Day 2: Lucca & Viareggio

Yesterday was an extremely long day. The only one who got through it without nodding off was Alfie (Matt and I both fell asleep for a counterproductive five minutes on the train from Pisa to Lucca) and, even though we all went to bed at the same time, it was the seven-year-old who was first out of bed and eager to start our first morning in Italy. We made a quick visit to the shop we had visited the previous evening to get the food for our breakfast, and then we decided to visit Lucca inside its city walls.

We had to enter the city from below and climb up to the ramparts. There are lions guarding the entry points:

From the ramparts you can see the mountains in the distance. They stretch around every side of Lucca:

The ramparts themselves are very green:

When we headed in we soon found the cathedral:

The streets were very narrow and flanked by beautifully coloured buildings. What really caught our eyes was the Guinigi Tower appearing in the sky, with its rooftop trees catching us totally by surprise:

We reached our target soon afterwards, the Roman Ampitheatre. Although it looked quite pretty with its modern look, I think we might have preferred seeing the original version:

It was a really hot day, so we decided to spend some time having a few drinks in one of the pretty sidestreets before heading back to the train station to travel to Viareggio:

The train journey to Viareggio was entirely uneventful and over before we knew it. It was then a simple matterof moving in the one direction that didn't have mountains to find the beach. We were lucky that even though the day was hot, as far as the locals were concerned summer was over and we had it to ourselves, near enough. Matt and Alfie headed straight to the sea to dip their toes into the Mediterranean:

Alfie was quite happy to entertain himself on the beach:

And whilst Alfie worked off his excess energy running around the beach, Matt and I enjoyed a nice sea-view whilst giving the local barlady some custom in the off-season:

We headed home and settled down for the night knowing we'd be leaving our apartment in the morning and heading to Florence.