From little Lucca to bustling Florence
Florence is nice for a city. It is busy with people in the way London is busy with traffic. There is lots going on in the Piazza and around the Ponte Vecchio, artists, street entertainers, hawkers, musicans etc. My plan to live off pizza has folded after 1 day and I ate salad yesterday, but I think I am going to try to reinstate the reign of pizza and pasta today!
We caught a night train from Arhus to Munich on Monday and had our first experince of sleeping on trains. The couchettes are cattle class style with 6 people in a tiny cabin but our fellow travellers were interesting and the journey was surprisingly ok. This was followed by a day of training it to Italy. The journey was enlived by the cartoon of wine we had left over and a new friend we found who played his backpacker guitar to us and sang beautifully.
Arriving in Lucca early evening we happened to bump into Hedda and Adil as we quickly searched the streets for something suitable to take to our couch surfing host. Our kind host picked us up and took us to her lovely old house outside Lucca, where the walls were adorning with early 19th Century wall paintings. Amazing! The morning saw us eating Italian sandwiches and drinking wonderful coffee in a lovely little cafe in the countryside as we waited for the bus back to Lucca.
Lucca is an interesting city. The old heart is surrounded by the most amazing city walls that you can walk on top of. The streets are narrow and paved and give the impression they should be pedestrianised. We saw the famous tower with the trees growing on top and ate lots of pizza!
We nipped to Piza on Wednesday to look at the tower and take photos of people pretending to hold it up or push it over. The piazza with the tower in is ugly with tourists and you are not allowed to walk on the grass. We left quickly and caught the bus to the coast where we went swimming. Most of the coast was private beach (is this even legal?) but we managed to find a sliver of public beach and jumped into the refreshing water. It could have been cleaner but it was fun all the same. Ice cream and pizza occupied our minds all the way back to Lucca.
We arrived in Florence yesterday evening, and used the useful hotel booking facility at the train station. The hotel is lovely and clean with a massive buffet breakfast which kept Keyvan happy for several hours this morning. We failed to get up in time to get to the Galeria del Academia to see David… maybe tomorrow! Sightseeing will start properly in about 10 mins!
Hope all is well back in sunny England!