Days 10 and 11

Italy 2010

Days 10 and 11

Yesterday we sadly departed the small village of Soriano, the location of our cooking and adventure week. We got dropped off at the train station, and six hours and two trains later we arrived at Lucca, our home for the next week.

We walked our suitcases along the cobblestone streets until we finally found our apartment. It’s located along a narrow alleyway (as most all of them are). We live off a small courtyard, and we like it except for the bathroom being down a flight of stairs. We have a living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. There are beautiful tiled floors throughout. Nothing is “Americanized”, so we are living as the Italians do. The buildings here are often made of multiple types of materials and still look great.

We ate dinner at a wonderful little Trattoria called Gigi, which is a small place in a piazza with potted trees around the several outside tables. There were a couple things we liked including the bruschetta and the polentina (fried cornmeal with meat reduction toppings). We did have withdrawal symptoms from our week in Soriano at cooking school!!

This morning we found a little place where we could sit outside in a piazza to have our cappuccini and croissants, watch all the people go by, and hear the music. This “little place” is called a bar, but it’s not the kind of bar you are used to. Yes, they have all the liquor, beer, and wine you are used to, but it’s also where the Italians go in the morning for their espressos and pastries (their typical breakfast).

Since we don’t do regular tours, we then did a self-guided audio tour of Lucca. They gave us little phone-like units that we held up to our ears and a map. We just had to punch in the numbers of each place. We even paused in the middle of our tour to have lunch. Our favorite stop was climbing the many steps to the top of a special tower that had trees growing on top.

There were several churches in the town, by our calculations, one every 2.4 blocks.

After four hours of walking, only Roberto was prepared to ride a bike along the 3 miles of wall that encircle the ancient city. This was the last of the walls built to protect the people of Lucca from their enemies. This was a very successful city made very rich by processing silk for Europe, thus the reason for defending against other city kingdoms.

The ride along the top of the wall is a visual treat. You can look upon lots of the villas and their gardens. The wall was reconfigured over a century ago for walking and riding, its days of use for defense now gone.