14 Ottobre 14

Lucca

Cabin fever. Four days stuck inside watching rain ruin lives.  Day four, though, the rain stopped. The streets are drying out, the muck regressing towards dirt. Surely now we may resume our lives?

Nope. That night, we received word from the Comune (pronounced Coh-moo-neh)—which must be like the Mayor’s office or something: All schools in Genova will remain closed yet another day.

I danced a jig and called for more wine when I heard the news. Still…I needed to get out of this apartment, so I checked the weather in Lucca, a medieval-ish city in Tuscany that I’d heard good things about, a place I’ve been trying to get to for a few weekends now. The weather was perfetto.

The next morning I caught the 9:00 train—with ease I might add. No, not because I’m getting the hang of it, but rather because the train was 50 minutes late. This it turns out, would be a theme of the day. Right now though I wasn’t sweating anything. While I waited for my train to depart I phoned a friend, all gung-ho for my day trip adventure. She was bored too, maybe she’d be up to come along?

“No,” she said, flat and authoritative.

I paused, trying to read into this. I couldn’t. “No? Why not?”

“Well it’s supposed to rain again tonight. What if you can’t get back?”

I paused again. I hadn’t even considered this.

“I hadn’t considered that,” I said.

“Well you should.”

“Why?”

“These things happen.”

I waited for her to go on, to explain. She didn’t. Her words hung there like a Wile E. Coyote puff of smoke after he went over the cliff.

I hung up, refusing to take her advice. Today I was undaunted. I’ll get back. No worries.

Boots on the Lucca ground at 12:27. The train station is outside the old center’s walls, but not by much. A five-minute walk down past a fountain and you are faced with a wide grassy expanse, maybe the length of a football field, leading dead into a red brick wall thirty feet tall. **

The walls were what I’d come to see, believe it or not. Lucca still has its medieval walls fully intact, a rarity nowadays, and if you’re in to history as I am its worth a look-see. Today, Lucca sits like a veritable time capsule, flux capacitor Delorean time machine to the 1200s. Forget Medieval Times, Dinner and Tournament! This here is the real deal!

But I digress. Let’s talk about these walls. The oldest section is over a thousand years old, built to protect the village of Lucca from the marauding escapades of the neighboring clans and villages from those dirty Pisaians or the marauding Firenze! The first ring was built in 200 AD, and subsequent additions and rings were made to accommodate village growth, one in the 1200s, another in the 1400s. Damn old, and damn daunting too. I mean, they aren’t keeping anybody out now, but still, they could. They did. And if you’re a daydreamer, worrying about about those damn sheep stealers from the south, well, you can picture it.

They aren’t the walls one normally thinks of when one thinks of walls. Or at least they weren’t the type of walls I think about. I think of little guys, thin little ribbons of grey rock two or three feet thick, maybe with some crenellations, maybe looking like the top of the White Castle logo. Or maybe I think of the Great Wall of China, a little thicker than my first thought, you know, wide enough to maybe fit a pair of horses atop it.

Not these walls. These puppies were wide. Wide as they were tall. You could double-park a pair of semi trucks up on top of these, maybe three or four oxen-pulled carts to boot, maybe a bevy of troops all clustered in their armor and mail. Of course today the walls don’t need to accommodate troops to defend the city so it is used as a lovely little park and passeggiata topped crowned with chestnut trees, arching across a decomposed limestone path to mingle branches some thirty or forty feet above. Today the passaggiata is filled with walkers, talkers, runners, and tourists.

Actually, come to think of it, this hasn’t much changed. Apparently, although erected for defense purposes in those old days, the nobles mostly ignored the soldiers warnings and used to use the walls for their afternoon strolls, heedless of marauders. Silly nobles.

Anyway, what do these walls signify, now? Time machine baby. In Lucca, you can almost taste life in medieval Italy. Traffic is almost nonexistent, the narrow cobbled lanes impassible to even the most narrow of vehicles. People in this historic center commute by bicycle or by foot, passing under, between and along cream-colored stucco building as old as some of the walls. Occasionally as I pass along these ancient byways, I glimpse above an old red-brick ribbon reaching for the sky, remnants of a day when Lucca nobility measured their wealth by the height of their…ahem…family tower. At one point the city had around 130 of these, but the passage of time and the spending of that wealth has withered the landscape to a mere handful.

I had come there to taste too. The food in Lucca may be the best in Tuscany today. I had a ricotta spinach ravioli in a rich salsa di noci, a decadent sauce made of cream and walnuts—unthinkable to me prior to visiting. I had a wild boar stew on a bed of mascarpone polenta, espresso with a loaf of bread hoarded by locals called Bucellato flavored notably with anise. I tasted some of the best gelato I’ve had yet, a dark chocolate that was better than life.

