Friday, 15 November 2013

Lucca

Halfway between Pisa and Florence, there's a cute little day-tripper town called Lucca.

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It's famously surrounded by huge Renaissance-era walls, which was turned into a public promenade.  You can rent a bike right outside the train station and bike along the walls for an afternoon, and they've done a really nice job turning it into parkland.

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The town itself is quaint, and as luck might have it, it was not as overrun by tourist as expected.  The weather was fantastic- autumn in Tuscany is really one of the most magic things in life- and the gelato was sustaining in the warm afternoon pre-wine time.

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Uniquely, the Roman amphitheater here had been transformed into the town's main square, the Piazza dell'anfiteatro, and you had a huge, sunny elliptical-shaped space surrounded by sun-baked facades and cheerful cafes.

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"Cafe", in this case, being code for, "yes, we serve wine."

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We were a bit harried as we had planned on being in Lucca much earlier than we actually arrived (Thanks Italiarail!), and we had people to meet in Florence, but it's a great place to see.  It seemed like it was one of the few places in Italy that wasn't built on a mountaintop or steep hillsides, so you see a lot more bicyclist here than other cites.

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