Thursday 10th May - We have spent a fantastic day in the walled city of Lucca, the birthplace of Puccini. Totally different from Pisa with only a few tourists Lucca is more of a commercial centre with a lot of banks, some lovely shops and most important the biggest selection of street side restaurants we have come across so far. Mixing and having lunch with the office workers during their 2 hour lunch break was totally relaxing and one would imagine gives you a totally different approach to your daily workload. Nothing seems rushed and everyone appears so happy, what would happen if we ever went for this approach in the UK!.
Once inside the walls of the city, where most traffic is banned (and the streets are too narrow anyway) the preferred mode of transport is the pedal cycle. They didn't have one that Bradley could ride properly so we elected to go on foot and spent nearly 6 hours seeing all the wonderful sights of this medieval city. The shops sold everything from fashion to the famous local olive oil. Lorraine found the only jewellers shop (typical!) and found a lovely local silver Tuscan piece for her Pandora bracelet, so thats the wedding anniversary present sorted for the 20th. We had afternoon coffee at one of the many pasticceria cafés sampling some of the locally made delicacies. Buccellato is a lovely fruit loaf with a hint of aniseed, so many different flavours and then the most wonderful Biscotti. Both can be dunked in coffee for an even more yum yum taste and it certainly beats any Hobnob you have ever tried!.
We really didn't want to step outside the walls of this peaceful place back to the traffic bedlum as the sun was lowering in the sky we could see that this was a fantastic place to be in the evenings. Having put Piccolo into 'Ferrari' mode we safely raced our way out of the city rush hour traffic back to the campsite. Tomorrow we are going to relax as the temperature is forecast to be touching 30c !.
Caio.
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