Lucca + Pisa

Oops. Before Florence we stayed in Lucca, from where we day-tripped to Pisa. But I did do the tower post, so I'll just quickly load up a few more pics here...

Lucca, near Pisa, is a town with a Roman street plan and a fully intact city wall (from the time of the Renaissance). 

At passagiating hour the pathway around the rampart, on a rise ringing the old city, was packed with families, friends, and couples walking handsome dogs.

Passagiating on the ramparts.

Some folks say, you haven't really been to a place until you've swum there, and they don't mean in a swimming pool. The other day I read in a guidebook that some folks say that you haven't been to Lucca until you've eaten some kind of special local bread made with raisins and anise. I wasn't sold on the bread, but I do like the idea, particularly in these colder months, of substituting swimming for eating as a way of really being in a place.

On our first night in Lucca we ate at a hip wee trattoria, sharing the likely less traditional dish of beef tartar loaded with capers, thyme, and red onion and topped (supposedly anyway) with quails eggs, as well as a sausage and pumpkin risotto, and pappardelle with wild boar ragu. Yum.

Detail of cathedral facade. 

A different, but similar, church facade.

The medieval tower with trees on top.

And back to the ramparts.

Lucca was our first stop in Tuscany, and we liked it. Small, mostly pedestrian, and full of Christmas markets and large scale nativity scenes. (They love nativity scenes in this country, every church has one, or more, often set up outside in the piazza.)




Pisa, around and including the tower.

The baptistry.

The cathedral with bell tower behind.

The tower leaning into Romulus and Remus and their she woolf.

Then we went to Florence, and from there to Siena...

30 December 2011

Florence...?

My goodness, well we're already in Berlin and look where I'm up to with this blogging business. Oh dear.
We've already left Italy! After 7 beautiful months.
And there's been so much to share with you all, but so little internet with which to do it. I've got a lot of either catching up or skipping over to do, perhaps a little bit of both, a compromise. Pictures always help. Let's see how it goes.


Way back weeks ago we visited Florence, city of bell ringers. We rented a tiny studio apartment in a converted convent and spent four days visiting museums. Museums and churches full of oversized toes and undersized penises, ghouls, goblins, and violent escapades.

First up - Jim and Ness outside Galileo's house on the hill above Florence way back when it was summer and hot and Finn took off with them for a holiday.
I carried this image around jealously in my mind as we wandered ...imagine if it was hot...

View across the cemetery back over Florence from the top of the hill.

With Finn's church behind us.
Finn's church because this is where a big lot of the inlaid floor designs he constructed came from.

This church was amazing, very different in both layout and decoration from any other churches we've visited (all zodiac symbols and not a crucifix in sight). And yes, incredibly beautiful inlaid marble floors and detailing. 

Back in the city...

The baptistry.
(From Finn's summer series.)

Monsters in the baptistry.

The cathedral.

Skeletons and ... 

...fishy goblins in the cathedral dome.

The cathedral bell tower.

A freshly severed head outside the Uffizi gallery.
(Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus holding the head of Medusa.)

With Giovanni da Bologna's Rape of the Sabine alongside, and a bit of bludgeoning going on in the background.

Not the inlay we saw, but very similar to a room in the Bargello museum we weren't allowed to photograph that had inlaid wood so incredible it caused Finn to exclaim 'Holy fuck nuts' in admiration.

Always looking for ideas to bring home for future renovations, this ceiling particularly captured Finn's attention. With our basement conversion in mind, we pondered frescoed, mosaic, coffered...

Or maybe like this...

...or this? I like this one.
Want to come help paint?

On our last night we had dinner at a trattoria recommended to us by our apartment owner, and it was really nice. 

We started with this, but we can't remember what it was made out of, spinach or cavolo nero, but we do remember it being delicious. And a bowl of cavolo nero and polenta soup, also delicious.

Finn with giant bowl of complimentary spicy fish soup.
A 'little present' from our friendly waiter.

For mains Finn had an absolutely melting oxtail stew and I had this Christmas rabbit.
Rabbit cooked with chocolate, nuts, and candied fruit. Pretty full on and not what I would ever think to do to a rabbit, but fun and yum to try.

Our waiter was friendly, helpful, tall, and handsome, reminding us a lot of O. H. O'Connell. At the end of our meal, when we were full to bursting and declined all offers of dessert, instead of the bill he brought us a wedge of flourless chocolate cake, another of his so called 'presents'. A meltingly amazing treat we could barely squeeze in, but did.




