Pisa and Lucca

Europe
June 16th 2007

Published: June 16th 2007

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Bibes

Christine's turn

I got tired so Christine had a go

After a quick start to our first weekend in Italy by visiting Siena and San Gimignano, we decided to extend our travels further and planned a day trip to Pisa and Lucca, seeing as we are only about 1 hour east of Pisa and Lucca is maybe 20 minutes north of that.

When you arrive in Pisa, you really only have one thing on your mind: the leaning tower. Unfortunately, the train station (in what is most likely a clever or desperate attempt by the city) is on the opposite side of the city from the tower. So, in order to get there you need to either walk through the entire city of Pisa in a straight line, or take one of the most crowded busses you've ever seen since they are all packed with lazy tourists. We decided to walk, since even after just one week in Florence we were already getting used to the idea of using our feet to get everywhere. The walk through Pisa is enjoyable but long and can be frustrating since really, we only came to see the tower. However, we randomly came upon a parade of sorts with the army marching through the

Group photo in front

Me and Christine and my roommate Drew and his girlfriend Laura, standing in front of the tower

streets chanting different things as each group passed us. We finally came to the tower, and it is, in fact, leaning. A lot. When you stand at the bottom of the tower and look directly up you get the distinct feeling that it is about to fall directly on your head and your vacation will have an historic end. So we did what any tourist does, we took our "hey look, i'm holding up the tower" pictures, found some lunch and left Pisa. Climbing the tower costs 15 euro (easily the most expensive price for anything i've seen, including all museums we've been too) and once you're on top you have an excellent view of Pisa, without the tower, which is what you invariably came to see...so we didn't do it. Instead we headed on to Lucca.

Lucca is a charming little town that still has it's entire wall intact. All Italian cities at one point had a wall surrounding them for protection from the other cities, but few cities still have the entire wall. The wall is not what you would imagine a wall should be. For me at least, I imagined a castle wall, with arrow slits

Kicking the tower

My roommate with an interesting take on why the tower is leaning...

and turrets and towers galore. Nope. It's very wide, with no turrets or arrow slits, looks nothing like a castle at all in fact. There is a road and several small parks on the wall in various places. Once on top, it is quite easy to forget you are on a wall at all. The city of Lucca itself is quite small and very quaint. We ambled around aimlessly, not really knowing what we were supposed to be doing there. Instead we just enjoyed the extreme quiet and eventually found a tower and climbed to the top. At the top of the tower, in the shade of some trees, we got a beautiful view of the city inside and outside the wall. After wandering some more, we finally came upon the tourist section, the shopping street, and it was only then that we realized how well Lucca's walls dampen the noise. What we thought was a deserted town was actually a thriving metropolis, we just couldn't hear the noise. We wandered some more through the ampitheater and the open market, along with a couple of very cool churches we came across, but eventually it was time to head home. After