Pisa and Lucca, Italy

The day after we arrived in Florence we felt the need to explore the region. We took the train to Pisa and stayed for a couple of hours, sipping on Italian granita while we completed a range of poses with the famous monument.
Then, we decided to work our way further south to the medieval town of Lucca that had once featured on an episode of Top Gear. There are so many pretty old towns in Tuscany that we wished we had more time to just zip by train to each one and walk around with a gelati in our hands.



Pisa
We visited Pisa for its one famous attraction - the Leaning Tower. This freak of structural engineering looks impressively white and clean up close. However there is little else to do at the site except take the typical photos where the camera angle means you are pushing the Tower or holding it with your hand or acting out some other strange pose. The Tower leans as a result of some stodgy soil conditions that were not appropriate for tower building. However this mistake of engineering is a clearly a revenue generator with a steady stream of tourists arrive by coach to visit this building.

A close up look at the angle of the lean

Olie acting as a great tower support

Mei holding the Tower up

Lucca

Lucca was a short train ride from Pisa. Founded by the Etruscans and became a Roman colony in the 2nd century BC, it is best known as a beautiful walled city and location of a Top Gear episode where the three presenters started in the middle of the city and had to make their way out by car using the maze of side streets.

The city's defensive walls, good for driving cars on 

The map showing Lucca ringed by a wall and park that used
to be the defensive moat

A famous Lucca resident

Cathedral in the middle of the city, where we ate lunch on the steps

Another cathedral and bell tower

Gelati Time
Powered by the sugar from a cup of gelati - one of the best we had eaten on this trip; we walked around the city and discovered how the place is a stunning representation of medieval Italian design, with churches and old palaces dominating the skyline. There were quite a few tourists walking around and we took our lunch by an old church, buying tubs of octopus and pasta salad from a nearby deli.

One of the best gelati sessions in Italy

Narrow medieval streets - good for providing shade in the hot weather

Racks of yummy ham

Decorative frescoes above a church

Olie snapping this photo before being
told off for setting up his tripod inside the church

Old Town Charm

Lucca reminded us of another walled town, St Malo in France. However in contrast, Lucca is yet to be heavily commercialized and still retains its old-town charm within the walls - perhaps all the tourist traps have been banished next to the train station. It feels so authentic that you can imagine being a soldier patrolling the city walls in the 16th century just waiting for an invasion from a super-power like the Spanish or Austrians - imagine the battles that these walls have seen throughout their existence.

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