Un finale toscano

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Dear Max and Dominic,

On our last weekend here we went to see two cities that we thought would round off our time in Italy. Lucca is a small city, about the same size as Nelson and Richmond put together, and it is very beautiful. Back in the time when it was dangerous to live in Italy because there were small wars every few years between the big cities, Lucca built a massive wall around itself. It takes about an hour to walk around it. The wall is so thick and strong that you can easily walk on top of it and even cannons wouldn't be able to break it down. It is much wider than a house - kind of like a dam made out of earth with bricks on the outside.

This wall was so good that no-one bothered to attack Lucca again and that is why the old part of the city, inside the walls, looks almost the same as it did 500 years ago. You can see in the photo from the top of one of the old towers in the city how the streets run narrow and deep between the four and five story houses like someone cut them with a knife. The tower we were on had trees growing on top in a small garden!

Lucca has many treasures but my favourites were the churches with marble decorations covering them. These are several hundred years older than the walls and the artists of the day used to love decorating things with animals, mythological beasts and other designs. We were amazed to see a what looked like a moa on one of them! When this design was made, back in New Zealand, maori were hunting real moa, and no-one else had ever heard of our country.

We caught the train down to the nearby city of Pisa on Sunday. Unfortunately a lot of the old city was damaged during World War II but in one part there is probably the most beautiful large town square in all of Italy. It is the equivalent of "The Sqaure" in Christchurch (before the earthquakes). Not only is there a huge cathedral covered in a riot of decoration, but the famous tower is there (it is the bell tower for the church), and also a really really big building for baptising people and a beautiful cemetery building. They all sparkle in the sunlight like fantastic sugar crystal castles on a perfect green icing lawn. It must have looked like a piece of heaven built on earth when it was new.

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