Beautiful Toscana (Pisa and Lucca the first night)
Firstly a small apology for being a little tardy with this update!
Last weekend James had a long weekend at work, it was the celebration of San Giovanni di Baptisti (John the Baptist) who is the patron saint of Genova, so it was a great opportunity for us to have a trip away. After much contemplation we decided to go to Toscana (Tuscany). We read the guidebooks and decided that a small town named Lucca sounded great. First founded by the Etruscans, later a Roman colony (circa 180 BC), under the rule of Pisa, later ruled by Napoleon, then given to his sister as a gift, sounded great! We hired a car and drove down. Lucca is slightly northeast of Pisa, so how could we pass up the opportunity to see the leaning tower so we drove to Lucca via Pisa.
As we drove out of Genova we saw what looked like large Roman viaducts on the outskirts of the city, very cool!! The Ligurian landscape slowly gave way to the flatter landscape of Toscana, and forests gave way to fields as we passed through a series of tunnels and bridges on our way along the autostrade. The autostrade in Italia is no different to that in any other European country I’ve been to, with cars ignoring speed limits and flying past at about 160 kph. Use of indicators is also solely reserved for tourists!
Pisa was remarkably close, we were in Aussie distance mode when we chose our destination and didn’t realise it was only about 155 kms from Genova, but the relatively short trip gave us more time to explore. Not having a proper map of Pisa we guessed our way to the centre of town. Initial impressions were that Pisa (and Toscana in general) has more money as a region than Liguria with more shopping as we’re used to it, differently dressed people and I guess a slightly greater western influence on bars etc.
It didn’t take us long to find the leaning tower. We simply followed the other people who looked somewhat touristy, and the line of tacky souvenir stores that increased in number as we got closer and closer. We entered that square that the tower is found in from the non-conventional end so were first met with a view of a very large cathedral that, like the tower is also leaning, only not as badly. There are three buildings in the square, the tower, a cathedral and a smaller church all of which lean and are perhaps the world’s largest engineering/architectural stuff-ups famous simply for sinking in to the ground. Having said this though, the buildings are all quite beautiful in their own right, and are definitely worth the half day visit 
The number of tourists in Pisa was crazy, and this isn’t quite yet high season! We decided to forgo the 16 euro fee (~$30 each) to climb the tower and enter the churches in favour of tacky yet mandatory photos of me holding up the tower, and gelato! 
We then stated on our way to Lucca. We thought this would take about an hour or more, more like 20-30mins! I have to say that I think I took the definitive Tuscan shot from the moving car as we drove along (I rock!) hehehehe.
Lucca is a very cool town in that it is completely surrounded by a city wall that was once the city’s defence barrier. Of course the walls increased in perimeter with time to encompass the growing city, but remnants of moats still exist. The walls themselves are very wide and you can even drive a car comfortably around them (although I think this is solely reserved for tourist busses), alas, Lucca now caters predominantly to tourists and was not the cute village we were after. Thankfully though, it caters predominantly to Italian tourists so that makes it better!
We happily found a very cool bar in Lucca on our first night so had aperitifs in place of dinner. It was a very cool bar you could imagine it on Brunswick Street, only that it did the Italian thing of serving food with drinks. People spilled out on to the street with their drinks, bikes that they’d come on leaning on the walls of old buildings. After a few drinks we kept walking about and somehow stumbled upon a huge free pop concert of an Italian ballad singer named “Anna”. It was like Jessica Simpson meets Jewel, very weird! We didn’t stay too long as the music wasn’t really doing it for us. As we approached our B&B we came across another square (what we later found out used to be an amphitheatre founded in ~200 AD). Here we were “treated” to the oddest show. Firstly there was a girl doing what looked like aerobics-meets-pilates in a boxing ring, followed by the arrival of 5 people in a hummer and a limo who gave us a very slow-mo demonstration of Aikido, followed by kick-boxing! Weird, but a very fun night!
I’ll write more in a second post as I think this is getting a little long…
VJ xo