The days are just flying by and as a consequence no emails have been forthcoming from me. So this is a catch up.
Sunday: Exactly as planned. A day of grazing. It was crazy…we couldn’t eat all the food for lunch so had to extend the meal into dinner. Antipasto platter consisting of cheeses, prosciutto, salami, bruscetta, etc…so delicious, all the produce of this wonderful food oriented country. Then the primi piatti which was a delicious pumpkin ravioli with a gorgonzola sauce. We then went out for a bit of a walk in the afternoon. The streets were full and bustling. Then home to cook up a chicken with garlic, oil and lemon. For desert we had bought a delicious custard/cream and strawberry pie and a torte di limone…just superb. This was all washed down with Aperol Spritz’s, beer, wine by the tonne and finished with Arancello and (for Hammy only) Grappa. Talk about a feast day.
Monday: A public holiday in Italy and we set off for the Giardino dei Tarocchi which is a sculpture park I had been told to go to. It is south of Lucca and near the coast. We naively thought this would be a lovely little excursion with a fish lunch by the seaside. So off we set. As it turns out so did every other Italian family in the whole bloody country. Our lunch by the seaside turned into a bit of a fiasco with not a single table to be found anywhere and the streets of our lovely little seaside town jam packed full. We eventually found a place where we could get takeaway and sat on a street bench with hamburgers, seafood lasagna, beer and wine. Sunny but cold!! Eventually we got to Giardino dei Tarocchi and had to fight our way into the carpark and then stand in a queue, absolutely freezing our butts off, for an hour to get into the place. It is a great park, similar to the Gaudi Park in Barcelona, with wonderful, colourful and bizarre sculptures to look at and climb into. Would have been wonderful with less people around. We finally got home around 10pm due to awful traffic. Cooked up some leftovers for tea and went to bed exhausted.
Tuesday: Off for a drive through the Chianti Region and to take in San Gimignano and Siena. Although still cold the sun was shining and it was a gorgeous day. So lovely driving through the Tuscan countryside through the typical rolling, vine and olive tree covered hills. We went first of all to San Gimignano. It is a really beautiful town as everyone probably knows, wonderfully preserved, antiquated twisting, tumbling and climbing streets, with towers and churches adding to the atmosphere. We went to an absolutely superb place for lunch that we had read about and were lucky enough to get there in time to get a table. Many were not so lucky. We had a superb meal and a lovely chianti. We wondered through the town some more, had a heavenly gelati and then headed off for Siena. Again driving through the beautiful countryside. Siena is lovely. I have been there in the last couple of months so I planted myself in Italy’s most beautiful Piazza (Del Campo), found a spot in the sun and sat there while the others went off to the Duomo. We wondered around the town and then headed off for home. The trip home was the drive from hell. We’re not sure what had happened but there was a massive blockage of traffic. So much so that cars were driving off the on-ramp to get away from it and we all made Hammy do the same. He was very brave…this would NOT be something you would do in Australia!! Anyway we kept hitting blocked traffic and exiting very cleverly to get around it all. When we hit Lucca we went straight out for a meal in a cheap and very cheerful ristorante which was fun. Then again late home and into bed.
Wednesday:….finally catching up, I’m now up to today. This morning it was off to Pisa. Saw the tower…tick(didn’t climb it though), saw the battistero…tick. and the campanile…tick. All really nice but the really nice thing was when we’d seen everything we had to see and went off walking in the town. It is a lovely town and I had never really explored the town before. I’d been into the main tourist area but what I loved today was that we got away from there and found to our delight a wonderful town. We went down to the Arno River and honestly you wouldn’t know whether you were in Pisa or Firenze they are so similar along the river. Again we found a place for lunch but this time not as successfully as in San Gimignano. Hammy was determined to have a pizza but unfortunately the place we found was mediocre at best. Still nice sitting out in the sun.
Then we came back here. Before coming back to the apartment we went for a walk along Lucca’s wall for a way just to soak it up in the sunshine. It is just glorious when the sun shines, it really is. Ham and Ariane have now gone off to do some laundry at the Laundromat and tonight we are going to a restaurant North of Lucca recommended by Chris to eat game!!