From the street, one would have never guessed such a magnificent church lays inside. Lucca was full of pleasant surprises like this.
The Arno in Florence
The Arno in Pisa
In the Middle Ages, the riverside was full of warehouses, and cargo boats lined the quays.
Nowadays, the river is no longer a means of transport, except for the crew of Peregrinus, anchored a couple of miles downstream.
In the Arno
A small stream winds through Tuscany,
which up in Falterona hath its rise,
and is not sated by a hundred miles.
——— Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio XIV, 1320
The Arno might be, as Dante says, a little stream at its source in Mount Falterona, but it is nonetheless Italy's second largest river (after the Tiber), and most importantly, the river that runs through Florence and down through Pisa.
Before the railroads were built, goods and merchandise arrived in Florence via the river; a dream trip no longer possible because of flood control dams and bridges along the way.
Peregrinus sailed into the Arno on 22 July 2016 and anchored for five gorgeous dats just 2.2 miles short of Pisa city centre, as no further upriver navigation was possible because of some low-laying overhead power cables across the water.
Viareggio
This is the town where they build the Perini Navi ketches, like Peregrinus, only a tad larger. We've frequently seen these boats on both sides of the Atlantic.
Snow in summer
Not really.
The white in these mountains, visible from far away, is all white Carrara marble, massively exploited since Roman times, and evidently, inexhaustible.
Fish tales
Peregrinus has three times come across submarines going in or out of port. In the United States, we came across a submarine coming into Norfolk, escorted by machine-gun toting fast boats screaming on the radio every few seconds that anyone within a sizeable radius of them would be summarily shot; we had to get out of the channel. All US Navy submarines are nuclear, and this one was going very, very fast, leaving a tall water plume behind its vertical stabiliser —and of course energy consumption is not an issue for these fish. This must be standard practice around these parts, because we heard the screams on the radio a couple of other times as we sailed the lower Chesapeake.
In France, sailing by Toulon, a submarine quietly passed our stern at modest speed. This was certainly a small (74-metres) Rubis-class nuclear-powered attack sub, as this is their home port, and one hopes the large SSB Triomphant-class don't let themselves be seen. No visible escort.
When we were at anchor in Le Grazie, near the naval facilities at La Spezia, we saw this Todaro-class submarine, 56-metres, possibly Scirè, leaving port. Italy, birthplace of Enrico Fermi, abandoned nuclear technology in 1991, so these non-nuclear powered subs have a top surface speed of 12 knots, and are the top Italian underwater weapons. Escort? Nah. Several local fishermen actually sped right by it.
Porto Venere
And the renowned port of Venere,
safe under any wind and capacious enough
for all the fleets that under heaven exist
———Francesco Petrarca,
Itinerarium breve de Ianua usque ad Ierusalem et Terram Sanctam (1358)
Vernazza
A fortress, first recorded in 1080, organised by the marquesses of Genoa under the Holy Roman Empire, to defend the coast against Moor pirates.
Now in the heart of the Cinque Terre, and assaulted, not by Saracens, but by tourists.
In the Cinque Terre
Down the stairway I have come, hand in hand with you, at least a million steps
And now that you are absent there is a void in each stair
Like one, so our trip has been all too short
——— E. Montale, on a plaque on the staircase to the cemetery,
Monterosso al Mare