I have an Italian name but can’t speak a word of the language and have only been to the country once. I moved from New York to Ireland when I was young and I think of the United States as my ancestral homeland. Italy, where my great-grandparents were born, feels like almost like a family myth.
My aunt Kate, on the other hand, adores Italy and visits from the US each year. Lately my wife Michelle and I have wanted to travel by slower, less polluting means than flying, so when we opt to join her in Lucca for a family trip, we do so travelling by land and sea from our home in Tipperary.
Long days on ferries and trains are tiring, but I love travelling like this, and feeling that my arrival in a city has been hard-won and that I have come great distances to get there. It also means getting to see whole expanses of Europe through a train window.
We leave Dublin Port on an early sailing from Holyhead. The day blurs by: lunch in sunshine at Holyhead, a long train to London, dinner at King’s Cross, a packed evening Eurostar.
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We’re in our budget hotel on the edge of Paris by midnight. The next morning I am hungry to explore a city I haven’t visited properly in years.
The morning is cool and overcast, the white sky mirrors the cut limestone buildings along the Seine. Michelle and I wander around the Latin Quarter, Notre-Dame and Île Saint-Louis. The streets are crammed with other tourists but central Paris still exudes serenity.
We meet an old friend of mine for lunch on Rue Saint-Honoré. Jason left Dublin for Paris 10 years ago. It was supposed to be for six months, but here he is a decade later, still in love with the place. I feel bad that I haven’t seen him in all that time, but travelling slowly means I am passing through Paris more now, allowing us to reconnect.
He walks us back from Place de la Nation to our hotel in Saint-Mandé and gives us a potted tour, pointing out columns where people were guillotined during the French Revolution, and how the street signs change subtly as you move from Paris proper into the suburban districts. He is amazed that Henry V of England died just a few streets away at the Château de Vincennes.
That evening, we take his advice and head to the bobo 11th arrondissement, where a roller disco is in full swing on Place Léon Blum. Then we wander past the bars and restaurants on Canal Saint Martin and have a late supper in a quiet cafe.
Next morning we board the TGV for Turin, a journey of about six hours. After Chambéry the hills swell into mountains and the train crosses the Alps. It’s warm that afternoon in Turin. We have drinks outside a bar in the scruffy, energetic neighbourhood of San Salvario, walk through Parco del Valentino by the Po at dusk, wander the city’s shaded arcades. Over 24 hours Turin reveals itself to be a lovely city, one geared more to eating, drinking, and walking than sightseeing.
Our train shuttles down the coast of Liguria and Tuscany the next day, but mostly it tunnels through the landscape, so there are only snatched views of an iridescent Tyrrhenian Sea. When we arrive in Lucca that night Kate feels unwell, and with Michelle being pregnant, there are no embraces.
This will be our first time seeing Kate since Rome last spring, and after growing up on the far side of the Atlantic from her, I cherish this nascent tradition of meeting in Italy each year. But we don’t get to catch up properly until the next day, outside a restaurant on the remarkable Piazza Anfiteatro, an ellipse of colourful 19th-century homes built on the site of second-century Roman amphitheatre.
Kate adores Italy, seems at home here, loves showing us her favourite parts. After lunch we wander the old city and adjust to her slower walking pace, which checks my tendency to rush things. Lucca is a modern city with a population of 90,000, but only a fraction live inside the old walled town. This is a maze of narrow streets and alleys, and an absolute pleasure to get lost in.
When the early October sun reaches 23 degrees, Michelle and I find shade among Gingkoes and Sequoias in the city’s secluded botanic gardens. One evening at sunset we jog the broad path atop the city walls, where locals stroll under the sweet chestnuts. But it’s at night I come to love Lucca especially, when the main thoroughfares are still, and the lamplit lanes and quiet piazzas are utterly beguiling.
Tuscany wallops our senses. Michelle and I take a long hike through chestnut trees and hill villages in the Apuan Alps, stopping to swim in a clear, deep pool under an abandoned mill. We attend an opera recital – Puccini was from Lucca – where ecstatic voices ring around the cavernous Church of San Giovanni. Kate joins us for meals but is happy to take things slower, unperturbed by our need to sightsee. It’s her fourth time in Lucca.
On one of our last days we all drive into the hills of Chianti. Kate wants to show us the best of Tuscany, has carefully picked a restaurant and a winery to visit. I’m unsure initially whether it is worth braving the three-hour round trip on the rather laissez-faire Italian motorway.
The day turns out picture-perfect. Clear sun, a cool breeze, and the best bruschetta and Spaghetti al pomodoro I could imagine on the terrace of La Volpanera, a rural restaurant overlooking a Tuscan scene so classic it verges on cliche: rolling olive groves, rows of Italian cypress, an elegant stone farmhouse.
The nearby Antinori winery proves an astonishing architectural experience, with its vast folds of weathered steel and sweeping expanses of clay and brick, built into the Tuscan hillside. There is even a working vineyard on the roof. The wine is good too. We depart sun-tired and happy.
We leave Kate with warm embraces at Pisa Airport and promise to see each other next year. As much as Michelle and I would love to return by train, we have to be back at work, and don’t have the budget to return overland. Travelling by ferry and train from Dublin to Lucca cost us €243 each, our flight home €129, an unfortunate reality of slow travel.
But coming overland meant I could see an old friend, visit cities I would usually not, and start a tentative tradition of travelling to Italy by train each year to see my aunt. Towards the end of our time in Lucca, I also realise that Michelle and I will look back on this as one of the last trips we shared before becoming parents.
Over breakfast on one of our last days, Kate tells us about my great-grandparents, Donato and Vicenza, who came from the same small town in Puglia, but only met in New York, where they had both emigrated. Donato had been a lawyer in Italy, and felt embarrassed to work in a factory in New York, she said, but still dispensed legal advice to his immigrant colleagues.
Hearing about my great grandparents’ lives, which I had known little about, felt like cold water over my face. I was embarrassed that this was only my second time in Italy, that the only Italian I could muster was a stilted “buonasera”, that I had never seen my great grandparents’ hometown, in fact had never felt any interest in visiting until now.
But as Kate told us about the train ride there, from Naples across the Apennines and into the heart of the Mezzogiorno, the dream of a future journey, hopefully with the next generation in tow, was clarifying in my mind.
