Lucca, Italy

The busy streets of Lucca in summer.  Shopping is rampant.

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Last summer (2013), after our battles with the crowds and heat at Cinque Terre, we high-tailed it to Lucca, Italy, which we'd been told was a fun place to stay with easy access to the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, a sight the girls wanted to see despite the Tuscan heat and previous experiences with tourist hot-spots.  

What a relief Lucca turned out to be.  We stayed in a perfect apartment (Airbnb) and enjoyed a couple of nice days exploring the narrow streets of this cosmopolitan town, just missing the summer festival with concerts by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Earth, Wind and Fire.  We stumbled onto a surprise exhibition of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, famous for capturing "the decisive moment" with his Leica rangefinder, and we ate lots of gelatto, climbed old towers for the views, hiked around the city walls, and relaxed a bit before our dash to Milan for our flight back to New York. 

A tiny amount of history seems called for.  Lucca was founded by the Etruscans and became a Roman colony in about 180 B.C (see Wikipedia).  Julius Caesar ("Who the hell is Julius Caesar?  You know I don't follow the NBA!" --Will Ferrell from the recent Anchorman sequel) spent time here.  The composer Puccini was born in Lucca and played his organ here during his childhood. Because Lucca survived WWII unbombed, many features of the Medieval town are preserved, most famously the town walls, which are now pedestrian promenades.  And of course, Neil Young played his mouth organ here in 2013, but we missed it, though I'm not bitter about that.

Enough of that...here are a few photos from Lucca, a town I recommend if you need to stage yourself near Pisa and if you enjoy Parmesan, vinegar from Modena, and shade.       

Bei, Lauren, and Leigh passing through the town wall into Lucca.

Typical store in Lucca selling "tipico" stuff.

Statues on one of the cathedrals in town.

Ellen denying herself a gelatto.

Photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Photo of William Faulkner by Cartier-Bresson.  To me, Faulkner looks a lot like my grandfather (see below).

My Dad (left), with my grandfather (Ken), and grandmother (Nelle).  We have other family photos in which my grandfather Ken looks even more like Faulkner, but this is the only one I have on my hard drive.

Lucca mailboxes.

Street scene with bicycle.

Cars aren't allowed on many of the streets, so bikes are preferred, though tricky in the summer crowds. 

Cyclist with wine.

Not Neil Young (or the Killers).

A Lucca summer wedding.  Onlookers point, chant, and dance as the couple emerges.

The girls, dressed to kill and heading out on the town just before ditching their embarrassing grown-up nemeses (me and Ellen).

For you climbers, an anti-stemming device.

A Euro-cat trying to get into one of those Euro-cat calendars, but feeling a little down because he wasn't born in Santorini.

Cathedral sculpture.

Architectural history in brick.

Tuscan weather.

Lucca from one of the many towers in town, none of which are leaning.

A Lucca tower.

The cafe scene at night.

Ellen exploring, just before bedtime.

Cinque Terre: No Parking

Picturesque Manarola, Italy.

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I'm enjoying the holiday and trying to catch up on processing images from the last year, including many from our trip to Europe.  And I'm looking forward to blogging more regularly.  The fall semester overwhelmed me.  I'll start here with a brief description of Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera.  We visited this at the very end of our summer trip.  I'll post about other European adventures as I get images organized.

The very tiny downside to an academic appointment is that one can travel only in the "high season." In the Northern Hemisphere, this means summer temperatures and summer crowds, and in Europe, where the vacation mentality is saner than in the U.S., it means that every location even hinting at fame becomes overrun with European tourists mixing with those of us from overseas. 

Perhaps I should have known that a place that popped up during a web search for interesting things to see in Northern Italy would not be a great high season choice.  But the pictures of Cinque Terre were so compelling(!):  five lovely little towns pasted to a steep rocky section of the Mediterranean Coast and connected by a hiking trail that could be traversed in a day. What a perfect place to finish a lovely trip!

Cinque Terre has a long history, with towns dating back to at least the 11th century, but for most of this time, the area was isolated by the terrain and a difficult place to live.  While fishing may be a viable way of life, farming doesn't seem to make much sense, and yet the locals over time hacked an elaborate system of terraces into the slopes and planted olive trees and vegetables.  Eventually, a railroad was built along the coast, connecting the five villages to the larger city of La Spezia to the south and providing tourist access, which has transformed Cinque Terre since the 1970s from a backwater to a bustling collection of hotels, restaurants, and shops.  Remarkably though, the original charm of the villages largely remains, at least visually. 

