Europe 25: Florence, Day 2

It has always struck me as kind of odd to spend a whole lot of time and energy to get to a place only to go somewhere else almost immediately, but that’s what we did on our second full day in Florence. It worked out.

Our plans were to take the train a little over an hour to the nearby city of Lucca. I like trains in general, and one of my wish list items for the last couple of trips was to take a train to one of our destinations. We’d taken the train from the Rome airport into the city every time we’d been there but somehow that seemed different, and this would be a “real train ride” instead. I am not sure why I made this distinction in my head, but so it goes. And Lucca turned out to be a lovely place, in some ways nicer than Florence itself.

We took the T2 tram to the train station in Florence to meet Stacey, as JR had decided to sit this one out after all of the walking the previous day. The train station is right there in the middle of town and the tram goes right by it – it’s another of the things that we passed every time we wanted to get to the historical part of town, along with the Duomo – so that part was easy. Finding Stacey, though, was a bit of a trick. We got off the tram and noticed the big open entrance to the station a bit to the right so we headed in that direction but this, it turned out, led into a lower level of the station, a big open space full of shops and restaurants, most of which were closed at that hour. Eventually we found a staircase and went to the upper level and walked until we found the door that we could have just entered had we gone to the left and up the stairs when we got off the tram. Thus we came up on Stacey from behind.

The train ride was as nice as I had hoped it would be, and in a little over an hour we found ourselves in Lucca.

Lucca is a pretty town of about 90,000 people, according to a quick internet search that I just did. It sits on the site of older towns stretching back to the Etruscans, and for much of the medieval and early modern period it was an independent republic. The Luccani built walls around the city starting in the 1500s and if Wikipedia is to be believed Lucca is the second largest intact example of a fully walled Renaissance city after Nicosia, Cyprus. The walls replaced older Roman and medieval walls, and you can just go up on top and walk around the old city anytime you want, and eventually we did just that.

Our first mission, however, was to find a coffee shop.

In order to do that we passed by a piazza that had a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the middle – a fairly common sight in Italy, as he occupies a very similar cultural niche in Italy to the one that George Washington occupies in the US – and some interesting floral arrangements, one spelling out “Puccini” since the composer was born in Lucca, and the other more prosaically spelling out “Lucca.” You have to admire that kind of effort.

Eventually we did find a coffee shop. You can’t walk more than a hundred meters in Italy without finding a coffee shop, after all – I think it’s a law or it might just be a cultural imperative, and either way we support it fully – and we made ourselves at home there.

We didn’t really have any plans beyond “get to Lucca” so the rest of the day was mostly just the three of us wandering around and finding things that were worth seeing. One of the first of these was a small market in the Piazza del Giglio, with vendors selling everything from clothing to jewelry to photographs to meats, cheeses, bread, and pastries. There was an amazing photographic print that I left there because I couldn’t figure out how I’d ever get it back to the US intact, but I ended up getting an olive-wood spider (which is not an arachnid but is instead a kitchen tool used to scoop pasta and similar things out of hot liquids) and a pile of pastries, while Kim explored a jewelry booth and came away with a pair of earrings shaped like long-stemmed cherries. You can tell that people have a bit of trouble figuring out how these work because as Kim was examining them the vendor came over and immediately said, “Come funziona?” (“How does it work?”) and then demonstrated the process with the ease of someone who has done that many times before.

The food vendors in this place were very forward when it came to offering samples, and I can’t say that I saw that as a problem as it meant I got to try a great many tasty things. It also meant that they sold a great many of those tasty things, so in the end it worked out well for everyone. The guy below got me to try a piece of braseola, for example – a Sardinian cured beef – that was astonishingly good, and I really need to figure out if I can get that in the US or not.

I ended up taking my pastries and other goodies over to the shady benches on the side while Kim and Stacey continued to look around, and I had a grand time just watching the people go by. Lucca gets tourists, but nowhere near in the numbers that Florence does, so a lot of the people there were locals out and about and the rest seemed mostly to be German. It was an interesting crowd.

From there we just started walking. One of the first places we landed was the Chiesa di San Giusto, a twelfth-century church that was just sort of standing there by the side of the road. That’s the thing about Italy – you just walk along the street and these things just appear without any notification or ceremony. They’re just part of the fabric of life there. It was a fascinating little church to poke our heads into for a bit.

We continued on up a very narrow street and along the way we passed a good-sized group of men just sitting at a long table enjoying their lunch. We didn’t think too much about it – lots of people do that sort of thing in Italy, and it should be more common everywhere really.

And then they broke into song.

 

It turns out that they were a Sardinian men’s choir visiting Lucca, presumably to give a concert or two, and having spent most of my teens and twenties in one choir or another I know that such groups are always just a heartbeat away from doing that sort of thing. It comes with the territory. They did a couple of songs, actually, and while some people just kept walking – why, I do not know – they did gather quite a crowd by the end. As, of course, they intended.

From there we walked a bit further up the road until we found the Chiesa di San Cristoforo, which at the time was hosting a photography exhibit by an artist named Stefano Lotumolo. His specialty, according to the little card we got from the exhibit, is “traveling continuously to meet remote populations and document their lifestyles, customs, and the most fascinating ancestral rites.” He’s a talented photographer and he seems to have a knack for putting himself in interesting places, so it was an enjoyable exhibit.

