Baluardo San Colombano

This guide to the Baluardo San Colombano in Lucca sets two walls against each other: a Roman wall built here two thousand years ago, buried in the bastion's foundations, and the Renaissance fortification raised above it in the 1500s to make sure history never repeated. It traces the century and a half of redesigns as cannon technology advanced, reshaping a tall wall into one built low, thick and sloped, backed by earthworks meant to absorb a cannonball rather than shatter. Engineers kept adjusting the design as artillery improved, long before anyone knew whether it would ever be needed.