VIAREGGIO & LUCCA (starring Alex Kennedy)

Friday afternoons are our favourite; for me, it means we are off on another exciting adventure and for Anna, it means she gets to sleep haha.

This time, we were off to Viareggio, a seaside resort on the coast of the Tyrrhenian sea, well known for the Carnivale of Viareggio, the second biggest in Italy behind the one in Venice.

Immediately as you arrive, you can tell that the carnival is everything to the city, even at dinner on Friday night, the restaurants walls were covered in carnival posters.

After a great seafood meal, we went walking around the port, admiring all of the expensive boats and then   found a gelateria that Lapo from Anna's school told us about (he is from Viareggio).

We stayed at Hotel Liberty, which was in a perfect spot right on the main street, across the road from the beach.

The main street was a great spectacle, full of 1920's style buildings on one side and on the other side was a huge promenade littered with cafes, restaurants, bars and shops, that stood between the road and the beach.

The beach was set-up for the tourist season (where many Italians come during July and August), divided into private "stabilimenti" where you could hire cabins, umbrella's, lounges and even get drinks at the bar dedicated to that section of the beach.  Luckily for us, as it wasn't quite tourist season yet, we didn't have to pay to enter!

Alex Kennedy (who had been working for Deloitte on the island of Jersey, off the west coast of France) had finished up work and was on a one month holiday and after a few days in Rome, he came to meet us, which was great.

As soon as he arrived on Saturday morning, we were off to the beach.  Although it didn't seem too hot, later on that afternoon we would realise that the sun was still burning!

After a few hours in the sun, catching up on old times, we went off for lunch at a great little fish n' chip shop that was actually a small boat on the canal.  I was happy with fried prawns and fries and Anna and Alex went for the anchovies, yuk.

The promenade is at least a few km long and in the afternoon, there is only one thing to do, a "passegiata" (afternoon stroll).  We walked as far as our feet could take us, stopping to look at shops along the way, before retiring to our room for a short rest - Well Anna and Alex rested, I'll rest when I return home to Melbourne!

By the time we started having showers, we realised that the sun was in fact a lot stronger than we thought and we all had a nice red tinge about us.  Unfortunately I was wearing sunglasses the whole day and so it looked as if I had gone skiing!

We went back to the bar on the beach where we had spent half the day for a few cocktails and some antipasti, the bar owner was a top bloke and we had fun chatting to him.

We had dinner booked for 9pm at a restaurant on the promenade as the night before we had seen people eating pasta and prawns, which looked delicious.  A bottle of red from Montepulciano accompanied a great meal.

The next morning the weather decided to do the complete opposite and absolutely bucketed down.  We walked up the promenade for breakfast at a well known cafe (frequented by Giacomo Puccini who had a holiday house in Viareggio) and we stopped off at a few shops.  See below for Alex's new undies!

We left before lunch time on Sunday and headed for our next destination, Lucca.  Hidden behind huge 15m imposing walls, it is a gem of a city.  It's highlight are the walls themselves; 4km in length, the ramparts are crowned with a wide tree-lined footpath that looks down onto the town and out towards the Apuane Alps.

Alex and I stayed in Ostello San Frediano (see below), a huge 141 bed hostel that used to be an old monastery.

We unpacked and then set out to explore the town.  Our joy at the sun coming out was short lived as once again it started to rain heavily.

Lucca has one of Tuscany's loveliest Piazza's, the oval shaped Piazza Anfiteatro, named after the amphitheatre that was located there in ancient times.  This was the perfect place for lunch.

After lunch we continued walking around, it was such a great place.  We covered part of the city walls and then went to the square where there is a statue of Giacomo Puccini, the great opera composer who was born (in 1858) and raised in Lucca.

Anna had to leave us as she needed to be back in Florence for school on Monday, so we kindly offered to walk her back to the station haha. If only we weren't so kind..........the rain came down like I have never seen rain before, even with umbrella's we all got completely saturated, and it didn't stop until just before Alex and I got back to our hostel.

After a well needed hot shower, we got changed into dry clothes and headed out for a few refreshments of the beer variety.  We met some older Australians at the first bar who acted like our parents and tried to tell us that we weren't wearing enough clothing, so we left that bar for another one which was fortunate because it had the AC Milan v Inter Milan soccer match on tv.
A few more beers and then we went to a tiny restaurant (only 4 tables!) for dinner.  We didn't need to look at the food menu, all we wanted was steak!

We demolished our meals and the bottle of wine, but we didn't want to leave as we were having a funny conversation with the waiter and two English women at the next table, so we stayed for a while and had a few shots of limoncello and some weird local shot that had pine nuts in it.

The next morning we were a little seedy, so we went off for a long walk around the city walls to try and freshen up.

Then we decided to climb the highest tower in Lucca, the "Torre Delle Ore" which gets its name from the fact that it is an old clock tower - in working order since it was built in 1390!!

The climb up was less than fun, not because of how steep it wear, but because of how unstable the wooden staircase was, I am surprised it carried AK's huge frame!

It was then back to our hostel to get our things and then off to the train station and back to Florence. Unfortunately we had a 1.5hr wait, so we occupied ourselves with whatever we could.