Lucca, Italy

Lucca has to be one of the most beautiful cities in Italy. We visited last month when we were staying in Tuscany on the coast at Viareggio. It was only 15 minutes by train from our resort and was the first time that we had used the Italian railway. The service was very good, but you must remember to validate your ticket in a machine before boarding the train, which is something we do not have to do here in England.

It is a medieval walled city - you may explore inside the walls if you wish to. We chose to walk around the town at our leisure. The streets are very narrow and we were suprised to see cars driving around, although it looked like there was quite a complicated one-way system in force - so it might be better to park and walk anyway! What did surprise us was how many people were using bikes, although great to see people not using cars there were far too many really as you had to be really careful not to be run down by them!

I think this was the impressive entrance to a (ex) tobacco/cigarette/cigar factory:

Beautiful features all over the city:

I was very inspired by Lucca and hope to return one day. There has been a lack of posts recently as we have had problems with the computer. However, hopefully things are back to normal now. This has meant that I have not been able to post about the fact that it is the second anniversary of my blogging. So in the next few weeks I will be having a (belated) giveaway on here and my other blog which is also two years old.