The church itself was also interesting, particularly if you peered around the barriers to the empty areas of the building. It was covered in names, for example. They seemed to be members of the church who had died, and some of them were quite recent. The floor art was interesting as well.

Just up the street from that was a little stand selling fruit and candy and other things, and it struck me as funny that the Italian word for “soft” in the sense that candies can be soft is “morbido,” and I spent the rest of the day imagining little sugary sweets dressed in black and playing depressing songs on tiny guitars. This is why you can’t take me anywhere.

We stopped for lunch in the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, which was a Roman amphitheater before it slowly disappeared over the centuries. It still has the rounded shape of the original building, though – a negative space into which people have poured restaurants. It was a hot day and we were generally happy to sit in the shade of the umbrellas outside and enjoy some good food for a while, and eventually we set out again but even as you go around the outside of the Piazza you can still see the rounded shape of the original building.

Eventually we ended up at the city wall. You can’t really avoid them once you’re in central Lucca – any direction you walk you’ll eventually bump into them. The thing about the city wall that isn’t immediately obvious when you think about it is that the wall is surprisingly wide. Like wide enough to explore underneath wide. Wide enough to have an entire road on top with buildings on either side wide. A lot wider than you think wide.

We explored underneath the walls for a bit. There were caverns and a squadron of attack pigeons and eventually we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac outside and had to retrace our steps to where we started where there was also a little pathway that took us the twenty vertical feet or so up to the top of the wall.

It was a lovely path to walk down, shady with trees and with interesting views of the city. Eventually we found a small museum dedicated to Lucca’s history – maybe three or four rooms including the gift shop, but with the inestimable value of also having a public restroom – and spent some time looking around the place. There was even a short movie that you could watch for as long as you cared to do so, and that’s always a nice thing.

I finished with the place a bit earlier than Kim or Stacy so I went back outside to sit in a shady spot and watch the world pass by. Eventually I heard a low rumble that got slowly louder, and when I looked up I saw a carabinieri car go by followed by about a hundred Harley riders on parade. It took them maybe five or ten minutes to pass, much to the annoyance of the museum operator who came out and performed several Irritated Italian Gestures at them before going back inside.

Me? I’m just thinking that I have traveled several thousand miles from a medium-sized city in Wisconsin to a medium-sized city in northern Italy and the Harley dudes have followed me even so. Harleys are a central part of Wisconsin culture, after all. They’re made here, and the way you know that your social movement has reached peak Wisconsin acceptability is when it gets adopted by the Harley dudes in your town. I used to do the annual “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” event sponsored by the YWCA, where local men put on high heels and – wait for it – walk a mile through town as a way to raise money for domestic violence prevention efforts, and the year when a dozen Harley dudes showed up on their bikes sporting some of the most fabulous shoes I have ever seen I knew the event had arrived.

It was a nice and much quieter walk back to the train station after that, as we made our way along the wall and then down into the town for gelato before heading over to the station.

The ride back was just as nice as the ride there – seriously, the US needs to up its rail game – and we soon found ourselves back at the Florence train station where Stacey left to go to her apartment and Kim and I took the T2 tram back to ours for a siesta. When you get out of the tram at our stop you have to go over a little creek that they kind of walled off, and it was a pretty walk back to our building.

Rested and restored after our break, we headed back to the train station on the tram and then walked over to the Chinese restaurant where we’d agreed to meet Stacey and JR for dinner.

Florence is a more cosmopolitan place for food than Rome, in my limited experience. In Rome you generally got Italian food. Very good Italian food, and to be honest better Italian food than in Florence. But mostly Italian food. Florence, however, has all sorts of food. Our neighborhood, for example, was a decent walk outside of the historic district and full of places selling food that advertised themselves as halal. We tried one of them and it was very good. Also, when we’d walk back from the historic district with Stacey and JR we’d hit a point where several roads came together in a tangled mess that never failed to confuse GoogleMaps. All you had to do was continue straight across, underneath the tower and across the various streets in a more or less straight line to the other side of the intersection a hundred meters away, but the GPS always wanted us to go in several different directions at once. That intersection was the point where Stacey and JR would split off to go to their apartment,and then we’d continue the ten more minutes back to ours. In those ten minutes we would pass six different Peruvian restaurants. We meant to try one, but never quite did. I suppose if we ever go back we will.

So it was not a surprise to find a Chinese restaurant in Florence, in other words.

It is a fact, though, that every ethnic restaurant that exists in a place other than where that ethnic group started has to do at least some translating for the local crowd. This is how you end up with Tex Mex food, for example, or General Tso Chicken in the US. This is also why the menu at our restaurant consistently translated “dumpling” as “ravioli.” You could get “Ravioli di gamberi” for example (shrimp and pork dumplings) or “ravioli alla griglia” (fried dumplings). Every culture on earth has a dish that is basically savory fillings wrapped in dough, and it is interesting to see how people try to bridge that gap.

I had Kung Pao Chicken and I have to say it was very good. So if you find yourself in Florence and craving good Chinese food, I can happily recommend the place.

Right across the street from the restaurant was a gelato place, and that was a must – Kim’s goal for this part of the trip was to have gelato every day, and we did our best.

From there we just sort of ambled our way back to our apartment, past various shops (when did Carhartt become a status brand in Europe?) and eateries. Italian streets are rarely empty until very late at night, and you feel safe walking around after dark in a way that feels less and less common these days here in the US. It was a nice walk back.