And beer. One day soon I will cobble a specific post dedicated to beer, wherein I will mention how previous to visiting Italy I thought there were only two Italian beers, Peroni and Birra Moretti, wherein I will illuminate readers about the intricacies of ordering a beer in Italy, about sizing, about Italian thoughts on beer, wherein I will wax poetical about the myriad of delicious crafty beers that I have found here. One day. Today though, I will suffice it to say that Italy is more than wine, aperitifs and digestifs. Several local breweries have done some excellent work around Lucca and I did my best sampling as many as I could. You know…hiccup…for research. Fear not brave Americans, the beer is delicious here.

This was my day. This was a day trip from Genova. The skies were blue, the air was clean, not smelling of muck and shit and must. Everything was right again in the world. I walked the walls, lingered at the entrance of the Museum of Torture, ate delicious things, drinking in the views and the beer and a glimpse of medieval life. I had a thoroughly decent time, but as the buzz wore off I realized that time was getting on and that my train was leaving shortly.

Or not.

Sitting on the platform, ready to catch the last train out to Viareggio so I could make the last connecting train to Genova, I heard the dreaded word at the end of a crackled PA, sorpesso.

Surprise. Translated literally it means surprise, and I couldn’t think of a better way to tell the passengers the bad news: Cancelled.

What?

Yes. Cancelled. Surprise!!!!!!!

Immediately I heard my friends words ring through my vacant skull, What if you can’t get back?

Damn. School would definitely be on tomorrow and it is 7:25 in the PM and I am about to be stuck in Lucca. My paradise had turned prison in an instant. The walls were closing in.

I took my ticket to the ticket counter where a smiling, frizzy-haired woman about six and a half feet tall took it for examination. I explained my situation in broken Italian, as best I could. Then I asked for suggestions. How do I get to Genova ASAP?

“Maybe don’t worry? Go back tomorrow?”

“No. Not an option.”

“Un momento,” she said picking up a phone.

Ten moments later she was still on the phone, laughing and chatting with the person on the other end. She had set my tickets aside and was twirling her curly hair idly between two fingers now. I half expected her kick her shoes off and put her feet up. Was she even working on my problem? The clock was ticking here…

“Scusate—”

“Un momento,” she repeated, a little frown flashing across her face. I’m talking here…

Meanwhile, I checked the timetables. Pisa was the only major destination nearby and there was a train leaving in fifteen minutes. Was there a fast train leaving out of Pisa to Genova? I checked. Yes, yes there was. Okay. If I could get to Pisa then I could get to Genova.

“Scusate,” I stuttered, cutting the woman’s laugh short.

Her frown flashed to a glare. “Signore,” she began. But this time I cut her off.

“No. Un momento. Ho un idee. Ho bisogno andare Genova stasera, e… I don’t care how I get there,” I cleared my throat.

This is how most of my conversations go. I start strong, but then lose sight of a verb or a conjugation and finish the statement in English. I paused to try to pick up the pieces. “Comè Pisa, poi Genova?”

Her eyebrows went up. She looked at the screen at the departing train for Pisa. She then told the person on the telephone ‘un momento’.

Hope blossomed in my chest, a fluttering of a moth moving towards light.

After a long pause and some consulting with her mysterious friend on the phone she smiled and nodded. It was going to work. She proceeded to make another series of phone calls, after which she started writing on my old tickets, in a battered blue ball point. Nuovo…biglietto a Pisa…causa sorpressa e Pisa a Genova Brignole…She then stamped and signed both tickets.

Seriously? She wasn’t going to re-issue tickets, my American brain asked. No way this is legitimate. I’ll be thrown off the train, cast into the dark, or fined, or something else.

She passed the tickets under the class partition. Smiling. She was proud of her solution.

“Sono questi suficienti?” I asked. Here now was a good English/Italian cognate: sufficient.

“Si, certo,” she began, rattling off a stream of Italian. From the gist it sounded like she had called the capotreno (train boss) of both trains and asked if it were possible for me to ride with them instead of my other itinerary. They said yes, so here I go.

I glanced up at the clock. The train to Pisa would arrive in 2 minutes. Insert audible sigh of relief here. Thank god. I would make it home after all. The walls of Lucca would not hold me overnight, but they did capture my imagination for the day. If you are ever in the neighborhood, by all means go.

**Damn. I almost wrote ‘10 meters’ right there instead of ‘thirty feet’. And instead of a football field in the sentence before, I deleted 100 meters. That was of course, before I considered my readers. This metric system is infiltrating my American sensibilities. Or insensibilities.