Acquedotto Nottolini

This guide to the Acquedotto Nottolini in Lucca follows the numbers a mason once chiseled into a buttress every seventeenth arch along nearly three kilometers of brickwork. It traces why Duchess Maria Luisa of Bourbon ordered her architect Lorenzo Nottolini to bring clean spring water down from above Guamo in eighteen twenty-two, and how a project meant to take a few years stretched on for decades as funds ran dry and crews came and went. Look for the thicker piers along the row of arches, each still bearing its carved number.