Lucky Lucca

Today was Jed’s last day walk­ing with us. We got our­selves up and ready to go in the camper and left when Roger and Ginny arrived, refreshed from some indul­gence a la italiano.

We had some bursts of high­way, but mostly calm sec­ondary roads or tracks through the for­est, chest­nut and olive and cypress and the occa­sional banana tree (appar­ently for show rather than for fruit). Wild mint and oregano still sprout up every­where. The high­est peaks of the Tus­can coun­try­side were off in the dis­tance, but we went up and down gen­tle hills and in and out of a few more stony vil­lages. The weather was lovely once again. We plopped down by a mod­est mau­soleum to eat lunch, then made our way down out of the hills till we reached the river that flows past Lucca. We fol­lowed it the rest of the way in.

There was, at last, another episode in the ran­dom acts of hos­pi­tal­ity. As we rounded a bend by a soc­cer field with a ram­shackle bar-café next door, an old gent in a car started shout­ing at us, albeit in a friendly fash­ion. After some exchanges in our hor­ri­ble pid­gin Italian-French-Spanish, he invited us for cof­fee. A cou­ple dozen more old gents sat around inside and out, dis­cussing some­thing or other loudly and intensely. There was a lov­ingly ren­dered draw­ing in col­ored pen­cil of Fausto Coppi, the record-setting Ital­ian cyclist, hang­ing framed on the wall. We ordered our respec­tive drinks and then he left us to drink them. We enjoyed the bemused stares from the assem­bled company.

After some logis­ti­cal coor­di­na­tion with the camper half of our team, we walked into Lucca, which—like Nördlin­gen in Ger­many, a city we passed through about a hun­dred years ago—sports an intact city wall all the way around. It’s quite a charm­ing place and seems chock full of his­tory. My pre­vi­ous asso­ci­a­tion with it was solely from the first line of War and Peace, “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just fam­ily estates of the Buon­a­partes,” though I know this not from read­ing War and Peace but from Peanuts cartoons.

Zeke has been plead­ing to do some pil­grim walk­ing with us, so he came that last kilo­me­ter of our day’s jour­ney, and so this time he got to see where we’re stay­ing, an old con­vent at the basil­ica of San Fre­di­ano repur­posed as a hos­tel. Then the three of us and Jed grabbed some cecina, the local chick pea-flour pan­cake, to tide over our pil­grim appetites until dinner.

While wait­ing for the restau­rant to open we met another Amer­i­can cou­ple, Erv and Lois, on a two-month Euro­pean tour that ends tomor­row, so we had fun com­par­ing notes of life on the road—they too have gone from Ger­many to Italy in the past eight weeks.

Our party of six expanded to a party of eight with the arrival of our friends Mar­ion and Jonathan. They’re Amer­i­cans but live in Geneva. She works at the English-language Lutheran con­gre­ga­tion, and he as the Pro­gram Direc­tor for Peace-Building and Dis­ar­ma­ment with the World Coun­cil of Churches. They promised long ago that they’d catch up with us at some point on the pil­grim­age, and today was the day! They’ll be along for at least the next two days.

Steve Godsall-Myers says:
October 13, 2010 at 2:45 pm
It’s great to hear how peo­ple walk in and out of your walk­ing. Some­thing you can exper­inece so well on foot. By the time All Saints’ Day comes, you will have won­der­ful reflect-ions on the “com­mu­nion of saints”> Thanks for your inspir­ing jour­ney, your steps and your words along the way. Steve Godsall-Myers
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