Room with a View

For long time readers of this blog, this picture should look vaguely familiar. This is Porta San Gervasio, aka our home. Well, technically we don't live in the tower, but we are attached to it. If you look carefully at the top floor of the yellow building attached to the right tower of the gate and find the left most window that is facing perpendicular to the photo (I'll give you a moment to interpret that)....that's our apartment. Or more specifically, that's the window of our kitchen.

When we moved in we thought it was cool that we had a place attached to this amazing historic structure. As it turned out, the street that runs along in front of the gate is a rather important street and tends to be a place where lots of things happen.

Here's a view out that window on a normal day. You can see a tower off to right of this shot. If you have really good eyes, you can see Arya and my buddy Jeff walking along the street mid-picture. Also notice in the bottom left of this shot you can see a little area right where the river goes under street. There's a fountain there where we filled up our water bottles several times a week (the tap water is fine, but the fountain water is better!)

During the year, we would often be surprised by hearing noise out that window. Here a few of the things we saw out the window this year.

A marching band (you can see the fountain now on the right)!

Floods of cosplayers during the Comics and Games festival. This picture doesn't even begin to do justice the number and types of characters we saw.

A wedding celebration! That family was there for about 10 minutes. They did a dance in the street, sang some songs, and took pictures.

A motorcycle club. More came later but I forgot to get another picture.

The Lucca marathon! This race and the half-marathon later in the year ran by both sides of the apartment.

Nighttime church celebration. I wasn't able to figure out for sure what the procession was, but it appeared to be a whole congregation with candles singing and chanting as they walked.

And those are just the things we caught in pictures. All year long we have been treated to sights and sounds in our little corner of town.

• A street piano player who came probably 50% of the weekends we were around and played the same 6 songs over and over...and over........and over. 
• Holiday projections on the wall of the tower for the Christmas season. 
• Countless lost tourists who reached this part of town and realized they weren't where they thought they were and pulled out their maps (many of whom I would offer to help when I was at the fountain earning me the nickname "The Ambassador" from my loving family). 
• Lots of antics of local school kids who would hangout near the fountain waiting for buses or friends or parents.

Let's just say we have had plenty to watch. More importantly than entertaining us however, I think getting to witness all these gave us a bit more of a connection to this town. We got to witness the real people who live their lives here. In our own voyeuristic way, we got to be honorary Lucchese.