Day 6

Italy 2011

Day 6

We need to catch you up on the food.  First of all, dinner service starts at 7:30, kind of late by our standards.  You can see by the following we are of the Early Bird generation.

Supposedly, Tuscan food is not the best in Italy; in fact it’s not in the top 10. But according to Mark Bittman of the NY Times, Lucca is the exception, and we’ve been reminded of that our last couple of meals.  As last night’s dinner shows below, we ordered one thing from several courses to make sure we sampled and enjoyed the wide variety of foods while preventing stomach overload. In honor of our usual traveling companions (Jan and Dan Studer) we ordered Melone and Prosciuto, cantelope and Italian ham.  Underneath the cloak of ham is the melon, and you eat them in combination.  It’s a lovely combination.

Our next course was one of the things we’d like to make at home, Tortelli Lucchese, a specialty of Lucca.  The tortelli is filled with meat and covered with a hearty meat sauce.

Our main course was wild boar stew with polenta (ignore the insalata on the right).  The polenta reminded us of what we had years ago.  The stew didn’t have any of the usual vegetables but did contain olives.  For those wondering, the plates were split so the total service was twice what the picture is showing.

The excellent food got us in the mood for more great food, so we decided to try what Frommer’s said is the BEST place to eat in Lucca, Buca di Santa Anta Antonio.  This is one place where you eat indoors (we prefer outdoors) and the waiters wear tuxedos, even though we were there only for lunch. We made it our main meal.

What was remarkable here was the ravioli with fresh ricotta and pulverized zucchini . . .

and the baby goat with roasted potatoes and green bean pudding.  That’s right, pudding!  That’s now another dish we would like to recreate.  It wasn’t easy, but we got over the baby goat issue pretty quickly.

We finished the day with music from the ages.  We think we have identified Lucca as the home of the composer Puccini.  Every evening of the year there is a one-hour performance in a dedicated cathedral of Lucca.  Tonight’s show was a sampler of Puccini and Mozart, mostly operetic works sung by two women with great voices.  Even though we haven’t made opera part of our listening music, it was great, and we would highly recommend it.

By the way, even though Lucca is a small town, it’s a music capital. We noticed that in July there are many outdoor concerts, held in a large piazza, by such performers as James Blunt, Elton John, B.B. King, etc. There are many classical concerts, too.

Our endless days of sun may be coming to an end.  We walked home tonight from across town hand-in-hand through a light rain.

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