We exited our regional train from Pisa and decided to walk the 10 minutes to our hotel, the Marriott Grand Universe.
It looks great, but we ended up in the smallest hotel room we’ve ever experienced.
We would have preferred a double bed and a little more space than this king bed provided. We worked hard not to knock the TV set off the wall as we inched by. The view of Piazza Napoleone from our window, although pleasing, wasn’t worth the walk.
The comedian who said his hotel room was so small that he had to go outside to change his mind was thinking of a room like this.
Nicely furnished, nightly turn-down service, rooftop Champagne bar (we didn’t indulge), but no place to sit.
We managed to pick up tickets for the concert we were attending, and found a little restaurant nearby, Pan di Strada,for a quick and tasty meal outside next to a propane heater.
The marvelous one-hour concert of favorite opera arias featured two sopranos. The acoustics in this small chapel were just about perfect.
Lucca is the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini, but we didn’t make it inside his childhood home, now a museum, due to its quirky opening hours.
We had to settle for admiring his statue in the nearby piazza.
It was raining when we arrived, and raining when we left, but we seldom needed our travel umbrellas during our stay.
We did enough walking each day to almost deserve our meals, returning for Sunday lunch to a previous favorite, L’isola Che Non C’era, The Island that Wasn’t There, Neverland in the Italian version of Peter Pan.
Is that whimsical or what? The food was excellent.
We dined out once or twice a day and experienced nothing less than a good meal, always with friendly service. Our most expensive meal was close to a hundred Euros, and our cheapest was twenty-five,
Yelp and TripAdvisor show a lot of 4.5-star and up eateries, and the standards seemed pleasingly high to us.
Stella Polare…
Pizzeria Pellegrini, our 25-Euro dinner that we couldn’t finish…
Our final dinner was at a cute little wine bar, featuring a house-made bean (and much more) soup, and a shared charcuterie board.
We chose to have the hotel’s continental breakfast this morning. These starches, some yogurt, and Cappuccinos set us back €15 each, but we’re riding trains much of the toward the Rome Airport so it was worth breaking our no-breakfast routines.
We managed just fine on a regional train from Lucca to Florence.
Our high speed train to Rome Termini was 20 minutes late, but we’re now hitting 230kph / 140mph in luxury.
From Termini it’s back on the Leonardo Express to FCO and the Rome Airport Hilton before tomorrow’s flight to London.
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