Toscana--our trip April 21-24

So the volcano ruined out London trip. Bitterly disappointed, we have to explain to Aryn that because a big cloud is over London, the planes can’t fly there and we’ll have to go see Peter Pan later.

“A big cloud?” she asks, with a three-year-old’s comprehension. “A big Captain Hook cloud is naughty and we can’t go to London and see John and Wendy and Peter Pan and Tinkerbell?”

“Right.” Plus or minus.

So plan B. I have the days off, so… what? Lake Como? Venice? Sicily? I start to make plans.

“I think we should go to Florence,” Julie says when I get home from work. “You’ve been wanting to buy a leather bag, and I want to go see Lucca,” another Tuscan town. And Pisa, and Montepulciano, because that’s where they filmed part of Twilight: New Moon.

Yes. We’ll go see the Twilight town.

Lucca, birthplace of Puccini, is still surrounded by a giant wall. Our B&B, Centro Storico, lends us bikes (“Si, my bike has baby seat”) and we ride atop the wall. Before our first revolution (you can ride around the whole of the old city on the wall), we resolve to buy a bike for Julie and a baby seat for Aryn. After our second revolution, after a few stops for Aryn to play on a few public playgrounds, we’re no longer bitter we can’t be in London. We love this town, and our lovely B&B has conquered Julie’s aversion to cappuccino and converted her to coffee. She now enjoys a cup many mornings.



The train from Lucca to Florence takes about an hour and a half. They say the bus is faster, but we don’t listen. We decide to climb Giotto’s Tower, because it’s Firenze and the view is worth every drop of sweat. Of course, we shrug, we can carry Aryn when she gets tired.

She never does. Climbing past kids twice her age, leaving them in her dust, she hoofs it up the tower like a champ. We barely keep up. Three-fourths of the way up, they display a giant bell. She runs over to it and starts trying to lift it up, though it’s got to outweigh her by an order of 100.

And that’s when the working bells start chiming noon.

I wouldn’t recommend climbing the tower at noon. But, if you find yourself about three meters from the bells when they start to ring the time out across the Tuscan hills, the narrow stairway, encased in stone, offers a tiny bit more protection than the open air.

From the top I can see the city, practically bleeding art. I see the hills Mona Lisa smiles above, I see the river, I see Firenze and the near reaches of Toscana. I see the descendents of the white Guelfs, Dante’s clan, who will later sell me a leather shoulder bag.

Speaking of leather shoulder bags, I’m glad I’m not a Chinese tourist. Even the innocent ones are thrown out of the leather shops as spies. Ah, the world of fashion.


It’s raining when we go to Pisa. It’s raining AND there’s a train strike, which I thought had been cancelled due to the grounding of every flight in Europe. So after taking a cab to the train station, we take one back to the B&B and hop in the car. We fight the crowds, we take a picture, we leave. The cathedral, whose bells the Leaning Tower carries, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.


Montepulciano, which my guidebook mentions as popular with wine lovers, turns out to be the best detour ever. Expecting to simply drive to the centro, take an emo picture holding our copy of New Moon (yes, we packed it for the photo op), and continue home, our mouths drop at the beauty gleaming from this Tuscan hilltop. We stroll through the narrow, pedestrian-only streets. Actually, we climb the streets. All roads lead up in this town centered on the top of a hill. Winding around and around, we can’t keep up with every narrow archway begging us to detour, every little stairway leading somewhere else, somewhere amazing. Every narrow lane we take is a win, every detour a new discovery for us as we hike the steep streets to the piazza from the movie.