Enshrouded in Turin and Beyond

Other than last night's imploding oven, things have been going well here. Sam had started to warm up the oven to bake a loaf of her excellent sourdough and we heard a loud implosion that turned out to be the inner glass panel in the oven shattering. So we're waiting on a replacement piece of glass before we can use it again. That's a bummer in these chilly almost spring days when we really enjoy roasting and baking meals and loaves.

In the past couple of weeks, we've taken a couple pleasant sojourns out of Lucca. We celebrated the 29th anniversary of our first date with a trip to Turin and we squeezed in a day trip to La Spezia and a couple of the Cinque Terre towns.

Turin Time

We wanted to take a trip to somewhere new for our anniversary but much of Italy was covered by a chilly rainstorm last weekend. We didn't want to go somewhere and shiver in soggy clothes. Luckily the forecast for Turin, despite being up north, offered a couple of days that weren't likely to be cold or wet. We booked train tickets at around 11pm on Thursday and left on a 9am train the next morning. We plotted out some things to see, do, and eat from the comfort of the train and arrived 4 hours later.

We didn't fall in love with Turin but it has some nice traits. The best thing about the place is the Egyptian Museum which is one of the best organized and displayed museums we've ever been to. And it's in a swanky old Italian building to boot. We'd go back to Turin just to revisit this amazing museum. Every city in Italy seems overloaded with apartment buildings covered with lovely, gratuitous embellishments. In Turin many of these embellishments are art nouveau and I can't help but wonder if humans will ever cover architecture with so much artwork ever again. We enjoyed wandering around random blocks to see what we might stumble upon and were rewarded over and over.

Our first night there we went to a pizza place and the young woman at the counter asked us if we're American. That's not typically a first guess about us, or for that matter, even the 4th guess. We soon learned that her mom is American and lives in Baltimore but had met her Italian dad in Turin during school. The pizza was good but pretty much from our first nibbles in Turin, we realized how good we have it in our small town. Lucca has several pastry shops that are top notch and I doubt we've ever had better focaccia than at one of the Lucca bakeries which casts its alluring salty-bready-olive oily aroma for a couple blocks from its humble door. In Turin, we decided to focus mostly on non-Italian foods, since we don't have much of that in Lucca, so we ate some Chinese, Indian, and Thai meals. On Sunday, the weather turned foul--bitter cold and pouring--and we headed back to Lucca on the cozy train.

Forty Percent of the Cinque Terre

The week before we went to Turin, we decided to take advantage of a nice weather day and we rode the train up to the Cinque Terre. That famous area is only a little over an hour away from us and we wanted to see it before it gets covered by visitors. It was a scouting trip to see if it's worth visiting in high season, which is just around the corner. We did a steep, pleasant hike between two of the towns, Rio Maggiore and Manarola. The pastel jumble of the two towns is pretty and probably seared into your memory via a screensaver or computer wallpaper. The area feels somewhat like being on a Greek island with great sea views, dramatically steep hills covered in grape vines. Despite going in mid-February, there were more tourists that we anticipated. After our hike between the towns, we realized we were too late for lunch in Rio Maggiore, so we headed to La Spezia to see if we could get a bite there. After spending a few hours walking around there, we decided we definitely need to go back to it. It's a vibrant port city and we had a few tasty treats there (and our friend Al has a restaurant recommendation we need to follow up on!)

Above Lucca

But now we're back in, and enjoying, Lucca. We ran a few errands in town this morning and went past the Guinigi Tower. It's sort of the Chrysler Building of tiny Lucca, a clear indicator of what town you're in. Instead of art deco flourishes at the top, the Guinigi Tower, which is something like 700 years old, has a garden of oak trees at the top. How cool is that?! It's a sunny day today so we spontaneously decided to go up to the top to take in the view and it's quite a view over the city and to the distant mountains. Since we can't bake bread, we'll use our time to plot a few more short trips and also look forward to seeing a few visitors within the next month!