In Heaven There is No...

In heaven there is no beer

That’s why we drink it here (Right here!)

And when we’re gone from here

Someone else will be drinking all the beer

                                    Ernst Neubach and Ralph Maria Siegel (1956)

                                    English lyrics by Art Walunas

One of the comments we heard most while preparing for the trip had to do with the opportunity to drink and savor Italian wine.  Unfortunately, neither of us are big wine drinkers.  I intend to sample the wine of Italy while here, but Shelley is a proud and devoted beer drinker, and has no interest in sampling or substituting wine.

Our question, then, was whether that would place us among a distinct, and perhaps even persecuted, minority in Italy.  There may be no beer in heaven, but is there beer in Italy? And if not, does that therefore make Italy heaven?

We knew that Italian beer exists, and even sampled Peroni back in the states, but we have been pleased to see that drinking beer in public is pretty common (at least at the places where we hang out).  We have thus far been out to several cafes and restaurants, and in each instance beer seemed as popular as wine.

We have enjoyed Italian beers Peroni, Moretti, and Menebrea.  Shelley tends to order draft, so she has had German beer a couple of times, while our first night here I ended up drinking Corona.  What we haven’t seen is any evidence of American beer.

That raises a second issue.  At home I drink a fair amount of Coke Zero, and the question was whether I could find a substitute while here.  When I was in Italy briefly 13 years ago I don’t remember seeing Coca Cola products, but remember drinking a lemon soda that was refreshing.  I caught a glimpse of one at a café the other day, but Coke--and Coke Zero—are easy to find.  A week ago, when we had first arrived and were unable to reach the apartment owner, one of the things that kept me sane was having a Coke Zero while waiting.

Then there’s the water.  At a restaurant when you receive water you are asked if you want “gas” or “no gas,” that is, carbonated or not.  When we first went to the supermarket and bought a bottle of water, we unintentionally bought “with gas,” and only because Shelley can’t stand to waste money we drank it in misery for two days to get rid of it.  It tastes like seltzer water, and we would have been happier if we had something to mix with it.  Once the bottle was empty we have been following the example of the locals and refilling at the public water fountains around town.  The water supposedly comes from the mountains between Pisa and Lucca and is supposed to be better than the tap water.

Hard to believe we’ve been here for a week.  In a subsequent post I’ll talk about some food differences between home and here.

This Little Porcellino Went to Market

Wednesday and Saturday mornings are market days in Lucca.  On Wednesday we had rain and thunderstorms and weren’t able to get out, so yesterday we headed out to experience the market for the first time.

The market consumes a half-mile stretch of the Passeggiata Delle Mura, the road that runs around the circumference of the old city just inside the walls. On market days the road is closed on the Eastern side of the city, and both sides of the street are filled with booths where vendors sell a wide variety of goods.

I asked Shelley if the market was what she expected, and her answer was she didn’t know what to expect, but no.  We both expected a farmers market, with produce and various kinds of food for sale, and there was some of that, but you could also find clothing of various kinds (T-shirts, dresses, lingerie), accessories (shoes, handbags, jewelry, wigs), kitchen items, toys, and even kittens.  We bought plums and clothespins.

A Sampling of Lucca's Specialties

Yesterday we decided to go out and sample several of the things for which Lucca is best known.

We first walked down to the Piazza Napoleone, home of the Lucca Summer Festival held each July since 1998.  There will be eleven concerts held outside in the Piazza during the month of July, with the headliners this summer including the Eagles, Stevie Wonder, and the Backstreet Boys.  The workers are busy setting up the stage and bleachers for the first concert next week.

We then walked around the Passeggiata delle Mura, the ramparts that surround the city.  The wall was constructed in the late 16^th or early 17^th century, an upgrade on previous walls that date back to the Romans and later to medieval times.  The best part of the wall today is that it has been turned into a tree-lined park where people can walk or bike, and we did the full two-and-a-half mile loop.  When we decided to come to Lucca my plan was to rent bicycles for the month and do a daily ride around the wall.  Unfortunately it is a steep 51-step climb from street level to the apartment, where we would have to store the bikes, so I’ll have to settle for renting bikes once a week or so. 

