Inside the Walls

We got an unusually solid night's sleep (after a sparse one on the plane) and woke up at 8:30, ready with a plan. Because we knew that Helen's knee was not a walking knee, we thought we should go out and take a walk before we started the day together. It was the perfect temperature, 11 degrees C, and cloudy. The best for walking. We went out the door, took a right, went a half a block to the underground passageway that goes underneath the roundabout, and came up at a gate that goes through the wall.  The wall itself is really two parallel walls, about 20 feet apart, filled in with dirt. This is one of only a few complete city walls in the world, and this one survived because it was built after most of the era of attacking and plundering was over -- they used the Roman and medieval walls as a starting place and did a renovation and expansion in the 16th century. Nowadays the top of the walls make a public park with a 2 1/2 mile circumference.  Lots of people walk on the path, and bikes weave in and out between the walkers. We walked for a while and then came down into the city and wiggled our way back to the gate. 

Top of wall.

View from wall, on right, into the town.

Sluiceway used for cleaning silk in the old days.

Then we continued on and walked to the house where Helen lives with Martino -- when she got a new knee a while ago she could not possibly climb all the stairs to her beloved apartment, and she needed care. She thought she would be back soon but her knee recuperation has been frustrating and slow, completely different from mine. 

Anyway, we saw the house that is like a museum -- Martino's predecessors were artists and the walls are covered with paintings. There are furnishings that have had meaning to their family for generations.  It's not spooky but it's not cozy either. 

Old sturdy furniture and grandfather's paintings.

Lots more sturdy furniture and family paintings. Note settee on left from Hana and Helen's grandparent's house in Virginia.

Helen's space in Martino's house.

We walked back to the apartment and had breakfast and a shower and then it was time to go back inside the walls for lunch. We met Helen and went to a restaurant that was next to many other restaurants, inside the walls of a long ago Roman amphitheater. Everything is repurposed and built around and reconfigured in Lucca. Every view in every direction is postcard-worthy because it is so ancient and the streets are narrow and the buildings crowd out the sky, even though they are probably only four stories high at the most.  After a leisurely lunch, we wandered across the courtyard to a gelato place and had delicious, ample servings of gelato. 

Alley in Lucca. Note picture over doorway. 

Martino picked us up at the gate (parking is impossible) and took us to Sarah's school -- about 3 years ago she started a school with a friend, teaching English and Italian. It has taken her every waking hour and she has a real business now, but she is discovering that she doesn't actually like the work of running a business. But she is in it for now, and she wishes she had one more classroom because that would make it all much more cost-effective. It is super impressive that this young person (I think she is 31) decided to do this really hard thing and she rented space and did the necessary permit work and hired people and found students. Her mother and I agreed that we would never have attempted such a thing.

Then it was time for a nap so we went back to our respective homes. I was so glad to find a napping couch.  

At 5:00 it seemed like we should go out for one more excursion so off we went, back to the city.  We ended up searching for the tower that we had climbed in 2013, only we couldn't quite remember where it was or what it looked like. We vaguely remembered the story that Helen had told us (it was a tower that was built to be a house and then it had a time when someone laid seige to it). After much wandering through streets, and realizing that it was impossible to navigate by looking up because the buildings were all too close, we finally did find the tower. By then my feet were very sore and Jon's back was tired. The other mission of the expedition was to fill Helen's glass bottles with water from the fountain, so Jon had been carrying this rack of bottles with him the whole time. We filled the bottles and straggled home by about 7:00.

Much better view of tower, as created by Helen. Plus you get Hana.

Water from house tap is fine, except for drinking. Many people get mineral water from the mountains through the public foutains.

Helen was cooking a multi-course meal in her kitchen: bruschetta with butternut squash pesto, a risotto with peas and asparagus, braised rabbit and roasted potatoes, ending with a big pan of tiramisu. We had a civilized family dinner with Martino, Sarah and her boyfriend Philippo. Martino speaks no English and Jon and I speak no Italian but the others slipped back and forth between the languages, barely noticing when they were switching, translating for us. Sarah spent a month on the farm five years ago so she knows a lot about our world and her boyfriend is a gardener for a fancy restaurant. Most of the chatter was about family and the upcoming reunion. We will see the Italians in Boston in less than two weeks.

That was a lot of walking on cobblestones. We are not really conditioned for that yet but we will learn our limits. It's just that we only had one full day in this picturesque place and we didn't want to squander it. We never saw Dustin Hoffman anywhere. He must have been taking Sunday off.