Via Fillungo

This guide to Via Fillungo in Lucca opens with a question about the two hundred seventy stone stairs inside the Torre delle Ore, and who climbed them daily for almost two centuries just to keep the city on schedule. It traces the tower's first clock back to around 1390, then follows the Republic of Lucca's 1752 commission of a Genevan clockmaker, Louis Simon, to build something more precise, cast with new bells by the founder Stefano Filippi. Along the way it walks the street itself, once lined with silk merchants' mullioned windows and marble sills, now filled with jewelers and cafes.