By the time we finished the walk my knees were aching, one of the reasons I was looking forward to biking.  My adventure next summer will be somewhat less glamorous than this, as I will be undergoing knee replacement surgery.  How the knees will hold up was my biggest fear coming into the trip, and I’ve been pleased so far, but I definitely felt them last night.

On the way home we stopped into a pasticceria (pastry shop) and bought a loaf of buccellato, a local delicacy.  Buccellato is bread dotted with raisins, lightly flavored with anise, and we had it for breakfast this morning.  It was good, but it would be hard to top my childhood memories of eating iced raisin bread.  Shelley’s take was that buccellato would be better served with butter, but we haven’t seen a lot of butter in Lucca in restaurants or at the market where we get groceries.

While walking we found a restaurant on top of the wall that had a sign indicating that it would be televising on large screen the World Cup between the USA (Stati Uniti) and Germany (Germania), so went back there for dinner and to watch the game.  For dinner I ordered Tordelli Lucchese, a local dish.  It is homemade ravioli stuffed with meat and served with meat sauce, and it was very good.

Just like the Italy-Uruguay game we watched on Tuesday, the final score of the game was 1-0 and the team I was rooting for lost, but it had a different feel.  The Italy game was rough and ugly, described subsequently as perhaps the worst of the cup so far.  There was a red card disqualification and biting (which earned no penalty).  Italian expectations were high and as a result the loss bordered on crushing.  For the American team, beating Germany would have been historic, and from the beginning the Germans were dominant and controlled the ball and game, and the question was not whether the Germans would win but whether we could keep it close. The USA managed to do that, and then almost got a tying goal at the very end on one of its only opportunities the entire game.  I am not one of those who believes that any loss is a tragedy, and for the United States to lost to Germany in the World Cup is nothing to be ashamed of.  The best news was learning at the game’s conclusion that Portugal’s win over Ghana meant that Stati Uniti will move to the elimination round, an accomplishment.  Who would have thought when we landed on Monday that by the end of the week Italy (plus Spain and England) would be eliminated and the United States still alive?

Most of our exploring so far has been in the southern and western sides of Lucca, and at dinner last night Shelley said that we should try to see more of the eastern side.  Well, we accomplished that walking home from dinner, and learned that we can get just as lost and confused on that side of town.  We found our way well enough, but whe we got home I walked right by the apartment building door until Shelley asked me where I was going.  I’ve always had pride in my sense of direction.  That may be gone by the time we leave Lucca.   

  

Why Lucca?

“Why Lucca?” we were asked, both on Tuesday night by Laura Inscoe’s husband and by one of the readers of the blog.  Here’s the story.

Back in December I was part of a meeting of the senior administrative team at St. Christopher’s to nominate possible recipients of a faculty summer sabbatical program that was established by a generous alumnus of the school two years ago.  Because last summer was the inaugural, I knew very little about the program or how it worked.  Two days later, during my regular meeting with the Headmaster, he informed me that there had been a secret meeting to which I was not invited and that I was being offered the summer sabbatical.

The sabbatical, as it was described to me, was to “Do something you would never be able to do on your own.”  I wanted to share the gift and experience with Shelley, and knew that she had never been to Europe (I’ve been once before), so that was an appealing option.  But I was also interested in carving out some concentrated time to work on a book idea.  Could I combine both, forgoing the grand tour of Europe for settling in a small town or city and living there for a month, using it as a home base for some travel?  So that’s what we decided to do.  My boss, Charley Stillwell, was very encouraging and helpful—in fact, every time I talked about the outline of our plan, he would ask “Have you thought about…?” and add an intriguing suggestion.  As a result we decided to add a week on the end of the trip and see Paris and London.

So where did Lucca enter the picture?  I initially thought about a city like Prague (which I hear is fascinating) or a town like Salzburg that I visited for a day on my previous trip.  Back when we were newlyweds, 31 years ago, we had an opportunity to go to Oslo and stay with a cousin, who was at the time the naval attaché for NATO in Norway, but decided to buy our first house instead, and so thought about going there a little belatedly.

At the top of Shelley’s list of places to visit was Italy, where her grandfather was born before immigrating to the United States, but because Paris was also a “must-see,” we thought about France as well.  So I started by researching places in Provence and Tuscany.

