Lucca by night

We drove up into the hills just above Lucca last night to a little Trattoria which was recommended by the guy that runs our B and B. It turns out that Monday and Tuesday nights are the quiet ones in Italy, and most of the places we wanted to visit were sadly closed. This one, he assured us, was always open! 

It’s quite scary travelling along the winding country lanes at night time, knowing there are deathly drops around every hairpin bend. Wildlife is also somewhat unpredictable in those parts, which is something we experienced when a deer rushed out in front of us, narrowly avoiding becoming road kill under our hire car wheels!

The Trattoria was very charming and very much a place frequented by locals. It’s commonplace for large groups of men to eat together in these parts. The Italians don’t have the same binge-drinking mentality as Brits, and, in fact, they don’t seem to drink without eating, so guys come out of work, head to the local Trattoria, sit in a back room around a giant table, drinking cheap plonk whilst eating plate-loads of food.

The restaurant is situated on a little bend in the road, by a fast-running stream, next to the crumbling arches of an ancient viaduct. The whole corner is invitingly lit-up like a Hopper painting. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the cured hams dangling from the roof, or the pig carcass stretched over the bar, but the food was fabulously rustic and they didn’t seem at all freaked out by my being vegetarian. I had a very hearty minestrone soup followed by a mushroom pasta dish and loved every mouthful to the extent that I used a piece of bread to mop up every last drop. No one in Italy makes a big deal about produce being locally sourced. Everything which is served is locally sourced. If you live by the sea, your local restaurants will be full of fish. If you live in the mountains, they’ll be more meat-heavy. No one really bothers to cook with ingredients which they can’t get on their doorstep. That’s just how things are. If you want honey, wine, olive oil, vinegar, cured ham, tomatoes, mushrooms, truffles, bread, lemons, even chocolate, you’ll be given the stuff which the locals grow or make. It’s just really honest like that. No one needs the gimmick of writing “farm fresh Cornish free range sausages served on a rustic bed of Northamptonshire cottage loaf.”

I was somewhat amused to note that the house plonk was served on tap, like beer in a British pub.

After dinner, we drove down the hill into a freezing cold Lucca to stroll around the icy streets and soak in the atmosphere of the place after dark on a cloudless full-mooned night. Perhaps it’s different in summer or at the weekend, but the place was eerily empty. We encountered the odd couple, wandering back to their hotels, enjoying the elegant Christmas lights twinkling blue and white over the pavements and the charmingly tacky seasonal displays in all of the shop windows. My favourite window featured disco lights dancing on the surface of a load of ceramic pots and vases! The juxtaposition was delicious! 

We discovered what appeared to be the only bar open within the city centre and I had a cup of tea... “con latte fredda.” You have to be so specific here about asking for cold milk, or you’re given a weird, sweet, hot, foamy nonsense, which tastes utterly rank with tea. There’s always a great deal of eyebrow raising to endure, which only stops when you announce that you’re English, and (in their eyes) eccentric to the extent that all bets are off.

On Monday Tammy told me about the Torre Guinigi, a tower in Lucca with an oak tree on its roof, which I’d somehow managed to miss on our visit at the weekend. It sounded too good to miss, so I found it on a map and we went for a gander. Obviously it was way too late to actually climb up there. I have a vague memory of possibly going up there twenty years ago when I last visited the city, but if I did, no clear pictures of it have lodged themselves in my mind.

It’s certainly rather impressive from below. The streets in Lucca are so narrow, and the houses, in the main, are so high, that you don’t really see it until you’re right underneath. It’s one of those medieval skyscrapers which the Tuscans built with great alacrity, and, at 44.5 metres tall, the fact that there’s a tree on the top seems all the more remarkable! Heaven knows how it manages to grow up there and whether its appearance was by design or the result of some kind of freak natural occurrence.

They light it very well. From below, it takes on the appearance of a tall, thin corn dolly with hair made of cress!

This morning was our last in Tuscany. Michael is actually rather interested in buying a property out here, so we went to a couple of viewings, both of which were rather stunning. It’s such a treat to be able to visit houses which are both beautiful and affordable. Even I could probably get a mortgage for the properties we were looking at. Both had large rooms, two bedrooms, and outdoor terrace space. One was built in the 1960s and was full of original features, which, ten years ago, I might have turned my nose up at, but now I think they’re deeply stylish. The other, which was too much of project, I suspect, actually made me cry. It was in the medieval main square and covered two floors. It was utterly ramshackle, with bits of rooms all over the place, but the views looked onto the cobbled market place and out onto the mountains behind.

The absolute piece de resistance was the Veronese roof terrace, which sat right on the top of the building. The terrace has a roof and walls but no glass in the large windows. That’s apparently the style. I have seldom felt so attached to a space. I imagined having breakfast up there every morning. Or writing music up there.

We drove back to the airport at Pisa (which one of the cabin staff on the way over pronounced as “pizza”). You can see the beautiful dome of the cathedral and the iconic leaning tower from the motorway. Today they were sort of looming out of the mist, which made them all the more impressive. You can also see them very clearly from the air as the plane takes off. The tower is so familiar that it actually starts to look like a sort of film set. You can’t quite believe that it’s actually there.

I arrived back in London during rush hour, wondering quite why it is that I call this city my home. I could literally feel the anxiety levels rising as people repeatedly crashed into me and the tube carriage filled up with more and more angry, sweaty people.