16 April – La Dolce Vita (again)

This afternoon, after a slow Saturday morning, we headed out on our bikes to check the car.  Parking in this city is at a premium and you can only park inside the city walls if you pay (blue parking spaces) or if you have a resident’s permit (yellow parking spaces).  Both are hard to come by, especially at weekends.  Outside the city walls you also have white parking spaces which are free for all but as you can imagine these are few and far between.  We found one the day we arrived and have been worried about moving the car since!  But it’s only a short bike ride to make sure everything is ok.

There has been a lot of activity in the streets in the last 12 hours here in Lucca and as we cycled out towards the wall the reason became clear.  It is the third weekend in the month and Lucca holds a big antiques fair in the streets and piazzas around the centre where we live.  It is apparently the biggest antiques fair in Italy and as we dodged between the crowds and stalls on our bikes it was easy to see why. So after checking the car we spent an afternoon wandering the market before settling down to people watch and sip wine at a nearby piazza.