In the end it didn't feel like enough days. We spent so much time visiting museums that I left feeling I'd hardly got a handle on the city itself. My impressions were of a city of rather bland, brown, heavy buildings, but I suspect most places will feel a bit like that after six months in Venice wonderland.

30 December 2011

Cinque Terre

So, backtracking a wee bit now, after Genova we headed down the coast to walk the Cinque Terre. 

Our apartment in Riomaggiore, built into the hill.

The owner of the apartment was away so his father took care of us, meeting us at the train station and leading the way up the hill. So friendly. After almost a week of cheap hotel rooms we were so excited to have a whole apartment to stay in - a kitchen, space to open our suitcases, a couch, amazing. Actually the apartment was a good deal bigger than the place we lived in Venice. Grand. With a view across the tops of the neighbours plentiful citrus trees to the well worked terracing on the opposite hillside, it felt like true holiday bliss.

Looking down on one half of the town from the castle above.
On the left you can see the pathway to Manarola snaking around the cliff.

This autumn, while we were in Venice wishing for a bit of rain to bring on acqua alta, the northwest of Italy was suffering terribly under torrents of water. Torrential rain caused massive flooding in and around Genova and the Cinque Terre, where it also caused huge landslides. By the time we passed through a bit over a month later, we saw no sign of it in Genova, in fact we'd forgoten all about it until the night before we left. In the Cinque Terre, things had not recovered so quickly. Riomaggiore is the most southern of the five (cinque) towns and, by this time at least, seemed relatively unscathed. Travelling as we are, without doing too much (i.e. not enough) prior research into our journey, we knew there had been some bad flooding which probably caused some damage, but we didn't realise quite how bad it was. Our first surprise came when we were told by the information centre people in Riomaggiore that, except for the pathway between there and Manorola, all the walking tracks through the Cinque Terre were closed, as was the entire town of Vernazza. Perhaps I should explain here that the five little coastal towns that make up the Cinque Terre are (usually) all linked by a 5 hour (each way) walking track around the sides of the cliffs. In addition to this main pathway, there are also numerous other tracks up and around the cliffs, linking in some of the smaller, higher up settlements. 

We had thought it quite likely that some of the tracks, or sections of tracks, would be closed, but were so disappointed to hear it was all of them. We resolved to explore the four towns we could access top to bottom, walking first to Manorola then catching trains to Corniglia and Monterosso al Mare. That afternoon and evening we began our explorations, walking up and around as much of Riomaggiore as our legs would take us, stopping at a lookout point on a terrace between some houses to watch the sun set into the sea (no apple green flash). The next morning, after the best sleep we'd had since leaving Venice (so quiet here!), we made our leisurely way around the cliffs to Manorola. On the underpass leading into the town we noticed signs up saying track number something or other from Manorola to Corniglia was the only one still open; we asked in at the information centre and sure enough - we had found a 2 1/2 hour walk to do up around and down the cliffs to Corniglia. We were so happy!

Manorola.
Note the nativity scene on the righthand hillside.

After a quick look around Manorola - up to the cemetery on the hill and to the beginning of the coastal walkway to Corniglia (we looked through our binoculars at all the landslides along the cliff face, they were many and large) - we grabbed a quick coffee and the most delicious pastries yet eaten in Italy and headed up the hill. 

There have been so many large scale nativity scenes set up in the towns we've visited, but this one is by far the winner - silhouette cutouts placed in amongst the terraced vineyard looking down over the town and out to sea.

The path we were after took a bit of finding, and, quite possibly, we didn't actually find it until we reached Volastra at the top of the hill, but we found tracks enough to get us there - making like mountain goats and climbing. It was bloody hot going. Nothing like it would be in summer of course, but that's probably why the path was so hard to find - because no one uses it in summer, and no one else was doing it when we were there. We just went straight up the really really steep hillside, and wearing a woollen dress over two layers of woollen undergarments really wasn't appropriate.

Almost at the top, F points to goodness knows where from within the thick of vine terracing.

After finally making it up up up up up up through all the terraced vineyards and olive groves, we found ourselves on a pathway leading into and through Volastra. From there we walked around the curve of the hill, through more vineyards and terraced gardens to another even smaller settlement, just two or three houses. After a while the vineyards and olive groves gave way to a forest. Terraces were still in evidence, but people had long since given up working this section of the hillside.