My first contact was Cindy Szadokierski, whom I coached along with Shelley on Randolph-Macon College’s first varsity women’s basketball team back in the late 1970’s.  Crab (her maiden name is Crabill) recently retired as a Vice President at United Airlines and is a world traveler, and I figured she would have already been any place worth visiting.  She e-mailed me back with a list of her favorites in Italy, and Lucca was on that list.

As I researched various options, Lucca popped to the top of the list for several reasons.  We decided early on that we wanted to try to do the entire trip using public transportation, and the train station is easily accessible.  We didn’t want a large city but worried that a small town wouldn’t offer enough to do, and we wanted a place that wasn’t overly touristy.  Lucca is also flatter than most of the towns and cities in Tuscany.  The final choice was between Siena and Lucca, and here we are.

 

A Change of Scenery is Nice, A Change of Clothes Even Better

For anyone concerned about the citizens of Lucca (or us) because we were on our third day wearing the same clothes while waiting for our luggage to be found and delivered, you can relax.  We received our luggage at 5 p.m. yesterday afternoon, some 54 hours after we arrived.

We are apparently the Ike and Tina Turner of travelers. On their version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, “Proud Mary,” they said they didn’t do anything “nice and easy” but rather “nice, and rough.”  We seem to be condemned to doing things “nice, and rough.”

The Alitalia baggage office promised to have the luggage delivered to our apartment when it showed up, but mentioned that the limitations on traffic inside the walls of Lucca might make it impossible for a courier to deliver the bags to our door.  When we learned on Tuesday that the bags were in Pisa, we were told that the courier would deliver them in the morning.

Shelley was up early (both of us are sleeping somewhat fitfully), and knowing that the bell for the apartment building doesn’t work, she opened the windows and listened for the courier.  A couple of hours later, she received an e-mail from the airport saying that the courier had tried to deliver the bags, had called the phone number of the apartment owner and gotten no answer, and had returned the bags to the airport.  The airline would not pay for a second attempt, so we would have to arrange to pick them up.

Getting the bags was the number one priority for the day, and I had mentally accepted the fact that we would spend a good part of the day going to and from the airport.  Shelley thought the owner of the apartment should take responsibility, given that the bell doesn’t work and he didn’t answer his phone when the courier called.  At first, we couldn’t contact him, but he finally returned her e-mail.  He had received a call at 7:03 while still asleep, had “accidentally” hung upl while trying to answer it, then called back to no response.  He promised to get them delivered to us.

I set a 4 p.m. as the deadline where we would have to go to the airport ourselves.  Shortly before 4 the owner of the apartment said that he was on the way to Pisa to get the bags and would be back in an hour.  And, sure enough, he was.

We’re here, the bags are here, and now the vacation can officially start—after I shower and change.   

 

Arrivederci, Azzurri

Yesterday began as a day to solve problems and ended as an evening of pleasant surprises (except for fans of Italy’s World Cup soccer team, the Azzurri).

We got up early and went out at 7 a.m. looking for coffee for Shelley, trying to get a feel for the layout of Lucca.  It’s not easy, because it’s a town full of narrow streets where it’s difficult to distinguish between a main street and an alley.  Not much was happening except for people out for walks and cars making deliveries to businesses (traffic is restricted inside the walls).  We found a couple of bars opening up but not much else, but finally found a spot where we had pastries and Shelley had expresso (a little strong for her taste).

Still without our luggage, we headed out close to 9 a.m. to try to solve several problems.  We wanted to get a better map than the one in the guidebook I brought with me, and so headed for the TI (tourist information) center.  On the way we solved a second problem when we found a store that sold electronics, meaning that we were able to purchase a couple of US/Italian plug adapters so that we could recharge our rapidly depleting computers and cell phones.  At the TI we found a better map, and also found out the one small supermarket within the walls where we could stock up on some basic groceries.  On the way there we found a newsstand that carried a copy of the Grapevine, the local monthly English-language magazine of arts and culture.  By 11 we had solved our immediate pressing problems, and shortly thereafter we learned that our missing bags had been located, were in Pisa, and would be delivered by courier this morning.  We’ll see.

