Lucca

The whole festival group went to Lucca on the first Saturday to tour the town and give a concert in nearby Altopascio. This was the concert where CZ performed her solo piece.

Lucca was originally a Roman town, which explains some things about how it's laid out. Medieval Lucca grew up over the original Roman town plan, and one piazza was even built up around the ruins of amphitheater. Eventually the ruins disappeared completely but the oval shape remained. And the church called S. Michele in Foro is called that because the piazza it's next to was originally the town's Roman forum.

What this means to the observer most of all is that the streets are narrow and laid out in something like a grid with little dead ends etched into the blocks here and there. But the grid also means that some of the streets are very long. The result is that it's easy to feel disoriented. I think that if you were a child growing up in Lucca, you'd either have a great sense of direction, or have nightmares about getting lost.

The town is very pretty, though. The old town is surrounded by stone walls so thick that there's room for a park on top of them. It looks a little like Riverside Park, in our neighborhood, and people walk and ride their bikes up on the walls between evenly planted rows of trees. The town walls are surrounded by a park-like grassy area, which in turn is surrounded by through roads and villas. The photo at the beginning of this post was taken just outside the city walls.

Piazza del Mercato, where the Roman amphitheater was

One of the long outer steets of the grid

Below is the facade of the town Duomo, S. Martino. Lucca is known for its buildings in the Pisan Gothic style, that is, with rows of arched colunnades carved in frothy white marble, giving it a wedding cake look. Each column is different, so it's interesting to stand outside and look at all the permutations. Inside, however, the duomo was mostly covered in scaffolding and there were no photos allowed.

Next door to the Duomo was a church that had been desacralized during the Napoleonic occupation. It had been the town's original duomo, SS. Giovanni e Reparata. But because it was no longer a sacred space, archeologists had dug under the floor and through several layers of previous building activity--Roman baths, an early Christian baptistry, and three different medieval churches. It was a little hard to decipher all that was going on in the one hour we had to look, but it certainly got across the point that the Italians tended to build on an important site again and again. In fact, many churches in Italy have remains of previous churches in their basements, and some, like St. Peter's and the Duomo of Milan, are of religious significance and therefore open to the public.

And what is that second photo? Admittedly it's hard to see, but if you enlarge the photo and look closely, two angels are taking a girl's head away from a monster. It's a graffiti version of the legend of Sta. Reparata, a child martyr from the 3rd century and patron saint of the duomo.

In another part of town, outside S. Michele in Foro, there was a Madonna and Child in a mandorla of golden rays, and on top of the facade was an outsized angel. There was a woman in the doorway wearing a white satin veil. She had painted her face white, didn't say a word, and was collecting money in a basket. People were dropping in money seemingly without even thinking about why she was there. We don't think she had anything to do with the church, and when Bob said something to that effect to me, quietly, she moved away from the door and into the shadows.

Though similar to the Duomo of S. Martino on the outside, the Chiesa di S. Michele was very different on the inside. It had bare stone walls with only a few artworks, so it wasn't nearly as touristy. The only employee was a woman arranging flowers at the altar. I liked the atmosphere, and there were no prohibitions against photos. I almost didn't want to take any. But since the insides of these churches are very much a part of what Italy is about and I hadn't been able to take many so far, I did take a few.

A side chapel dedicated to St. Joan of Arc, one of CZ's heroines

CZ took this photo of me. I think I have a funny expression, but as I've taken so many photos of her over the years, I figure turn about is fair play and I'm posting it.

The third church we saw in Lucca was S. Frediano. It had a brilliant mosaic on its facade and this statue, among others, within.

Don't you just have to wonder what's taught at a high school named for Niccolo Machiavelli?

The last photo is of tiny Altopascio, the town where the students played after their day of touring Lucca. I just like the photo because it's so classically Tuscan, with its striped and colonnaded facade, shaped cypresses, and dark blue sky.

I think this post has too many photos, but it was hard to decide what to cut! Next up, Florence, but I don't have nearly so many photos of it.