That's where we're headed - Corniglia from above.

With the grapes and olives in pruning mode, it was left to the citrus trees to provide a view of bounty in this dramatically difficult terrain, and by goodness did they provide. Oranges and lemons especially, but also grapefruit and clementines in such abundance, but so god damn well fenced in!

Heading down through Corniglia.
Down down down down.

Looking back up the seemingly endless zig zag of steps we'd just descended.

 The train we caught to Monterosso skipped right through Vernazza without stopping, and Monterosso itself was not looking great. Mountains of rubbish were piled up in temporary dumps on the beach and mangled boats were still strewn along the shoreline. We didn't stick around long. Most of the people there seemed to be civil defence type workers and cleanup / reconstruction crew and they didn't look like they needed rubber necking tourists getting under their feet. Google Cinque Terre floods and have a look at some of the videos - it's bad.

That evening we watched the sky turn pink from the station as we waited for a train running on a quite disrupted schedule - saved our legs walking up another hill to see the sun set though. Next morning we just had time for one more quick roam around the hill before catching a train Lucca-way.

Looking up the other side of Riomaggiore from the castle on the hill.

12 December 2011

Leaning Towers

The leaning tower of Burano.

Sometime back near the beginning of our days in Venice, probably when we first ventured across the lagoon to Torcello, I read somewhere about the leaning campanile of San Martino on Burano. Like all the islands in the Venetian lagoon, Burano is a soggy-bottomed mudflat, and as such it is not the most stable place to build a tall skinny tower. Anyway, the thing I read that now, travelling without so many of our books, I can't find my way back to, was that the tower is leaning at the same angle (5 degrees) as the famously tipping tower in Pisa.

Really there are a lot of similarities between Venice and Pisa. At the junction of the Arno and Serchio rivers, between the 11th and 13th centuries Pisa rivalled Venice and Genova as a naval and sea-trading power. Gathering goods, treasures, ideas, and iconography from around the Mediterranean, south to Africa, as well as across to the east, Pisa developed it's own Romanesque style and built it's now famous 'Field of Miricles'. But in the 13th century both Pisa's naval and geographical luck changed. After losing some key battles and outposts, the port silted up leaving Pisa as good as landlocked. As it turned out, this silty soil was not great for holding up heavy marble structures, and the results are rather similar to the topsy turvy, higeldy pigeldy, falling down nature of Venice.

Burano, before a storm.

Campo San Angelo, Venice.

San Pietro, Venice.

Torcello.
Back in the hot hot days of summer...

Towers, sticking up as they do, stand out from all the other slumping structures, and their footprint to height ratio no doubt doesn't help their tip-ability. In Pisa all the buildings in the 'Field' are on a lean - most significantly the baptistry leans 1.8m to the north, while the tower is headed 4m to the south.

Pisa.
The Duomo and it's campanile.

The strange thing about the leaning tower in Pisa is that they realised it had a lean on during construction. The first construction team got it up four stories, by which time it was abundantly clear that the bottom was sinking. The second team tried to right the lean and got almost to the bells, but not quite. The last lot put the bells on top, again at an angle compensating for the lean, but the bells themselves weighing in at something quite heavy didn't help matters... A decade of reconstructive surgery completed in 2001 has supposedly stabilised the tower for another 300 years.

Shipping detail in the marble at the tower's base.

The ubiquitous leaning on the leaning tower shot.

10 December 2011

Genova

Hills!

Harbour!

Tall, straight buildings!

Narrow winding lane-ways!

A substantial living breathing population! 

This place is amazing, why do you not hear about people visiting Genova?

And so mild in temperature after Venice and the mountains...

A hill, with so many steps!
We were possibly a bit over-excited about this.

The buildings really did seem so substantial - eight stories tall and precariously teetering on the steep sided hills, but no wobbles and not a crack in the plaster between them. Astonishing after six months in crumbling Venice.

Nice inlay in the cathedral facade.

We spent Sunday afternoon-evening wandering the lane-ways of the old city and visiting the three big old palazzo-museums on the big old palazzo street at the base of the hill. There were people everywhere - such density of non-tourists! And people of all walks of life. A town with a sleazy (not so under) current.