I spent the afternoon writing a blog post and napping, not necessarily in that order.  Our plan for the rest of the day was to see if we could find a place to get something to eat and watch the Italy-Uruguay World Cup game, which Italy needed to win or tie to move into the elimination round.  Our apartment is right around the corner from the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, which dates back to the Romans and was an amphitheatre seating 10,000.  Today it houses restaurants and shops, and last evening most of the outdoor cafes were set up to view the World Cup game.  We found a table at one, just far away from the television that it was hard to follow exactly what was going on, and ordered beer and pizza.

The atmosphere was relaxed and enjoyable, but after missing the USA-Portugal match on Sunday night because we were on the way to Rome (several passengers asked the crew to report the score but they never did) I looked forward to sampling World Cup fever in a country like Italy where soccer (pardon me, football) is the national sport and where expectations for success are high.  I never felt that last night, for two reasons.  One is that our sense was that most of the people viewing the game at the various cafes around the piazza were tourists rather than locals.  More important was that the Azzurri never gave the crowd much to cheer for.  They appeared to be outplayed during the first half, which ended in a scoreless (or nil-nil) tie.  The Italian fortunes were severely jeopardized in the 60^th minute when a defender was given a red card following a foul, meaning that they had to play the remainder of the game with only ten.  Notorious Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez apparently bit an Italian defender (which appears to be one of his best-known moves) but didn’t get any kind of foul called just before Uruguay scored on a header with just under ten minutes remaining, crushing Italy’s hopes of advancing.  This morning accounts are describing the game as perhaps the worst of the entire cup, and the Italian manager has submitted his resignation.  

If the game was a disappointment, what happened next was a pleasant surprise.  Shelley thought she recognized someone at a nearby table.  It was Laura Inscoe, the rector of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, best known as the site of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech back in 1775.  Laura and Shelley served together on the Board of Crossover Ministry, and Laura was in Lucca to preside over a wedding.  We were not surprised to have a small-world experience during the trip, but didn’t expect it so soon.  Had we gone to a different café right there in the piazza, we would have never seen them.

What made it especially gratifying for Shelley was seeing someone she knew.  There have been numerous times in the past when we are somewhere and run into someone I know, including an event years ago just after we started dating where she assumed I would know no one and the first person we saw said, “Hi, Jim.”  I’m happy to let her one-up me this time.

Comedy of Errors

Our trip and first day in Italy were a reminder of the challenges of travel and the virtue of patience.  We left Richmond on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. after having been chauffeured by our son J.D. (who took the picture of us at the airport not noticing that Shelley had her eyes closed), who also happens to be my colleague on the faculty at St. Christopher’s School.  He will be joining us for a week right after July 4. 

(Late breaking news—we’ll apparently see J.D. in Paris as well.  He was going to visit Maury Hancock, the theatre director at St. Catherine’s School, at his summer place outside Paris after leaving Lucca, then had to return home to teach a summer class.  The class didn’t make, so he is thinking about staying longer in Europe and then joining us in Paris.  That news alone made the events chronicled below easier to take.)

The trip was largely uneventful until we arrived at Galilei International Airport (named for Galileo) in Pisa after changing planes at JFK (named for President Kennedy) and Rome (named for Leonardo da Vinci). 

In Richmond (where the airport was formerly named for polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, who featured prominently in the first chapter of the book I started reading last night, Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America 1927) I was pulled aside for “individual screening” by the TSA, but then no one did any screening other than asking me to walk through the metal detector in my own private line.  Not sure why I was pulled, other than the fact I look pretty suspicious.  On a school spring break baseball team trip to Disney World one of my students whose father worked in national security could look at the ticket and know who was being randomly pulled.

JFK was JFK, in that we had to go outside to a different terminal (Terminal 1).  Of course there were no signs directing anyone to Terminal 1 until we arrived at the terminal itself.  Once inside Terminal 1, we had to go through TSA screening again, but were informed that we first had to have our Delta boarding passes reissued at Alitalia boarding passes.  That ate up a good part of our two-hour layover.  I held my breath as we went through security but no special attention the second time.

We left JFK at 7 p.m. EDT (or 1 a.m. Rome/Lucca time) and flew through the night, arriving at 8:30 a.m.  We were in Pisa by 11 a.m.

That’s when the fun began.  The first issue was that while we arrived, our bags didn’t.  We packed relatively frugally, but a lot of important stuff (such as plug converters we need to be able to recharge electrical devices) is in those bags.  If we go too much longer without a change of clothes, Lucca may suffer from a new form of pollution.

