September 18th

Yesterday, we boarded the train to Lucca for the day. Train tickets were not too expensive (like 5 euro a pop) and after a half hour->hour of sitting in a train we reached Lucca. One neat thing about Lucca is that it's one of the last walled cities kicking about and there is this very nifty wall containing the entire diameter of the city. The group of us were spat out of the train in the station just outside the walls, headed for the interior and immediately lost all cohesion as a 'group'.

Once a month in Lucca, there is a fantastic antique show, which dominated the majority of the southern part of the city. They had all sorts of random nick-nacks for sale, along with a decent amount of neat war stuff. I saw black powder pistols, helmets, trench shovels and range finders kicking around, along with other things. My personal highlight of the show was this one fellow who was selling old Milan newspapers. He had them from the entire war period and the decades afterwards and each had a water-colour painted back and front cover. Many during the war period of tanks blowing up and infantry fighting and planes crashing into Milanese building. Pretty amazing. Dianne, Iskuhi and I each got two. the group of us found a cool music store which was into rock and roll and metal, which we loitered in for a bit (going to Lucca to look at beatles and Iron Maiden swag). Had pretty tastey pizza for lunch and wandered around the rest of the town. There is a large Piazza near the northern end of the city, which has all the building curving around it. Very cool, but hard to find. There are obscure narrow streets which lead into it and we nearly walked past it twice.

Around 4pm, we stopped for some (overly priced) tea and coffee and then made our way back to the train station. We caught the 5:33pm train back to Firenze, enjoyed dinner and a rousing game of Catan and then drifted off to a late sleep. All in all, a pretty fantastic day.