Shackalackaboomboom

I'm certain that I didn't mention this in last weeks writings -- because I didn't do any! (nothing truly significant happened last week) -- but yesterday I went to Pisa and Lucca on another whirlwind tour. It was quite enjoyable, but just as wearying as my trip to Vinci last week. Let me tell you, my professor can WALK. Apparently she goes jogging after our 12 hour trips, because the exercise of power walking all day isn't enough. Crazy. Anyway.

I have already been to Pisa and Lucca, back when I was 16 and visiting Italy with the girl choir. I had shorter hair back then, and was about 50 pounds lighter, but Pisa was pretty much the same. I got to see quite a lot more of it this time, though, and it was pretty cool. We were pounced upon by African men selling knock off designer items, which was very annoying and creepy. For some strange reason they shouted "shackalackaboomboom!" at us every time we went by.*

FIRST we went to the baptistery, which, like the bell tower, leans, but not nearly as much. Inside we saw the pulpit carved by Nicola Pisano, and a cool acoustical demonstration -- the baptistery is, whether by accident or design, made so that someone standing in the middle and making sounds sounds like several people. It was rather cool, although I wish that the demonstrator had been a real singer and not just some chick.

The baptistery and the Pisano pulpit.

After the baptistery, we went to the Camposanto (literally holy field), which is apparently the oldest modern graveyard in the world. Pretty cool. It was more of a building than a yard, the graves were set into the marble floor rather than in the ground. All around there were frescoes, but they were so damaged that you really couldn't tell up from down, or angel from demon. The building had been accidentally bombed in WWII -- a miscalculation, as the bombers meant to get the train station nearby. Anyway, restorers did the best they could with the walls, but we still couldn't see much. There were also a lot of cool graves, especially this one of a professor in the nearby university, with an allegorical representation of Lady Knowledge reclining on his tomb. She was very pretty. I liked her face a lot. 

The courtyard of the graveyard!

Standing inside of the cool Gothic architrave. Here you can see some of my fellow students, whose names I don't know.

The sadly ruined frescoes...

This is what the buildings looked like after the bombing.

Knowledge, with a star in her hair, relaxing on some books atop a professor's grave.

AFTER the graveyard and a short visit to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (museum of the works of the cathedral), and then finally broke for lunch. I had a strange but pretty enjoyable meal with my friend Sarah, our TA Jessie, a girl named Maggie, and Professor Helen. I had pizza. When I was paying, I accidentally said "I had the salmon pizza" instead of "I had the salami pizza". I felt pretty ridiculous -- one of those things that clings to you and makes you cringe.** Sarah and I went for gelato afterwards, and the nice, cute gelato vendor spoke to me entirely in Italian. I knew he could speak English because he switched once he realized Sarah was struggling -- which means that he actually allowed me to use Italian! It wasn't just from necessity! That was a good feeling.

Inside the Cathedral Works Museum we saw the...sketches for the frescoes in the Camposanto. I can't remember exactly what they're called, or how they were made, but the place was FULL of these huge sketches, the same size as the frescoes themselves. It was pretty cool.

Also inside the museum were costumes from various movies set in Renaissance Italy. This is a Juliet dress from "some Romeo and Juliet movie", as my professor called it. Super helpful, Helen. Apparently they used these frescoes as references for making the dresses and other costumes -- cool, huh?

The belltower, viewed from an angle so that you can't see the lean. HAH I got you! Apparently there was a plan back in the 1990s that someone proposed to counteract the lean and keep the tower from falling down: build an identical tower leaning in the opposite direction, and chain them together, to act as counter weights for each other. How silly! Some people went up in the leaning tower, but I didn't really have any interest in paying 15 euro for it, so I stayed on the ground.

After all this adventuring, we left Pisa for Lucca. Everyone slept on the bus, including me, but the 45 minute ride was really not enough to restore me to fully functioning status. That was okay, though, because Lucca was wonderful. I didn't realize how awesome it would be to see parts of the city that I remembered from my last trip. The central piazza, the merry-go-round that I had my picture taken in front of, and several churches that we may or may not have had concerts in. Unfortunately, my camera died just as we got into the city, so I was able only to grab a few pictures.

The facade of San Frediano, a church that I'm positive we visited on the girl choir trip. I think our hotel was right nearby, and I think I glimpsed a lobby that I remember.

The central piazza, Piazza dell'Anfiteatro. Top Gear actually did a special in Lucca, so it was a pleasure not only to walk over ground that I had already traversed, but that had also been beneath the shoes of James May, Richard Hammond, and Jeremy Clarkson.

We also visited the churches of St. Giovanni and St. Reparata. St. Reparata was AWESOME because there's a huge Roman excavation underneath it, which you can access from the apse and amble about inside. There were about six different buildings whose foundations they could recognize, dating back to a Roman house around the first century AD. That's pretty cool. There was also a Roman bath complex, an early Christian church, a later Christian church, all of which was topped by the current Christian church, in Romanesque style and dating from the 1100s, I believe. We then visited St. Michele, which had medieval graffiti on some of the columns (or so the historians claim) which depicted an elephant and some fish. An elephant? Awesome.

After we had seen all of these churches and ruins and graffiti, we stopped for cake. Vegetable cake. It was actually pretty good. St. Zita***, the saint whose body we actually got to see, in all of its strangely well preserved glory, is said to have come up with this recipe. It's only found in Lucca, and it's made with pine nuts, which are very expensive in Italy. Yummy. 

Here's another thing about Lucca: it felt so much more comfortable to me than Florence, and I'm not super sure why. It may have been because there were lots of children and dogs there. The birth rate in Italy has been sinking over the years, and there are very very few kids in Florence. Lucca was overflowing with 'em! They were all really cute and spoke in squeaky Italian voices. There were nearly as many dogs as there were children, which was really nice to see. They just ran around and played with children, sniffing and people and then galumphing back to their owners.

It would be super awesome to have a little dog with me here in Italy. I'd be like "hey, Small Dog, let's have an adventure!" or even "let's go to the grocery store!" and Small Dog would say "yes I love doing things with you let's go!!!", like any excited dog would say. As I was an Adventure Assistant for much of my childhood, I know the importance of the role.

I think in my later life, I'd love to do a lot of travelling, and perhaps live in a different country for a while...but I don't ever want to do it alone. Friend, sister, boyfriend, parent, I don't care who it'd be, but so many of my fears and worries would be smoothed over if I had an Adventure Assistant.

Maybe I'll just get a Small Dog.

*I hate being a tourist.

**(four years later) "I can't believe I said that!"

***Here's her story. She was a pious girl who worked in the kitchens of this rich guy, and she gave out the extra bread that he didn't eat to the poor. When he confronted her about it, saying "What's in your apron?!" she just said "Oh it's just flowers teehee" and MIRACULOUSLY IT WAS. So now they have a flower holiday in Lucca where they cover her tomb in flowers and put them in the central piazza. St. Zita was also a big baker, so she's a patron saint of recipes. Like green vegetable cake.