All of the travel guides and websites I had consulted had recommended taking public transportation (bus or train) from the airport in Pisa to Lucca, and we (I) had chosen the bus because you have to change trains at Pisa Centrale station, while the bus delivers you inside the walls of Lucca.  We found the ticket booth (on the right as you come out of baggage claim) after reporting our missing bags, and I even did a passable job of saying “Due bigliettos per Lucca,” but then we couldn’t find the bus where we had been told it would be.  Buses are supposed to leave hourly, but I read somewhere that in the middle of the day there is a couple hour gap, and I suspect we had just missed the final morning bus.  We retraced our steps, found out that the bus we were looking for was blue, and at the bus stop were told that the next bus would leave in an hour.  40 minutes later, we had no sooner stepped on the bus then it pulled out.

We made it to Lucca by way of downtown Pisa and route 12 connecting the two cities.  By the time we arrived we were tired and grumpy, and about to get grumpier.

In preparation for the trip we had long discussions about how to communicate once in Italy, and until the last day or so the plan had been to buy Italian cellphones in the airport at Rome to avoid expensive data roaming charges.  At the last minute something we read in a guidebook convinced us that we could get by with our own phones as long as we kept them on airplane roaming and used them in Wifi hotspots.  Part of that discussion came about due to J.D. (our technical consultant and a damn good one) finding an app (Viber) that would let us call and text each other over the internet and our sense that we would probably not call or text anyone but each other.

That sense was quickly tested.  I had rented the apartment through VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner), highly recommended by several friends who travel regularly, and I had been in touch with the owner of the apartment by e-mail and he had given me a number to call him once we arrived in Lucca.  As soon as we got off the bus at Piazza Giuseppe Verdi I looked for a place to sit down I could pull out the number and call.  I couldn’t understand why Shelley seemed disgusted with me more than ususal until she informed me that we couldn’t make any calls using our phones but had to call from the public phone we had just passed.  And, of course, when I tried to call there was no answer.

I had also been given walking directions from the train and bus stations by the apartment rental office so we began to walk.  On the way we stopped on the steps of a church to see if Shelley could contact either the owner or the rental company by e-mail, but she couldn’t get internet access despite having bought a data plan for her phone right before we left.  In addition, the directions we were given were wrong, telling us to turn right when we needed to turn left.  When we finally found the apartment we got no answer when we rang the doorbell.

Close to panic, we decided to enlist the help of someone at a local business (the apartment is right off Via Fallungo, the main shopping street).  The first person we asked didn’t speak English, and the second just shook her head.  But we found a heroine at a little café around the corner.  She spoke English, understood our situation, and tried to call the owner for us, but had no success.  She then found the website for the rental company and called there, and learned two valuable pieces of information.  They had a different phone number for the owner, and he had called the rental place looking for us.  That was the first bit of positive news at a point when we were starting to wonder if the owner existed or we were victims of a scam.  Shortly afterward, as were having paninis for lunch at the café, the owner showed up and found us, and took us to the apartment.  It turned out that the phone number he had sent me was missing a digit, and the doorbell to the apartment building doesn’t work.

That’s our first day in Lucca, a little more eventful than anticipated.  We felt at times like minor characters in A Comedy of Errors, at times like the tourists Mark Twain described in Innocents Abroad, and at times like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire, relying on the kindness of strangers, but finished the day more like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Tomorrow’s bound to be a brighter day.

Buongiorno

Buongiorno!  Welcome to JumpinLucca.  This blog will follow the adventures of the Jump family—Jim and Shelley, husband and wife—as we spend what we hope will be a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, including four weeks living in Tuscany in the old walled city of Lucca, followed by a touristy week seeing the Swiss Alps by train leading to several days in Paris and London.

The name of the blog has double, and perhaps even triple, meaning.  First, there is the primary meaning, the adventures of Jump in Lucca.  Second, as will be all too apparent, we are definitely “jumping in” to this experience, deciding to stay in a town that is unseen by and largely unknown to us.  I’ll share more about “Why Lucca?” and how all this came about over the next couple of days.  What remains to be seen is the third possible meaning, whether Lucca itself is jumpin’.

I'll try to post regularly, unless the Italian culture and lifestyle destroys my ambition.  Ciao!