Italian Adventure – Barcelona to Tuscany

Here I’ve been gallavanting from Barcelona to Milan over the past three weeks and offered nary a glimpse to my reader friends.  Scusa.  Of course, the longer I go without recapping our Italian adventures the more the little details accumulate.  I see the tall, shiny pile of them and they begin to blur together.  Then I start to worry I can’t do justice to them.  Then I decide to hold off writing for another day.  And then…

Twyla Tharp, in her wonderful new book, The Creative Habit, writes about the problem of beginnings.  You will be hearing more about this book in times to come.  But for now I’m tossing some toothpicks on the cafe table, selecting one at random, and letting it dictate my beginning.

Which happens to be about how we broke the long drive from Moraira to Lucca.  We drove from Moraira to Barcelona, from Barcelona to Marseille, Marseille to Rapallo, Rapallo to Lucca.

Originally, we’d planned to take a ferry from Barcelona to Livorno.  But then we opted to take the slow approach and see what we could along the way.

So, we drove to Barcelona where we planned to spend the night.  We walked around for a few hours and enjoyed a coffee on the Ramblas.  I love the architecture of Barcelona, and the vibe of this city.  We have yet to stay in this city for more than 36 hours, and I think we need to do something about that in the next year.  Mark those words.  You saw them here.  Today.

Marseille, Old Port

Then, Marseille.  It isn’t a beautiful city.  It’s kind of gritty and chaotic yet exotic and confident.  It’s on the Must See Again list.  There’s a youthfulness about it, stylish people, and loads of outdoor cafes in the Vieux Port area.  A good dinner is not hard to find.  We visited the cathedral and baptistry, walked in some of the different neighborhoods, strolled through the market stalls of a less fashionable quarter, sipped wine while the police dealt with some shoplifting youths, lost count of the ambulances roaring up and down the streets.  Over a lovely Lebanese meal we dealt with the bad news that a tree fell on our house in Atlanta.  C’est la vie.

Portofino

Next, Rapallo – a town on the Italian Riviera. En route to Rapallo we drove through Monaco, just cause.  And then held our breath as the autopiste on the French side became the autostrada on the Italian side and many many motorists took full advantage of the fact that there are no speed limits.  While in Rapallo we wandered through the pretty streets, felt a bit shabby in our ho hum clothes next to the well-heeled Italians, bought dog food and a phone charger, and enjoyed a very good dinner at a bistro.   The next day we drove to the neighboring village of Portofino, which is pretty much dripping with money so there was no point in continuing the shabby-style comparison.  It began to rain rather hard, so we bought some foccacia to go, and hit the road for Lucca.

Tuscany

Lucca, book stall

Lucca was my first glimpse of a Tuscan town.  It’s old ramparts are still intact and have become a kind of park encircling the city.   Puccini was born in Lucca, and so the town takes great pride in his association.  That is now. In Puccini’s time they weren’t’ so fond of him.  He was an upstart of none-too-high birth who had a thing going with the wife of a very wealthy man.  She ditched the money bags for the composer.  It’s not clear if their life together was all that rosy once the romance ebbed.  Eventually, they married, but apparently Puccini had a bit of a roving eye and that instigated some spectacular arguments – we’re talking the full orchestra.

At any rate, I’ve kind of fallen in love with Lucca.  There’s a feeling of spaciousness to it, that you don’t always find in old towns.  We spent a couple of afternoons walking around and being tourists.  One evening went to a concert.  It wasn’t a particularly good concert, but we couldn’t be on Puccini’s home turf and turn down a recital showcasing his standards.

Elsewhere in Tuscany…

Pisa, Duomo after the rain.

We spent an afternoon in Pisa, too.  As we were walking into town it began to rain, and the rain shower turned into a rather blustery, uncomfortable rain “event”, the sort where the rain comes in sideways and finds your eyes no matter where you look.  As the storm ran it’s course, we huddled with a hundred other tourists from a multitude of nations under the eaves of the Baptistry which gave a little cover.  It occurred to me, while huddled, that people have been doing that for hundreds of years, seeking shelter from the elements under the eaves of this same building and grateful for what little cover they get out of it but still wishing the storm would hurry the hell up and move on.

