It's hard to believe that we were in Rome this morning!
We finally found the correct train after wandering around somewhat confused in the Rome Terminal for a while. Eventually a good Samaritan came to our aid and showed us how to find the train to Pisa. Whew!
The trip to Pisa was nice and fairly uneventful and the weather was georgeous. The rout we took followed the western coastline so ever so often we'd have a nice view of the sea. After about 3 hours we finaly reached our first destination of the day, Pisa. We checked our baggage at the train station and made the 30-40 minute walk to the famous leaning tower. It's amazing how much that thing is tilting! Several architechs during several stages of the building process actually tried to correct the problem by angling each new addition, so the end result is a slightly bent, leaning tower.
We ate lunch on our way back to the train station at this quaint little Italian pizzaria/pastaria. Our little waiter didn't speak a stitch of English but was incredibly friendly. We told him that we were "vegetariana" and he said (in Italian) that he could make us a veggie pizza and a veggie pasta dish. So we agreed and he brought us a pizza topped with whole olives, artichoke hearts, eggplant, onions, bell peppers and mushrooms. The pasta dish was similar, but tasted much different. It also came with an apitizer of two different kinds of bruscetta. So this was technically our first REAL (sit down) Italian meal.
Leaving Pisa was quite an adventure too. Again we wandered around the tracks trying to figure out which train was going to our next destination. The small ancient walled-in town of Lucca. We met up with a Scottish lady who said she lived outside of Lucca and was convinced that she knew which train to be on, so after rounding up a bunch of other lost english speaking tourists also going to Lucca, we boarded a train... A few minutes later someone came and told us that we were on the wrong train! The one we needed to be on was several tracks over and hundreds of feet down the trainyard. So we all scrambled as fast as we could to the other train which was gone by the time we got there... So we had to wait another 40 minutes for the next train to arive.
The train ride to Lucca was beautiful. Old castles and anient mansions up on the hillsides, tattered old farm houses, etc.. Even the run-down appartments in the cities have a somewhat picturesque quality about them. :)
Lucca is absolutely enchanting! The first 10 minutes we were inside the city walls, all I could do was grin & snap photos. Lucca is a 2,000 year old city that was never attacked so it has retained much of it's history. Tonight we enjoyed some Italian ice cream (Gilato) on our evening stroll around town. Tomorrow will be our first full day in Lucca.
Italy08vacation
