Without being able to understand the Italian broadcasters on TV or radio, and having forgotten to check the weather forecast while online yesterday, we didn't know what the weather would be like, but earlier in the week I thought I'd heard the rain was supposed to end by the weekend. So Bev and I got into our little Fiat rental and headed for the beach on the Italian Riviera, about 20 minutes West of our house up in the hills. We were hoping that the sun would be out today, and that since it's a Saturday, there would be a lot of people on the beach and we could at least catch some rays and do some people watching. However, while it wasn't raining, the weather was still high overcast and when we got to Viareggio, a resort town that crawls with sun- and fun-loving Italians when it's hot and sunny. But today, although there were a fair number of tourists browsing around, the sand beaches were empty. We spoke to a woman in a snack bar who spoke pretty good English, and asked her about the forecast. She told us the sun was not supposed to come out until, hopefully, tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon. We then decided on Plan B, which was to get back in the car and drive East of Camaiore to Lucca, a Tuscan town we'd heard really good things about.
Driving in Italy is a challenge for a lot of reasons. Apparently the highway department has decided that it can't afford highway signs with numbers on them. Instead, signs contain names of the plethora of towns, pointing in different directions, as you drive through the many roundabouts. So you have to be a speed-reader of the Italian town signs as you figure out what lane to be in to make the correct turn. Then they pull this trick where they'll have the name of the town you want on a sign pointing in a certain direction. You go by it, then you never again see that town's sign at any of the turns in the roundabout. It just disappears as an option. Sweet! So the tendency is to drive slowly to look for the town you and the turn you want, so you make the right move. But the second—-and I'm serious, the very second-—you slow down to try to figure out where you're supposed to go, HONK, HONK! The driver “behind”you (read, riding your bumper, basically on top of you) is wanting you to speed up or get the hell out of his or her way! So it's baptism by fire learning to drive in Italy, and this from someone who just weeks ago was driving “on the wrong side of the road” in Ireland, without any real problems.
The Italian drivers have to be the absolutely busiest people in the world. They don't have a single second to waste on some dumb American driver who's trying to find the sign for Lucca among the twenty-seven other Italian towns' signs in some tight little roundabout.
But we did find Lucca, and it was lovely. The old part of the city is surrounded by walls that were build over many centuries to protect the city from invaders that never came. So Lucca was, you could say, all dressed up in their walls, with nowhere to go. Because the walls never saw any battles, they are very much intact and provide a 2 ½-mile biking and walking path around the old town area. This Saturday afternoon, the walking path was very crowded with locals out enjoying their “bike/hike trail.” The atmosphere was very wholesome, family-oriented. The sun was flirting with the idea of coming out, but the air was cool and breezy, and so it was a little cool for a bike ride, but we hope we can come back some day while we're in the area and rent bikes to ride this flat bike path. We then went into the "centro" part of the old city and walked around with other tourists and locals. The pace was slow and relaxed, and we stopped to have an espresso and watch people moving around the town. Dogs are common, and sometimes even dressed up, as shown in one of the photos.
After a couple of hours, we headed back to Camaiore and arrived about 7 p.m. We strolled around the town and couldn't get over how many locals (remember, this isn't a tourist town) were walking around, the men hanging out in front of little bars visiting and people of all ages were just out and about, everywhere. It reminded me of the Saturday nights in my hometown of Madison when I was young, when all the farmers would come to town and there were people out and about, visiting and getting caught up with each other. It was cool!
We decided to go to the restaurant in the middle of the town that our buddy at the computer store had recommended as a good place to eat. Tomorrow is Mother's Day, so I told Bev I wanted to cook for her, but my gnocchi maker was on the fritz, so we needed to eat out! We stopped by the restaurant and found out that they didn't start serving dinner until 7:30, so we made reservations and had a half hour to kill before we could be served. I was craving an American movie, so we stopped by a video store and rented a movie. The choices weren't great, and we ended up with “Bride Wars.”
Here in Europe where people don't eat dinner until late, and we didn't want to wait that long before eating, then having to drive in the dark on very narrow paths up into the hills to our house.
We felt like your classic senior citizens when we showed back up at the restaurant promptly at 7:30 to be seated! It had to be the European equivalent of the 4:00 p.m. early seating for pancakes! But the server who had taken our reservations greeted us and told us that although they didn't have an English menu, he would explain things on the menu to us. And did he ever! As he explained his way through the anti-pastas, the primis, the secondis, and the meat dishes, they all sounded irresistible! And because we were the only patrons being served for the first hour we were there, we got great personal service, and the best Italian food we'd ever eaten in a restaurant! To die for! In time, other patrons showed up, all of them with reservations, and by 9:30 p.m., the place was finally full. We took our time enjoying the fabulous food, great dessert, coffee and people-watching, then headed for home. We navigated in the dark and were greeted at our door by all the neighbors' dogs. They settled down as we settled in to watch “Bridal Wars” on our laptop, in English! Who needs Italian television?
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