Parco Fluviale del Serchio
Riverside park along wooded embankments once breached by catastrophic Christmas flooding, now a walking and cycling loop.
This guide to Parco Fluviale del Serchio in Lucca returns to the night before Christmas in two thousand nine, when the river's earthen bank finally gave way downstream near Santa Maria a Colle after hours of falling water levels, flooding nearby fields and streets. It traces the centuries the Lucchesi spent building and patching this embankment, from work begun around fifteen fifty to a network that recorded dozens of breaches over five hundred years. It also follows Guglielmo Petroni, a Lucca-born writer who set a Strega Prize-winning novel on this same river. Stop at the terrace named for him near Ponte San Quirico and look out over the water.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.