Lucca

  After about a week in Florence, we went on our first day trip to Lucca. Lucca is a smaller town than Florence, but it’s still a decent size. It’s a popular place to visit because of the old walls that surround the center of the town. I had never heard of Lucca before we decided to go. We decided that Wednesday the 12th would be a good day to go because we would still be able to do lots of schoolwork during the week, but it also shouldn’t be full of weekend tourists.

We had to be at the train station by 9:00 because our train was at 9:09. We took the tram from our house to the train station, and we got there with plenty of time to spare. Our train took about an hour and 20 minutes, so we got to Lucca around 10:30. The train station in Lucca is outside of the walls, so we had to find a way to get in. Luckily there were a lot of other people going in too, so we just followed them through a passageway in the wall. On the inside Luca looks like a normal Italian town. You can tell it’s Italian because there are churches every few blocks. We wandered around for a little bit, and then we decided we were going to walk all the way around the wall. It’s not a super long walk, just a few kilometers, so we did it in about an hour. While we were up there we saw these statues of guys without torsos. It turns out it was an art project that was traveling all around Italy. We got lucky and were able to see these sculptures in Lucca because they're leaving soon. After we walked around the wall we decided it was time to have lunch.

We found a restaurant in a piazza and decided to try it out. I got some tortelli with meat sauce. It wasn’t nearly as good as tortelli at the restaurant I really like in Florence. I’ve had a lot of really good food in Italy, so I think that this was the worst meal we’ve had here. After lunch we wandered around for a while again, this time stopping in some churches. The first church we stopped in had a mummified saint in the altar. This freaked my sister out, so she refused to go into any other churches before we checked to see if there were saints.

After more wandering we stopped to get some gelato. I got two scoops of dark chocolate and one scoop of banana. Like lunch, it wasn’t as good as the gelato we got in Florence. It came with a cookie on top of it though. After we ate gelato we went outside of the walls to explore the rest of Lucca. We found a place where they had bubble tea, and one of my mom’s friends had told us to try it at some point, so we did. I thought it was too sweet, but it wasn’t awful. It was almost time to go back to the train station to catch our train back to Florence. The train ride back was the same length as the one there, but we had been drinking a lot of water, so I needed to use the bathroom. When I got up to look for one, all of them were out of order.

Even with the downsides, it was still a nice trip. I’m excited for the other day trips we’re probably going to go on with about half a month left in Florence. We’re planning to go to Arezzo and Siena this week, which should be fun. Arezzo is a hillside town, so there will be a lot of going up and down. We’re hoping to go get some fresh pasta there. Siena is also supposed to be a nice town, but I don’t know much about it. I can’t believe that we’ve been in Europe for a month now.