By the way, the leaning tower is rather impressive.  But it also seemed kind of short.  It’s like when you meet someone in person who sounded tall on the phone but turns out to be a shortie.

The other memorable moment in Pisa was a traffic incident in which a man got out of his car to yell at another driver for something.  We don’t know what the issue was, because naturally he was screaming in Italian.  Something went down that really got his goat, because he had a good yell in the street, hand gesticulations ablazing. Very fun to watch.  Not so fun for the other driver who seemed very confused by the fuss.

Siena, Il Campo

The day after Pisa we drove to Siena where we stayed overnight.  Maybe it was how the October sun hit the brick buildings, but I was drawn to the town from step one.  We stayed at hotel just outside one of the impressive gates, and didn’t have more than a 10 minute walk into town or 20 minute walk to Il Campo, a wide,  magnificent plaza where everyone congregates.

Yet as much as I enjoyed every minute spent in the city itself and admire its magnificent duomo, what I remember most is lunch, dinner and the colorful laundry hang outside the houses.  We both had pasta for lunch.  Moi:  papardelle with duck.  Tim:  porcini ravioli in a ewe’s cheese sauce.  He’s tried replicating the cheese sauce a couple of times since then, but it’s been tough going.  Personally, I think it might have had a little young balsamic tossed in, but his jury is still out on that one.  For dinner we found a ristorante just off Il Campo, where our dog was made welcome in the main dining room.  The proprietor’s dog, a lovely golden retriever, slept in the bar side of the restaurant.  He had a sly humor about him, the proprietor.  So we enjoyed that as well as the perfectly cooked food on our plates.  Moi:  grilled lamb chops with a potato and fennel mash.  Tim:  Beef stew over rice. Our plates were bare, very nearly licked clean.

As for the laundry, I’m putting together a Flickr album of the laundry scapes we’ve been taking.  File that under “Coming Soon.”

From outside the walls of San Gimignano.

The following day we toodled through the Tuscan countryside,  stopping in San Gimignano and Castellina di Chianti along the way.  The scenery was everything it was touted to be, I’m delighted to report.  Don’t let the lousy lighting on our photo mislead you into thinking I’m waxing on without reason.

Later in the week we spent an afternoon traipsing around Florence and trying to dissuade our dog from barking at buses.  Rufus has developed this thing about buses – he wants to kill them.  Since he can’t get do that, he barks.   And not little barks.  Barks that have scared the bejeezus out of people not expecting such a roar from such a little dog. When he wasn’t barking at buses, Rufus had horses on his mind.  Horses induce this high pitched squeal in Rufus that’s hard to describe.  It’s kind of like he’s dying, and maybe he is in a way because he is absolutely dying to have a go at those horses, startle them into running so he can have a merry chase.  Horses are just big sheep to him.

When we weren’t keeping our dog quiet, we were letting him pose for pictures.  Tourists kept asking if they could take a photo of him.  He was the toast of the Ponte Vecchio.  We think he’s very cute, but dang, the Italian ladies have taken a real shine to him.  And he knows it…the little barking-at-buses-squealing-at-horses bugger.

The point of going into Florence was to get a taste of it, more than try to see any of the big ticket attractions, and to have lunch.  Lunch in Florence, unfortunately, was memorable because it was totally blah.  Shame.

Florence, near the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella

However, they day was not lost.  On our way back to the car we passed the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella.  To the right of that plaza an old-ish man played his violin beneath the awning of the Hotel Universo.  Somehow all the pieces of the day melded into a circular still life in which old is now and now is timeless – the dimming light of an autumn afternoon in an old square, the pretty Renaissance church, the plaza abuzz with students, and the lone man off to the side playing his fiddle for coins.