Florence to Lucca

We checked out of our room, packs on our back. We started off with a trip to the market again. This time we headed upstairs to the food court for a bite to eat. Really should have stuck with the traditional market for food. Not that the upstairs was bad but certainly not like a common food court.

Next to was a stop at another church, Santa Maria Novella, near the train station . This place was massive with courtyards and cloisters. The paintings here was huge and magnificent. Most had been restored, and there was one wall painting that was currently undergoing restoration. There were frescoes through the cloisters, most had not been restored - a project for another day. Hard to imagine the amount of money just spent on art restoration. I guess the 7.50 entrance fee helps a little. Outside the church there was a sizable Piazza with a number of vendors, mostly arts, crafts.

Inside the train station, we had "fun" with the tickets machines (the manned ticket booth had a line that wasn't moving.). One was only accepting cash. Another got as far as saying "printing tickets", then decided to give us our money back. The next clearly said "sick" on the terminal screen. Waiting quite a while at one behind a lady who was clearly having problems. We finally found one that worked and have us tickets. We had about a 30 minute wait before heading off on the 90 minute journey to Lucca. Had it been non stop, it would have been a much quicker ride but lots of stops on the way.

It was about a 15 minute walk to our room inside the city wall. Lucca still had it's walls intact, 100 feet wide. Your are able to walk or ride bikes along them. A bit about Lucca here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucca

The room was on the 2nd floor, so much easier to get to than the 66 steps we had to climb to our room in Florence. There is a nice garden area with tables outside that is viable from our window. After unpacking, we headed out to explore the town. We use the Rick Steve's tour books and started following his city walk, which started about 2 minutes from where we were staying. We never finished the walk. Our first distraction was a small brewpub with craft beers. Good distraction. While there we saw a flyer for a one act opera tonight. We figured why not, so Eileen bought tickets online. After that we continued walking but detoured to a monthly open air antique market.

While there, we heard the beating of drums (had heard them while we were in our room) and followed the sounds to what appeared to be a medieval competition, primarily of archers (crossbow). Unfortunately we missed the competition but we did get to see some sword fighting and the awards ceremony. Neat seeing men, women and children in period dress.

After a quick trip back to our room, we headed out to find some food. We ended up at one of the open air tables in the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, mainly for the atmosphere. There were some musicians in the center playing and lots of people around. The pizza and wine were ok.

Next up was "Cavalleria Rusticana" , a one act opera that was held at the Auditorium del Suffragio, a former church. We were both glad that it was a single act .... 90 minutes was enough for us. The singers and instrumentalists were great. It was a short 4 minute walk back to our room, in by 1100 PM.Read more