taxi bus donkey

November days in northern Italy are normally punctuated by rain, not a dark depressing or torrential kind of rain, but a steady drizzle broken up by moments of clear skies and crisp air. As November moved into December the days grew noticeably shorter and the temperature of the night air often dropped suddenly. I hadn’t yet experienced a real winter and the little glimpses i got of one during my travels in Europe during 2003 made me realise how hopeless an Australian male with a backpack full of summer clothes was when faced with the brutality of nature’s not so motherly ways.

On this late November night, returning home from yet another evening in one of the local small town watering holes the rain fell more heavily than what I had now been led to believe was normal for this time of year. Tonight like most nights over the last 10 days or so I was walking Mieke back to her apartment, we were drinking beer, smoking unreasonable numbers of cigarettes and no doubt amusing ourselves with the habits of the locals. (more…)

Friday July 4th early am, managed to sneak in a little breaky courtesy of the Le Torre family, receive a firm hand shake from Alfredo and administer a promise to return.

The trip to Pisa Aeroporto wasnt very eventful, chatted with an Alitalia pilot whilst in the check in queue at the airport, they have to queue up with the rest of the plebs if they arent actially flying a plane, something which he wasnt over the moon about, whinged about cuts in salary and benefits.. all this adding to the general “i’m about to go into an airplane” anxiety. (more…)

Feeling at leat a little better and with the “you are in Italy” meter ticking ever louder I decided to indulge in that great tourist with a plan activity “the day trip”. (more…)

On Monday I sorted out my travel plans to Greece, flying direct from Milan to Salonica was the best option but due to something which nobody was able to adequately explain to me, tickets for this journey were approximately 560 euro one way. A visit to the travel agent and some explanation of the nuances of the way that airline ticketing works in this country meant than i walked out with tickets from Pisa to Rome and Rome to Athens at about 200 euro, these were return tickets, but i was not going to return,.. the one way tickets cost twice as much as the return tickets (that makes sense) and some poor sod would miss out on a flight from Athens to rome because they had allocated a seat for my ass even though I would be several hundred kilometres away in a village. (more…)

Alfredo sits in one of the narrow laneways that extend from his humble hotel, he sleeps in a deckchair, his beer gradually gets warmer, his grey chest hair billows forth from the area which would normally be covered by a shirt.

Alfredo is a wise man, modern wise, not Michelangelo wise. Knowing that family is a good source of free and reasonably reliable, but more importantly free labour played his part in the production of child. His son, now approximately 30 years old… maybe more.. maybe less, is regularly seen around Lucca steering one of the various forms of hotel “Le Torre” branded means of transportation betwixt the various areas of lodging they manage. (more…)

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. (more…)

It was still rather early in the evening so we took the opportunity to walk Lucca’s streets and attempt to achieve the “are we lost yet” heights of touristic utopia.

It was a postcard tour of about 2 hours duration, the amfiteatro, piazza napoleone, churches, puccini’s birthplace and even stumbling across the (its actually pretty big) aquaduct that supplies most of the town’s drinking water, and it seems most of the town’s empty beer bottles and other general refuse…. yeah but at least it was clean garbage, god bless italy.

We returned to trattoria gigi for another round of great food and bevvy, this time accompanied by good and varied conversation. (more…)

More positive tourist Karma at work with my fortunate choice of lodgings at Le Torre deep in da heart of Lucca. The owner Alfredo and his loveleeee wife are absolute characters. He spends most of the day sitting around Piazza del Carmine talking to the other locals, making smalltalk with the tenants that he likes all the while sporting a rather well worn pair of black trousers, the government issue dark brown sandals and a shirt (please note the use of the singular) which he, like a skilled catwalk model or experienced seamstress, transforms into various “looks”When in idle mode (this is his default mode), the shirt would be draped over the back of his chair or similarly draped over one or occasionally two shoulders. In the one full afternoon I spent with him, testing my Italian as we watched the shadows lengthen across the piazza his establishment (more…)

Lucca didn’t need fireworks, men on horseback or architectural feats to grab my attention, Why people stay in Florence when Lucca is only 90 mins further up the train line I dont know… why anybody would dream of staying in Pisa when lucca is only 20 mins up the train line is something that will baffle me for quite some time, but it is to my gain so why worry. (more…)

Having promised myself to return to Florence and try and find some love for the town the whole world bar me seemed to worship was… unsuccesful. I did my best, s

I tayed in a better hotel, went to the sights and wandered the streets, but there was so much I didn’t like about this town. There were several things i did like. Most of these moments happened when i walked to the outskirts of the town centre to areas like Santo Croce where the Calcio Istorico was played, here again the crowds were incredibly passionate thugs but you felt you were in the midst of something unique. The game itself is more brute force than brutality, not openly violent but men did whatever they could to stop the guy with the ball from getting to where he wanted to go, there werent too many moments of random violence… there were plenty in the crowd mind you, and a lot of them between the “women” i enjoyed a half of a game and headed off to listen to the cheers from the steps of the santa croce church whos piazza had been invaded by the game and its supporters. (more…)