Lucca, like the rest of Italy, has been... amazing (for lack of a better word). Yesterday and today it rained, but Greg and I were still able to see the sites. We arrived yesterday around two, checked into the hotel, and walked around the city before dining at the only restaurant open. (It was Sunday evening and we couldn't find any other food options and we were both on the verge of starving). I ate spinach tortellini with a cheese sauce (although I had ordered cheese ravioli with sage and butter sauce for my primi) and for my secondi (second course), I had the eggplant. We tried the house wine, but were not impressed (although I think Greg said it was better than the 2 Euro wine he bought in Venice in a water bottle).
By the way, the hotel is great. I've never been to a place that serves breakfast in the room (for 2.50 Euro each). There is a mini fridge in the room (which we stocked today with food bought from a grocery store right outside the city walls - yes, the city is still completely surrounded by hundreds of years old walls). We were so impressed with the hotel, we decided to stay a second night. Originally, we were planning on just passing through Lucca and heading to Cinque Terre only immediately, but I for one am glad to stay a second day.
Today, the weather was a bit better in the midday, but turned sprinkly around 2.30 or 3.00 and started raining about 5.00. The first thing we did was head in the direction of the treed tower. There are 17 towers inside the city walls of Lucca by our count. This number increases significantly if you add in the number of towers built on top of houses/buildings. We decided that climbing a tower for the bird's eye view would be worthwhile. I chose the Guinigi tower because of the trees growing on top. Although novel, the trees posed an interesting problem - How do I get around these other fools with cameras glued to their faces? and How do I avoid elbowing the girl in the pink jacket? I never figured out. From the top of this tower, we had an amazing view of Lucca. We were able to count the 17 towers and determine that there were in fact trees surrounding the entire city (I found out later that there are 4 different kinds of trees, one on each side). After the tower, we headed towards the city walls with the intention of walking all the way around the city on top of the walls. We google mapped the journey tonight and found out the trip was 3 miles. It didn't feel like 3 miles, but walking in the rain became less and less enjoyable.
About a mile into the walk (I'm totally guessing here), Greg discovered a locked gate in front of stairs that led to an unlocked iron door. In his version of this story, we jumped the gate (he jumped, I nervously put one leg over at a time) and walked down the stairs into a dark, dank, and dreary Medieval dungeon. In my version, we walked down concrete steps, through the unlocked metal door, and into a forgotten chamber currently used by the homeless. His story is far more exciting, so let's go with that version. I was terrified that something was going to jump out at me. Fortunately nothing did and we got out of there quickly after taking a few pictures (I couldn't see anything it was so dark. Greg had a small flashlight, but it did me absolutely no good). We walked back up the stairs, climbed over the fence, and walked away quickly as the couple sitting on the bench facing the gate stared at us funny. We heated up dinner in the microwave (yay for grocery stores with microwavable caneloni), organized our pictures, and are currently blogging.
Tomorrow, the plan is to eat breakfast, get our things packed again, and take a train to La Spezia and continue on to Cinque Terre.
***I'm sorry the pictures are not posted in the appropriate spots, but I am having a picture problem with blogger that is not allowing me to conveniently move the pictures to the correct places.
****At some point, I will get around to blogging about Florence and Siena. Look for those posts in the next couple of days.
No comments:
Post a Comment