IN CITTA - An elegant apartment for rental in Tuscany
1 double bedroom, SLEESPS 2
This apartment is located in Lucca, in a very old section of town, within the city walls, at a corner of one of the most charming squares. The building itself is nearly one thousand years old. Actually, it has just completed a total renovation of the space, but retaining wherever possible pieces of its history.
San Salvatore a is a light and spacious high ceilinged one bedroom apartment with a sitting room, separate kitchen, bathroom, huge romantic bedroom and spectacular views over Piazza San Salvatore and across the red rooftops of Lucca to the mountains of the Garfagnana and Northern Tuscany beyond. It is perfectly located in a quiet square in the heart of Lucca's historic centre beside the main square of Piazza San Michele. Elegantly and theatrically furnished in pale cream and gold antique furniture, paintings and artifacts, you can sense that this is a special place.
Piazza San Salvatore is one of Lucca's gems as it is considered home to some of the best of Lucca's culinary offerings. Next door to the apartment is Lucca's best fresh fruit and vegetable market shop with its wonderful array of daily fresh seasonal produce, olive oils and pesto's. A couple of doors down is Vanni Vini, one of Lucca's oldest and most respected wine stores with its incredible vaulted cellars full of thousands of different wines. Tastings can be made through prior bookings. There is a fresh bread shop around the corner where the focaccio is perenially warm. In one corner is Restaurante Da Leo – one of the better busy local trattoria's and another, Buralli, is nearby round the next corner. Lucca's main shopping street, Via Fillunga, is just a minutes walk.
The apartment is located on the third floor of a 16th century palazzo, once the home of Boccherini, the Lucchese violinist and composer who created The Minuet and along with Puccini, one of Lucca's famous son's. The steps (70 but not steep) are worth the climb when you see the amazing views of the mountains from the large picture windows, from which you look out over a piazza, red terracotta rooftops, an evocative 12thcentury bell tower and the ragged white iced or purple mountains (depending on the season) in the distance.
The décor is all light cream interiors, all the better to highlight the traditional ochre of the surrounding buildings and the multicoloured parade in the piazza below.
The windows are well placed to catch - if you are lucky - one of the regular traditional parades that pass beneath. In the middle of the piazza is a white marble sculpture of a toga robed woman who carries an urn on her shoulder. She stands regally over a great marble bath guarded by lions and from here the locals fill their bottles with fresh spring water. Like the wishing well of old.
The sitting room is spacious and well furnished and the high ceilings add to the feeling of openness. There is a comfortable lounge suite (sofabed) as well as an eclectic mix of contemporary art, paintings, quirky artifacts, antique furniture and a dining suite for six. It features handmade beautifully patterned tiles dating from the Liberty era. The doors are adorned with stained glass made up of fragments from an ancient Florentine church. A television with dvd, stereo and a collection of books provide comfort and entertainment options.
The bedroom is even larger than the sitting room, romantic and opulent with a huge lace clad canopied bed, gilded mirrors and brocade covered furniture. There is an enormous hand carved wardrobe to store everything you bring (and your purchases from the main street of via Fillungo which is only steps away). This room is large enough to house a smaller lounge suite, gilded in true aristocratic style, from where you can have an aperitivo gazing out on the towers before you.
But more than this, the apartment feels at once calm and awake to possibility. Not least that of exploring Lucca, Florence, Pisa, the small fishing villages of the Cinque Terre on the coast, Barga and the mountain towns of Garfagnana, Siena and Montalcino South of Florence, and Bologna to the North.
The bathroom is compact with a shower. It also houses a washing machine for your laundry requirements.
The kitchen is equipped with new appliances including dishwasher.
There is also free wireless broadband Internet connection.
“My home in Lucca is a special place, a magical place where the light is golden. As the sun sets over the mountains, outside the window a thin gold line appears on the wall. Opposite, on the far wall a wide shadow of dappled gold.
Sometimes when I wake up, early in the morning or in the middle of the night and I catch myself lying there facing the window and the wide sky that shifts with clouds or is speckled with stars and the lights burning on the mountain far away, I think I must be dreaming. I cannot, for a moment, remember how I came to be here. That 800 year old bell tower, a tapestry of fine medieval brickwork and stone, changing colours from sunrise to sunset. Each piece of broken stone of grey, yellow, cream, black, broken representing a patchwork of other lives witnessed through the ages, and the veils and layers of my own life whispering across the piazza, and a round window half way up like a porthole from which the swallows and I come and go year after year''
Ciara Ferguson
