Today we took a day trip to Lucca. We arrived around 10:30 AM and what had been a cold morning turned into a perfect day. Given the beautiful weather, our tour of Lucca started from above the city with a walk on the city walls. The city is surrounded by a completely intact wall that has existed in some form for 2,000 years. The current wall is from around 1600. Now the top of the wall is basically a 2.5 mile-long park with a wide path for walking/biking, benches, and is mostly tree-lined.
After our walking tour we went down into the city and walked around, checking out the town. We stopped for lunch at a small kebab place and then went to get some gelato. The price was great - but the serving size was unacceptable. Two tiny little scoops barely the diameter of the cone! We almost didn't consider this worthy of recording...it's been added to the list, but with an asterisk.
We made our way across the city and made our first official tourist stop to admire the piazza and church of San Michele, with the dangerous looking stairway behind the facade. Then we saw the former Roman Amphitheater, now a large amphitheater-shaped piazza with apartments, shops, and restaurants. We made a quick stop at the tourist info center to get a better map, and then continued our tour. First we stopped for another gelato break, hoping the first place we tried was just a fluke. It was not. Seems that gelaterias in Lucca are big on small portions. Its a pretty big biking town - I think we saw more people biking than walking - so maybe they are a "healthier" city, and try to promote good health with smaller portions? After we finished our cones, we climbed the Guinigi Tower - Lucca used to have a tower at every corner, most part of wealthy family homes (like in Florence). The Guinigi family was one of the wealthiest families, in charge of the silk industry, and their tower is probably the most recognizable in the city, with a tree garden on top. We got some good views of the city and then made our way down to street-level. A few blocks away we found our second tower to climb, the Clock Tower. This tower was not in very good shape - we weren't sure the stairs would survive our ascent and descent. We got to the top for some more good views.
Our next stop was the church of San Giovanni. At a first glance, there isn't much to see here. But it turns out that they did some excavations under the church and found ruins from the 12th century AD all the way back to the Romans in the first century BC. We were able to climb down a flight of stairs and walk around underneath the church to see some of the ruins. Apparently there are the ruins of an entire Roman city underneath Lucca. Pretty neat.
Just down the block, we visited another church - actually the Cathedral of San Martino. They were doing a lot of restoration of the interior of the cathedral so there wasn't too much to see. But the facade of the cathedral was interesting - it was the first asymmetrical facade we've seen on this trip. There was a tower built on the site before the cathedral, so they had cheat a little to squeeze it in the space. They also engraved a maze on the wall of the facade.
After our tour of the sites, we rented some bicycles and did a couple of laps on the ramparts (the city wall). (For those helmet advocates like myself: I was told no helmet was necessary for this bike ride, and they only had helmets available for babies. What kind of crazy person asks for a helmet in Lucca?) When we were done biking we relaxed in the park for a while and then decided we couldn't wait two hours for dinner. Instead we got some snacks in Lucca to satisfy us until we got back to Florence. We found this great pizza place and tried a local treat - Cecina. Its basically a large pancake (the size of a large pizza) made of a batter of chick peas (ceci), water, and oil. The batter is baked in the pizza oven, and the cut in slices like pizza. Its really thin (1/8th of an inch) and we got a fresh batch that was really good. So many people came in and ordered the same thing - the whole pie was gone in five minutes. Then we ordered some of the pizza that looked so good and ate in on our way to the train station.
The only other thing to mention about Lucca is that they were setting up tents all over the city today in preparation for a big festival and a marathon this weekend. While it would be exciting to visit when there is a lot going on, I'm glad we went today to see the city in it's natural state (although Mike sort of wants to come back to Lucca at the end of the month when they are having a comic book convention).
Back in Florence we still felt stuffed from our "snack" in Lucca and instead of going out for dinner, we just called it a day!
Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Pistacchio e Stracciatella, Amarena e Cioccolato
Aviva - Menthe e Cioccolato
I could not find any good gelato in Lucca when I was there, and yes, the serving sizes were puzzlingly small everywhere I went. Lucca is sorely lacking in the gelato department. But biking the ramparts is kind of fun.
ReplyDeleteJeff W