We got to our "Guesthouse" room on Saturday afternoon and decided to change our plans and only stay in Lucca for four nights and then go to Florence. The room was up one flight of stairs, fairly basic and old but clean, and we had access to a shared kitchen.
We then settled in to three days of taking it easy and just enjoying the ambience. Lucca is a city of about 81,000 people but the heart of the town is the old walled city. The town has maintained the wall and the old town within and this is where we stayed.
It is a truly beautiful place but definitely a "tourist town". As the wall is an old fortification, it is very wide on top and the locals and the tourists alike use it to walk, cycle, run, walk the dog, roller-blade and simply stroll on a Sunday afternoon around the city. It is also Puccini's home town and this is reflected in some of the statues, street names and tourist souvenirs.
On Monday we took the train to Pisa (a 30 minute trip) and spent four or five hours walking around Pisa and going to see the leaning tower. As the Lonely Planet says, nothing can prepare you for the reality of the lean of the tower - it certainly does lean. The authorities have been working on ensuring that it does not lean so far that it falls over, and apparently their efforts have been successful. The interesting point is that they could probably fix it so that it doesn't lean but then no-one would come to see it and the town would not get so many tourist dollars!! 
One thing is becoming increasingly clear, Italy's economy would crash without all of this tourism - a point that a number of the locals do not seem to be aware of (!).
My main question on the Leaning Tower is why do so many people have their photo taken with their hands up as if they are stopping it from falling over? Who said this was a funny, memorable, amusing or whatever thing to do? 
We took the train back to Lucca and spent the rest of the time on housekeeping matters such as the laundry and getting a haircut. The restaurants recommended by the Lonely Planet are very hard to get into so we booked one for our last night in Lucca. We had an excellent meal followed by a stroll along part of the wall, after which we had a very tasty gelato. A very pleasant last night in Lucca.
2 comments:
Great to see your Italian photos! Only one problem: the tower on the right has a bit of a lean. Try adjusting your camera. Cheers - Andrew
No way! I paid a lot of money for this camera - I think the Italians should fix their building. And while they're at it I think they could clean up their country; there's a lot of buildings that are in ruins that no-one seems to want to fix up.
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