Horse and carriage with young girl in Piazza del Giglio, Lucca, Italy
How interesting to be a young girl with your father discussing the prospect of a ride in a carriage.
The setting in the photo above is the Piazza del Giglio, just a short walk inside the city walls of Lucca.
Lucca is rather run down in a ‘faded beauty’ kind of way. It has Squares and narrow streets and a massive city wall twenty or so feet high, built in brick that encircles the town.
The wall is breached by footpaths, and that is the route we took walking into town from the station. It was a special feeling walking through the tunnel in the wall – like entering a besieged town.
Go to Lucca
“Yes, Lucca is nice to visit.”
You know how one has to listen to the choice of words and the intonation when someone local recommends a place to visit.
We often have discussions about exactly what we did hear with these recommendations. Did we both hear the moment of someone holding back when we asked about visiting such and such a place?
Did we both hear an intonation that reveals that while Lucca is nice, it is not that nice?
And then there are all the other competing places to visit on a day trip from Florence. Are some of these better choices?
The town is nice and homely. People are friendly. We stood in the early evening looking at the fair in the Piazza Napoleone, drinking in the atmosphere and the pace of life.
View through an archway onto the Piazza del Campo in Siena
Siena is an Italian hilltop town lying to the south of Florence in Tuscany.
Being a hilltop town it is of course hilly. And in the center is the beautiful Piazza del Campo. It is a huge, perspective-bending Piazza built on a slope leading down to the Torre del Mangia. Walking into the fan-shaped Piazza truly is confusing to the senses.
Next to the tower is the museum – as run down as a faded heirloom.
The next photo here shows the threatening sky above the Piazza. It did not rain, but see how dramatic the scene is.
And see how big the space is: Walking down into the Piazza is dizzying.
There’s a horse race very year, when horses race around the Piazza. Look in the cafes and shops and you will see photographs of previous horse races displayed on the walls.
One photo we liked was from the 1960s, with crowds behind barracades erected in the Piazza. The horses were galloping past at a furious pace.
It’s fitting too, seeing that the Piazza del Campo is on the site of a Roman forum.
The Duomo In Siena
Up the hill from the Piazza is the Duomo. Another white marble edifice like in Florence. You might think it would be more commanding given its elevated position. In fact it is less impressive. Maybe it is a case of ‘once you have seen one white marble church you have seen them all’ or perhaps it is because it is smaller.
Or perhaps it is the design. The campanile (bell tower) is integrated into the building, unlike in Florence where the campanile stands on its own as another piece of marble magnificence.
Or it could be that the building speaks of the magnificence that did not happen. The guide books say that the intention was to expand the Duomo so that it would be bigger than the Vatican in Rome. But in 1348, less than ten years after work began, the Black Death killed half the people of Siena and work on the cathedral stopped.
The real difference here compared to Florence is on the inside of the building. The contrasting stone and the interwoven arches are wonderful.
Here’s a tip. You need a ticket to go into the cathedral. Perhaps you are the kind of person who objects to paying to go inside a church. Perhaps you don’t want to traipse around to the ticket office that is in a separate building towards the rear of the church.
Well the walk is not that far and there are two kinds of tickets: free and not-free. To go around the ground floor of the Duomo you only need a free ticket. To see the library and to go down into the lower floor, you need to pay for a ticket.
Why, you might wonder, do they require even free visitors to have a free ticket? We wondered the same. We even thought for a moment of asking. We didn’t ask but we decided between ourselves that the tickets acted as a kind of clicker to monitor who was in the building. Come closing time they would know how many people they needed to usher out.
The Uffizi Gallery is known worldwide. And yet from the outside it is easy to overlook one of the most impressive aspects of the building, even when looking directly at it.
And that’s a pity, because you are missing out if you don’t take a few minutes to look at the outside of the building from across the river.
The Uffizi is just a few minutes walk from the famous Ponte Vecchio and next to the Palazzo Vecchio. Yet from the river it simply blends in to the panorama of buildings along the bank of the River Arno.
There it is with the three huge arches that take you into a quadrangle that recedes in a succession of arches. Because it is not locked away behind doors, it is easy to walk through it and simply not realise that it is the Uffizi at street-level.
And being open at both ends, it has the feel of a public space – perhaps the feel of a Roman forum.
Here are two people walking through the quadrangle. How modern.
At the same time we were struck by how, when seen from across the Arno, the people on the bank of the river look like figures from a Canaletto painting.
In some ways, time has not changed anything.
In the Gallery
Of course the treasures on view are wonderful and well worth seeing. But what stands out in our memory is the long, long corridor that connected the rooms on the upper floor.
