Recycling is prolific in Tuscany. I don’t know if it is in all of Italy. We saw a news story about garbage piling up for months in the streets of Naples. They have nowhere to put the trash and they don’t recycle! Apparently the locals have resisted a landfill for years. It’s getting to the point that the U.N. might sue Italy to force them to put a waste management system in place. After the trip, we talked to a guy who had lived outside of Naples for three years working for NATO. The trash from his country house was never taken to a landfill; it was dumped in a nearby field!
In Tuscany, there are four types of bins: containers (all kinds – plastic, glass, metal); cardboard, paperboard and paper; organic (like a compost pile for the whole city!!); and undifferentiated (everything else – like a regular trash can.) I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the organic material bin! They almost always have the different types of bins together – not just the “everything else” trash bin by itself. The “undifferentiated” one was the best find of all – it clearly says on it: no containers, paper/cardboard or organic material! That’s the mindset we need to promote in the US – dumpsters aren’t catch-all’s, they are a last resort and nothing that is recyclable should be put in them.
We took the train to Lucca, and it took forever! The trains sat for way too long at some stations. Travel by Italian rail is not as good as it is in France and Switzerland. The train cars are dirtier and can be slow or delayed more often. Our introduction to this country was getting stuck on a train for an extra hour.
The churches in Lucca are even older than in Siena. We actually went inside a church that was started in the 8th century! Another in the same town was from the 10th century, and another from as long ago as the 12th century. These churches had been changed around and added onto many times over the centuries, and now a lot of renovation work is underway. Most of what you can see now is not the original, but various bits and pieces remain of the original structures and artwork. I can’t imagine how those large churches were built back then – especially as long ago as the 8th century?! – the 700s!? That church was made of what looked like concrete blocks with a stone flooring (very crude, not like the 13th century Siena church with very deliberate, neat flooring.) I wonder how they made their building blocks, what raw material specifically was used. Also what they used to keep their stone walls intact and the stones from crumbling, and what they used for plaster on their buildings/where they found the material.
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We got up early this morning so we could go visit another Tuscan walled down, Lucca. The trip was going to involve a total of 4 trains and 2 buses! We were out of the door at 0840 and caught the bus to Poggibonsi with no problems. When we got to the train station, there were about 25 minutes left before the next train to Firenze, so we just hung out on the platform until then. The train ended up being a set of three direct drive DMU’s that actually shifted gears while accelerating, like a bus. We arrived in Florence at about 1050 but the next train to Lucca wasn’t until 1140. First, we tried to make train reservations for getting to Slovenia to no avail, and then bought a sandwich from a shop to hold us over till lunch in Lucca. Well, it was a good thing we got a snack because it was a slow, local train that didn’t get to Lucca until 1320! By this time, we were starving and straight into town looking for food, not paying much attention to the immense brick wall of fancy Duomo along the way. After a long search for a restaurant, we sat down at a bar/restaurant, but moved to another nearby one when it was obvious it would be a slow ordeal there. The meal happened very quickly, we barely started on the Caprese salad before my tortellini and her lasagna came out. It was an excellent meal for cheap, with a nice view of an old cathedral on the central square. Despite this, we still only had about an hour to look around before we had to be back on a train at 1632. We packed as much as we could into that time, seeing the inside of three churches, a government palazzo, and several piazzas. It was particularly interesting to see the varying complexity and completeness of the churches. The train back to Firenze pulled just when we got up on the platform…perfect. The connection in Florence was only 12 minutes, and the connection to bus in Poggibonsi was about 20 minutes, (despite some confusion about which bus was ours) so we were back in San Gimignano by 2000. It was already time for dinner so we looked high and low for a decent restaurant that didn’t require reservations. We settled for an outside table in the shadow of the Torre Grosse that was steeply tilted (like everything else in this town). The food was great though, I had a prosciutto brushetta (the real deal!) and excellent vegetarian lasagna, and B had an interesting salad with bread in it, and spinach ravioli. It was getting dark, and chilly, so we went home at about 2100 (only after B got some much awaited tiramisu and cinnamon flavored gelato for dessert!)
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