Lucca is a pretty awesome little city just northeast of Pisa. The main part of the city is completely surrounded by a big, broad wall (that they've now turned into a park which is awesome for biking and walking), and at some point in Roman history, the town was some kind of cultural center of Rome. Or it was important. Okay, I wasn't really paying attention to the history, I was too busy biking. You can read the wikipedia page if you want, but I'm too lazy.
I took the train from Rome to Lucca (changeover in Florence) on Sunday (4/12), and then had to grab a taxi at the station to the much smaller town I was staying in about 12 kilometres away. At this point, I had been devouring my little French-to-Italian phrasebook in an attempt to seem less like an Amercian jerk, and I (sort of) told the driver where I was going in Italian. The great thing about Italians (outside of Rome) is that if you speak even a little bit of their language, even really badly, something clicks in their head and they're like, Oh! This person speaks Italian just as well as I do! and then they just launch right into it. Whatever it may be.
So my cab driver launches into this explanation of how much it's going to cost, and I understand enough to get that this is what she's talking about, and that she comes up with "Maximum 20," and so I agree and get in. When she's driving me there someone calls on her cell phone and in the midst of asking this person if they know exactly where in Santa Maria del Giudice she might find Marta guest house (where I'm staying), I also understood her saying that I "understood her" because I "spoke Spanish." Sure! I did take some Spanish in high school.
I ended up booking at Marta Guest House by chance, because the only hostel in Lucca proper was listed online as booked out (though I later found this to be untrue). In any case, it was a magical and fortuitous find. Marta, yes Marta herself, runs the show, and she is the image of hospitality and kindness. She welcomed me in and personally showed me up to and around my (amazing!) room.
With a balcony!
Marta was very worried that there wasn't a shower in the room, even though I had booked a room without a private bathroom and it surprisingly came with a sink and toilet. In true Marta style, she offered me the use of her own shower (she lives downstairs), and gave me some fancy orchid shower gel. She then made me coffee, and I sat down and had a great little chat (mostly in English) with her and a friend of hers (Rosarita, I think?). It was wonderful. Marta called all the restaurants in (the very small) town to find out who would still be open for dinner on Easter Day, and I had a delicious pesto and calamari pizza that evening.
In the morning, Marta served up a homemade, four-course breakfast, including some delicious ricotta chocolate cake. I had asked her if there were any buses running into Lucca, and after she called only to find out that they weren't running until the afternoon she said, "Anneh (she adorably pronounced the e at the end of my name), my friend will take you into town." So, true to her word, her friend (a middle-aged man who spoke no English) saved me a 20-euro taxi ride and drove me into town. And thank god I had been such a dork about reading my phrasebook and writing down new things I had learned to say, because that man wanted to have a conversation; and have a conversation we did. He told me about how he was too old to learn English, about his honeymoon in Spain, and we talked about how traveling in April was ideal (my contribution). He also asked me lots of questions about myself that I was only able to answer in broken sentences, but he was happy to fill in the blanks for me.
Lucca itself is a pretty little town. The hostel I stayed in was huge and clean and more like a hotel in feel, except for the fact that there were 6 of us in the room. I hired a bike at 2.50€ an hour and rode around the wall.
I had clearly rented the cheapest bike available (I didn't pay the extra euro or two for a mountain bike or a road bike) because you could hear and see me coming without any kind of bell (though I had one). The thing was neon green and rattled to the point that I actually stopped to make sure nothing was falling off.
I spent a day and a half in Lucca and that was plenty. There aren't many cars that go inside the walls, so the streets are mostly full of bikers and pedestrians. It's a cool place to walk around, and there are some important churches and towers that I admired, but didn't bother to learn anything about. Mostly I ate more gelato, did some laundry, and had a Bloody Mary (with limoncello!) when I wasn't just wandering the streets.
On Tuesday, I went to the train station to buy my ticket and head to Pisa, and my French bank card was eaten by one of the ticket machines. The women working at the train station were completely unhelpful saying they didn't have a key and I would have to call the machine company. After much arguing (in bad Italian by me, bad English by her), one woman finally found me the number, but refused to make the call, herself.
By this time, I was already embarrassing myself by crying in public, and someone else had told me I should go to the police station to report the card lost. This didn't really make sense, but thankfully while looking for the station I stumbled upon the office of tourism, and the nicest man ever who worked there made multiple calls to the machine company for me, finally relaying the message that they're based out of Florence and they couldn't come until tomorrow or the next day at the earliest, but that they needed the train station to call and report the problem. He tried to call the train station, but no one was answering, so I walked back to try to tell them they needed to report the incident, but the women again refused and said the man at the office of tourism didn't know what he was talking about (even though he had talked to someone at the company). Long story short (sorry, I already told the long story), I had to cancel my card and borrow money from my dad until I got back to Flers and received my new one.
Conclusion: Lucca is beautiful, but Santa Maria del Giudice is even more so. If you're in Tuscany, stay with Marta, rent a car and take day trips around the area. Don't put your card in the ticket machines in Lucca, and people in the service industry are grumpy, no matter what country you're in.
So what did you end up doing in Florence?
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