/LPI). Wandering through Lucca in Tuscany is like stepping into an illuminated manuscript. The town’s red-orange roofs and spires thrust out of a landscape of deepest green, with cypress-tree brushstrokes and a backdrop of mountains. Author Hilaire Belloc’s 1902 description holds true: ‘The neatest, the regularest, the exactest, the most fly-in-amber town in the world, with its uncrowded streets, its absurd fortifications… everything in Lucca is good.’
