Winter is nearly over! I’m not a winter person and I am very ready for Spring. It has been an unusual winter. Very mild and no snow at all here in the valley. But very wet. Rain, rain and more rain! Not many chances to get out. Here is one winter walk we managed.
The walk starts at the far end of the La Villa part of Bagni di Lucca. As you run out of street you take a little side street, Via Campiglia, until it runs out. The path then runs along the River Lima for a short while.
As the path heads away from the river it starts to get steep. At this point there wasn’t much to see with trees on both sides of the path and I started to get a bit grumpy, wondering if it was worth it. For me steepness needs to be justified by good views! But then the path led to several very cute villages: Guzzano, Gombereto, San Gemignano, then across the road to Longoio.
- Longoio
And better still once we’d achieved the height of the first village, Guzzano, the rest of the walk was fairly level and gave wonderful expansive views of the Controneria area and the mountains behind.
It was one of those bright winter days, crisp and blue skies. Most of the trees are bare. This made the shimmering silver of the olive trees even more precious.
Many of the old paths and mule tracks have these wayside chapels. Although they are usually locked the porches still offer great shelter and a place to sit and rest. This one was beyond Longoio and marks the end of my attempt to offer a route! After this there were several paths. We picked a route that turned out to be rather rocky, so my tip is – not the middle path! But we did end up where we needed to be, coming back into town from the opposite direction, so completing a circle. Circular walks are always the best kind, I don’t like coming back the same route.
This took us about 4 hours (I’m slow!) Overall the balance of challenging sections compared to beautiful sections was good. Next time we’ll try the higher or lower paths for the last part!