Lucca

After wrapping up our morning in Pisa, my parents and I hopped a 30-minute train to Lucca. Lucca, originally built by the Etruscans and later inhabited as a Roman colony, is a one of several walled cities in the region of Tuscany. As such, the main historic parts of the city are entirely enclosed. There isn’t a great deal of famous sites to see, but the current walls date back to the Renaissance, and they definitely give the town a unique and interesting feel.

My parents and I walked all over the small, enclosed city. We saw a small former palace, a few interesting plazas, some impressive towers, a large church (16), and a basilica (17). (Don’t ask me which was which.)

[This plaza is round and really looks cool from above. You can’t quite tell from here because I was trying to avoid taking pictures of scaffolding.]

My time in Lucca was one of the rare occasions thus far in the trip where the weather was less than ideal. We won’t complain though because the clouds didn’t rain on us all that much (and they made my pictures look incredible). Also, it apparently rained quite a lot in Florence that day, so we were glad to have escaped it.

After strolling around the streets and atop the walls of Lucca for a while, my parents and I ended our double-feature day trip and went back to Florence. But earlier - before we actually entered the walls of Lucca, we took a little detour that added to our visit.

For my parents and me, visiting Lucca offered a little something extra. As you may know from reading my posts from Portugal (I choose to believe that you read all of my posts), my background is essentially 7/8 Portuguese and 1/8 Italian. Tracing that backwards, my father is 25%, and his grandmother – who made a mean spaghetti sauce - was fully Italian. I knew my great-grandmother, a strong and feisty woman, throughout most of my life until she passed in 2006 at the impressive age of 96. Getting back to the purpose of the blog, her family – and our family – was from Lucca.

Technically speaking, Lucca refers to a large commune or collection of villages. The greater Lucca area is made-up of 81 of such villages that sit outside of Lucca proper and its famous city walls. But these subdivisions – or frazione – are so small and dependent upon Lucca that Italians routinely consider them part of Lucca nevertheless. Our family was from a small frazione within Lucca known as Montuolo.

We could find little to nothing online about Montuolo, but we decided to check it out anyway. We asked a cab driver at the Lucca train station to drive us to Montuolo, and though he seemed surprised, he had us there in about six minutes. Seconds after we passed the “Welcome to Montuolo” sign (with which my dad took a picture), the driver made it pretty clear in his limited but still helpful English that this was about all there was to Montuolo. He estimated that about 500 people live there.

Without a better idea, we convinced him to drive us to the local cemetery in hopes of seeing some familiar names. Though we weren’t looking for anyone in particular, the tiny little cemetery was filled with headstones bearing familiar familial names including a handful that had my great-grandmother’s maiden name – Iacopi. We proved that I am indeed Italian because at some point, I had relatives named Luigi and Giuseppe.

It was a great experience to visit Montuolo. It’s always fascinating to learn about one’s family past, and our impromptu visit to the cemetery made us feel like we accomplished something to that end. And of course, it added a special, extra relevance to our later tour of Lucca. It was the perfect addition to the day trip.

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More pictures of Lucca: