Lucca Day 2


We woke up and enjoyed a nice breakfast buffet at our hotel that was unusual for Italy - it had scrambled eggs and bacon! All of us enjoyed a nice helping of both.
    The weather was in the low 50s and cloudy as we headed back into the city for more sightseeing. We found a few more medieval churches and some beautiful town squares. Puccini was born here, and they have a nice bronze statue of him in a small park. Dad's leg was bothering him, so we headed back to the hotel for lunch.
     At 2:30 we met up with Claudio, one of Dad's family that still lived in Bruce's Grandparent's town of Colli di Compito which is a few kilometers sourtheast of Lucca. We piled into his car and first headed into Pisa to check out the Leaning Tower and the beautiful cathedral and baptismal building. There were tons of people there, but we were able to get some good pictures.
     We headed over to Colli di Compito and enjoyed the beautiful scenery on the way. The town is even farther up into the mountains, and we were amazed on how Claudio was able to easily navigate the twisting and narrow streets to his house.
      We met his parents, Luigi and Piera, and toured their beautiful home. It has a spectacular view of the valley below. We then walked back down the road and met up with Silvana and Narchisio, more relatives on Bruce's grandmother's side. In fact, they still lived in the family home - the same home his grandmother was raised in. Dad hadn't been it the house since his last visit back in 1953, and couldn't believe how much it had been remodeled over the years.
       I guess that I should mention that only Claudio and another cousin, Barbara, spoke english, and it was limited. Dad speaks broken Italian, and with me helping out in Spanish, we we all able to communicate (most of the time).
        We looked at a bunch of old pictures they had of the  family (including Dad as a young man) and listened to many interesting family stories. As the afternoon went on, Dad's Italian got better, and so did Claudio and Barbara's english.
       At 7:30, we headed back to Claudio's house for dinner. We were joined by even more relatives until the house was full of people. Dinner started with traditional pasta with meat sauce, followed by a bunch of assorted pizzas. Everything was delicious. Naturaly, we were encoraged to "manga!" and we tried to be good guests and ate too much. We finally all had to say "enough" after they brought out an orange almond cake, which we could barely eat a slice.
        Soon it was 9:30 pm and we had to leave. We all had a great time meeting our Italian family, and we're sorry to have to go.
The Baptismal, Cathedral, and Tower of Pisa

Poor Engineering and Quality Control.........

Selfie with Claudio

The church across the street from Dad's Mother's house

Claudio talking with Dad

The view from Claudio's house
Old paisans talking

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