The flu whose seed I had sown in the storms of Bologna, the aching left foot I had souveniered after a week of 10km a day walks through Venice, the stabbing back I had twisted out shape in the air conditioned mirage of a hotel room in Firenze, and a sore throat aggravated by a night’s talking and laughing with friends in Lucca have joined forces and clouded my ability to experience.

My will to travel and experience was still strong, but the need to rest reflect and capture wayward thoughts was now speaking louder to compensate for its relative lack of importance.

Sunday morning in Lucca began with a throat so sore that I only dared swallow when the phlegm had collected so badly that my throat had completely closed. This was accompanied by a dry cough that seemed to come from nowhere, last for several minutes at a time and leave me quite near passing out. In those wee small hours of Sunday morning two things were decided. Firstly I had to seek the attention of some form of trained medical professionals and secondly, once I had attained this advice and hopefully some relief, I needed to make plans to head to Greece and the sanctuary of my grandmother’s home in the family village in Kastoria.

The first part of this quest was accomplished after 30-45 minutes study of my inadequate but transportable dictionary in order to get my head around several ways of describing aches and pains. The farmacia provided me with a spray for the throat and a syrup for the cough. In the pharmacy’s doorway I seriously overdosed on whatever active ingredients these products contained and rather rapidly found myself able to function with some form of normality. Sure i couldnt eat anything that had corners and didnt risk anything not at room temperature, but I felt human.

I returned to Le Torre allowing the sympathetic words of the signora to further heal me and ended up not surprisingly back in bed my medicated state now making sleep a possibility.

The supermarket below my window was open for business, the rhythmic beep beep of products being passed over the scanner lulled me to sleep, a soothing postmodern lullaby of commerce, progress, globalisation, macroeconomics. The beeps burst out of the doors of the super, bounced off the walls of the old markets a few metres away. The entrances of the two halls of trade; ancient and modern, faced each other in an arrogant “time will tell” way, the arrogance of the young against the “I’ve seen it before slowness” of the old.

The barcode symphony was the first recognisable sound I heard when I awoke at about 10 am. Dry cough and sore throat still my bedfellows but neither as crippling as earlier that day. I got up shook the sleep from my eyes with a quick shower and joined the Rizutti at the local segafredo, i even think i managed to down an espresso or three.

We squeezed in another tour of the centre of Lucca with the Rizzuti, the craft markets were in full swing and contained some interesting trinkets but none that forced me to loosen the purse strings.

We returned to the Rizzuto family fun vehicle which they had pacled, ready and waiting to transport them onto the next destination. “Beach!!” the women folk cried, “whatever” the men folk replied, and west they rode, albeit a little too early in the day to allow me to say into the sunset.

Thanks Rizzuti, may the sun never set on the Ligurian Sea of your collective happiness.

As I watched my friends disappear into her streets, I, wooed by Lucca’s ample charms had come to terms with the fact that this would be my last stop in the first leg of this fantastic journey.