Lucca and Prato. August 23

We caught the train to Lucca today, a familiar ride for Elise as it was her train line during her semester in Prato, but we’ll come back to this later.
Lucca is a beautiful old town in Tuscany, which is still surrounded by its Renaissance-era walls.  As soon as we go out of the train station we hired some bikes and went for a pretty ideal ride around on the walls, circling the entire town.  The views were super lovely and we stopped a few times to have a look around us. Eventually we reached the start again and rode into the maze inside. Luckily we had maps on our bikes, as our phone couldn’t find us without Internet and we did get a little bit lost. We stopped to get some gelato and walked up to a little square which Elise was determined to find again, as rather than being a square, it’s perfectly oval because it used to be the sight of a Roman Colosseum. Much smaller than the one in Rome, we assure you. But it’s pretty cool, and now there are shops, cafes and apartments that join closely together in a ring.

We got on our bikes again and rode to another part of the city, stopping at the Lucca Cathedral of Saint Martin, and had a look inside. It was sufficiently spectacular.
We rode around a while longer and then returned our bikes after 3 hours of exploring.

Note street name

We caught the train, avoiding the rain, and found ourselves in Prato! Now unfortunately, Elise had been most excited to show Ash (and re-visit herself) her favourite places to eat. We hadn’t eaten in Lucca, despite our hunger in hope that Prato would open their doors to us on a Sunday. They didn’t. Despite it being really exciting for Elise to revisit Prato and to have a look around the familiar streets, we were very disappointed to find not one place to eat! Elise supposed she must have been in Florence on weekends or back in the apartments, which we also had a little peak at. So after a trip down memory lane and boring Ash with her reminiscing, Elise pointed the way to PAM, the grocery store of everyone’s dreams during life in Prato, and we got ourselves some snacks for the train.

Greek Orthodox church and Prato Castle

Memories of past apartments

We got back in the evening and ate leftovers from our picnic.

Love A&E