Lucca

Our European beds are going to kill us. When Europeans come to the United States, they must wonder how we can possibly sleep on such soft mattresses. Every bed we have slept in during our trip since we got off the ship has been extremely hard. As a result, both of us are suffering from hip soreness. No wonder we see all these old folks walking around with canes.

Tuesday we drove to Lucca to find the English language library and to drop off some of our books. Much to our surprise, we were able to find it quite easily even though it wasn’t right in Lucca, but instead in a little suburb a bit outside of the town. The librarian was delighted to have our donation, though this time around it was mostly travel books.

After we dropped off the books, we drove into Lucca, parked just outside the old wall, and walked into the old town.

Lucca has one of the most well preserved old walls in Italy. It also is somewhat unique in that you can actually walk around the entire city on the top of the wall. Now, don’t picture us teetering on the edge of a little skinny wall. The Luccanese knew how to build a fortress, and the wall is extremely wide. In fact, Bill read somewhere that many years ago they used to have car races on top of the wall. In this photo, I am standing on top of the wall and you can see how wide it is.

There are no cars now. You just see people strolling with baby strollers, holding hands, and many, many bicycles. And unlike some walls, this one has survived in its entirety and goes around the entire town.

Because this fortress was so well built and apparently quite impenetrable, we checked the Internet to see just who it was that Lucca was fortifying itself against. It turns out the wall was built between 1400 and 1600, and they were protecting themselves against those ol’ nasty Florentines. Florence was apparently the enemy of everyone in Tuscany. However, in the case of Lucca, they never actually had to use the wall to protect itself. The Florentines were so put off by the wall that they never actually attacked it.

Lucca also has one of the interesting towers in Italy. While not particularly high, you can tell from the photo that it has trees growing right on top of the tower. Bill climbed the tower years ago when we visited Lucca with my sister and my niece. This time he just took the photo.

We had lunch at a restaurant in the Roman amphitheater. I had a hearty Tuscan soup that I recalled having the last time. Bill had pizza that he claimed was the best he’s had in Italy thus far. He pretty much says that every time, but I must admit, this was particularly good.

After lunch, we walked around most of the wall, and the part we didn’t walk on the wall, we walked down below to get to our car. Our drive home was uneventful.

We did observe two rather funny things. At one point, traffic on the autostrada slowed down, and nearly stopped. After finally getting up to the situation causing the backup, we found that a road crew had blocked one entire lane of the highway (a four-lane highway, two lanes each way). The reason? There was a man sweeping the highway, not with a street sweeper, but with a broom.

The second funny thing almost takes the prize for the most amazing thing I’ve seen in Italy. As we were driving down the highway at 130 kilometers per hour, or about 78 mph, we passed a man driving a semi tractor-trailer with his left leg hanging out the window of the truck. I’m frankly not sure how you even physically do that, but I’m certainly not going to try to find out while roaring down the autostrada!

On Thursday, my sister and brother-in-law are coming to visit. Yipee! We are both very excited to see them. They will spend 10 days in Tuscany with us, and finish off in Paris.