We spent 3 days at Cinque Terre before moving to Lucca, a little farther south, our last stop before flying home from Milan at the end of our month in Europe. Though Cinque Terre is beautiful, I'd avoid it during the high season.  We drove our rental car to a small village high above the coast (Volastra), the only place where I could find a place to stay on late notice.  Avoid that if you go.  Instead, make a reservation in one of the seaside towns (Riomaggiori, Manarola, Vernazza, or Corniglia are best--book early), park in La Spezia, and take the train to your destination.  Check on the status of the hiking trail, damaged by a 2011 landslide and not completely open while we were there, dashing our hopes for a nice hike. And avoid mid-summer crowds and heat if possible.  I was told that the scene in the fall is completely different.  Still, I'm glad to have seen Cinque Terre.  

A few images...

The town of Vernazza.

The harbor at Manarola.  The cool water was a lifesaver if you avoided the jellyfish.

Rock diving at Manarola.

Bei (L) with her cousins Lauren and Leigh, gazing at the Mediterranean.

Manarola.

Boats at Manarola.

Bei was in her element, which is the element where you eat pasta for every meal.  

The coastline is probably too rocky and steep for traditional cemeteries.

Fishing in the Med.

Railway at the edge of the sea.

Castiglioni.

Ellen hiking into Vernazza, after sweating it out on the trail through the olive groves between here and Corniglia.

Decoration in the Volastra cathedral.

A disgruntled cat in Volastra, perhaps unhappy about the tourists?

No parking.  

The five towns were nearly impossible to access with a car, because parking is so limited.  Take the train!

The Dolomites: Alta Via 2 Overview

A view of the Dolomites from the trail that climbs onto the Sella Group from the Val Gardena.

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I've been far too busy since the semester started to either blog or work on photographs from the summer's travels.  I'm starting to get over that hump, and hopefully can begin to post more regularly again.  I'll start with some random images from our trek in the Dolomites in late July.

In 1919, a significant portion of German-speaking Tyrol, including the Dolomite mountains, was ceded to Italy upon the signing of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.  One result is that today, signs and towns in the region include both German and Italian names.  More importantly, rather than blending the cuisines of the two cultures, the locals decided to double the amount of food one eats.  As we hiked from "hut" (a misnomer) to hut along a portion of one of the famous high routes in the Dolomites (the Alta Via 2), we were presented each night with two-plate dinners.  The first was usually Italian--heaped with pasta--the second a nod to German-Austrian heritage:  potatoes smothered in fried eggs and speck, thinly sliced ham that is the salt water toffee of the Tyrol, sold in tourist shops at every alpine pass in the region.  

I'm certain that despite over a week of hiking over steep alpine passes and descending into deeply incised glacial valleys, I gained weight in the Dolomites. Sleeping in alpine rifugia, which over the years have morphed into comfortable hotel-like structures in spectacular locations, takes the edge off of the alpine experience.  You arrive after a day of hiking, drop your daypack (no need to carry much weight when you sleep indoors), and order a beer or two, some strudel, and eventually a couple of plates of dinner, before crawling into a comfortable bed to read yourself to sleep. 

We hiked for seven days in mostly perfect July weather from the town of Bressanone, in northern Italy near the Austrian border, southward to just beyond the famous Marmolada Massif, a glaciated peak embedded in a sea of alpine terrain, traversing beautiful alpine terrain, hiking through meadows thick with wildflowers, and occasionally scrambling along rocky traverses equipped with steel cable handholds.  The girls (Bei, Lauren, and Leigh) survived despite little alpine hiking experience, and seemed to have fun, though they might be reluctant to admit it, and Ellen and I savored being in the mountains. 

Here are a few images to give a taste of the experience.  

A signpost near the start of our hike, with the Odle group in the background.

Lauren, Bei, and Leigh near the beginning of our hike.

Ellen and Bei, leaving the Plose hut on the 2nd morning.

Bei, day 2.

The Genova Hut, owned by the Messner family.

Bei and Ellen, day 3.

The trail down into the Val Gardena, with the Sella group in the background.

A church in the Val Gardena, with the Sella massif in the background.

Bei on the last hiking day, sampling the local flora.

Breakfast:  potatoes, eggs, and speck.  This was often served as dinner plate #2 as well.

Canederli.  Dumplings bathed in calories. 

Midday snack along the trail: crepes.  Presentation is everything when you are hiking.