The tree-lined city walls at golden hour

Lucca never had to demolish its defences, so the seventeenth-century ramparts survive complete and were planted with trees in the nineteenth century. The result is unique in Italy: a continuous elevated avenue, twelve metres above the street, wide enough for cyclists and prams, wrapping the entire town in a ring of green.

For a photographer it is a corridor of repeating trunks that goes on for kilometres, with dappled light on the gravel and gaps that open onto the rooftops and the Apuan Alps beyond. The classic frame is straight down the avenue with the trunks receding; the better one is on one of the eleven bastions, where the path widens into a grassy platform with room to move and a view out over the plain.

Light is easiest in the late afternoon, when the sun comes through the canopy sideways rather than from overhead. In autumn the plane leaves turn and the whole ring goes yellow; in winter, bare branches make hard graphic lines. Access is free and permanent — there is no gate and no closing time, which makes this the one Lucca spot that never falls through.