Blogs from Lucca, Tuscany, Italy, Europe - page 5

While I'm starting to get the bug bad for visting the rest of the country, on Tuesday I set off with my cousin Arianna to visit the local town of Lucca by foot and on bike. Lucca has, among its narrow, narrow streets, once protective walls, and many piazzas, famously 100 chaese, or churches. Its history goes back a long ways, as you can imagine, and I will get into the walls and some of the history as I learn to translate the local story from Italian. I learned a little about the history of the competitive development of churches in Lucca. As some of my pictures show the size of churches and especially their connected torre (towers) were a sign of power, and of course wealth. Over the years, when local people of power got ... read more

Geo: 43.843, 10.5085-7 MayLucca is a lovely city, obviously much quieter than Florence and Venice but still plenty to see and do. The city is surrounded by a wall used to protect it in war times. There is a road on top of the wall and the walk around it is 4km. It poured all day on Sunday and the shops are closed so I walked most of the way around and called into the Lucca Gallery of Contemporary Art. There was a very strange exhibition on called Paint where the artist started on white canvas, colored the majority of it with black lines and then used different textures of white paint to cover it all. I think the aim was to use white as colour whereas we usually start with white and introduce other colours ... read more

The dreaming stage Its was back at Christmas 2010 and I was stuck in Kuwait due to problems with visas. I was a bit feed up and so to give myself something to look forward to I began to plan a summer road trip to the Alps. My first thoughts were to take in some of the great passes through the Alps. This would take me into Italy, which i love and so my thoughts logically moved south and into north Tuscany and the Garfagnana, which I already knew and had fond memories of family holidays. But where to after Tuscany? Well Corsica is somewhere I always wanted to visit, and it has great roads and some amazing mountains, plus the famous and tough GR20 trail. The route home from Corsica naturally leads onto France, Provence ... read more

Friday, July 15, 2011 Early Morning Photos This morning I rose early to take photos of the statues by the Uffizi. I hadn’t taken any photos of the statues on the day I went to the gallery, and by the afternoon the piazza was filled with people. The morning was my best way to get up close without fighting the crowds. There was actually a sign that said “no photo” by these statues, but I don’t know how you can police people when the statue is outside. There were in fact two policemen in the square, watching me as I snapped my camera. They didn’t say anything. I think they were there to make sure I did not attack any of the statues. The one piece I really wanted to see was right up front, Perseus ... read more

Day 6 - Lucca Day 3: Well, we ended up not going to Florence, but found out later, when we went to check on the next train trip to Cinque Terre, that the price for the train to Florence wasn't as much as we'd thought, which was one of the factors we used in deciding not to go to Florence. Trenitalia, for some reason, charged us about 15 Euros from Florence to Lucca, but we saw that we could have gone to Florence from Lucca for only 5.20 Euros, a big difference! Oh well, live and learn. Still haven't figured out why the price difference. Anyways, we decided to make a late start and then rent bikes for a trip outside of Lucca to the place where we will have our Tuscan cooking class tomorrow. The ... read more