Blue-lit rubbish rooms.
An example of the difficulty of finding the horizon line when photographing a doorway on a really steep street.
And also where not to shoot up in Genova.

Nice inlayed roof.

If you can't be bothered with all the climbing (the hills are really steep), there are lifts and cable cars to ease the journey. On Monday morning we headed up a fairly new lift to begin our day exploring the hillside. I guess it's ingrained in us to head for the hills, and we really were impressed with the place, the buildings (as I mentioned) sitting so strong, but really it was the open lightness of walking around the crest of a hill as compared to in the deep dark warren of the tightly packed old city that made us feel suddenly so much less squashed. 

It was friendly too - when we were both higher up and further around the hill than Finn could believe possible, a man helped us recover our place on the map with much pointing and exclaiming and full-bodied hip-swinging gesticulations. It was quite a performance, especially since we'd regained our bearings just before he stepped up to guide us.

Finn looking more uncertain than I remember in one of the older lifts up the hill.

In the evening we were back up there, marvelling at the maze of city below and watching the sun set over the port.

Looking out over the crowded old city.
Two of the three huge palazzo we visited in the foreground.

With the marvels of liveable cities already wearing a little thin, it was time to turn our attentions to lemon trees and sea spray in the picturesque coastal towns known collectively as the Cinque Terre. 

9 December 2011

Châtillon to Matterhorn

Ever since we flew from London to Venice over the top of the spectacular Swiss Alps, I had been wanting to somehow include snowy mountains in our post-Venice holiday. When we started planning a month or so ago, we found out about a particular spot where you can take cable cars up and up and up the mountains and when you reach the top, not only are you in Switzerland, but you are also just across the way from the Matterhorn. So we went there.

From Verona we caught three trains to get to Châtillon in the Aosta Valley, aided into the second and into and out of the third by a friendly woman (who spoke no english) familiar with all the tricks for avoiding the delays we otherwise had in store.

The next day we went UP 3.3km, to Plateau Rosa, 3500 meters high, and -8°C. 


From Châtillon (+8°C) we caught a bus up a winding mountain road to Breuil-Cervinia (+4°C), where the cable cars begin. It takes three cable cars to get to Switzerland.

From the second cable car, looking down to a lake on the freeze.

Looking up one of the cable car runs.

At the top.

Going up that high that fast makes you dizzy. It is a very peculiar feeling, walking along like normal and then suddenly being so light headed you have to stop and (where possible) have a wee sit down. Also a little nauseous, but only a little, mostly just dizzy. Not that I'm trying to make excuses for our behaviour or anything...

The mandatory border-crossing dance.

Similar to the hokey tokey.

See how warm we look! Thanks to Svetislava and Arnel, our hands were fully protected from the chill in snuggly lined leather gloves. We were totally spoilt. Thanks thanks thanks thanks! My feet though... despite double socking it (I should've triple socked it), and despite cleverly wearing my acqua alta gumboots for dry snow toeing it, after a couple of hours at the top, they were totally frozen. No feeling left at all in my right toes. Descent into warmer climbs was painful.

Views from the top.

 The clouds provided constantly changing views of the mountain ranges surrounding us in all directions. It was incredible. Beautiful and slightly terrifying and truly spectacular.

Skiers heading down the Swiss slope. 

A glimpse of the Matterhorn peak behind a Swiss mountain station.

The Matterhorn again from a better vantage point, but without it's peak.

Just so you know where we are - that's us at Plateau Rosa, and that's the Matterhorn (Monte Cervino in Italian) up ahead. (A section of a model of the alps in a museum hut at Plateau Rosa.)

Time for a whiskey and biscuits picnic to warm us up.

Towards the east the sky looked like sunset above the mountain ranges.

Just a little lardo sandwich before heading back down the hill.

Our descent.

Finn finding alternative entertainments to skiing.

When we got back down to Breuil-Cervinia the temperature had dropped to 0°C and the wind was picking up. We retreated into a cosy bar for one of those incredibly thick and rich hot chocolates while we awaited our bus back down the hill. When we got outside again it was -1°C and utterly miserable, so much more freezing feeling than at the top of the mountain where we had been in full sun and there hadn't been a breath of wind.

A frozen waterfall, through the bus window on our winding journey back to town.

Town - beautifully slated roofs, looking across the valley to the mountains on the other side.

A half moon mountain above Châtillon. 

8 December 2011