Wow, here we are. Once again it's been a few years since I've been here. Oh gosh.

Just approaching it. I completely forgotten how splendid it is. This place.

I'm just going to sit down and take my bag off. It's the city of Lucca. Oh wow in Tuscany. We've come away from the coast. We spent last night in Via Regia after a very long drive.

I've driven for half an hour to the finish line in Lucca. And many of you will know Lucca, won't you?

It's not exactly a secret, but it's an absolute jewel in the Tuscan crown,

all Italian crown really with its intact,

amazing intact medieval walls.

Last time I came here I was told by the landlady of the B&B where you were staying in that you could run around.

The first morning I woke up, woke up quite early and you can run around the entire city walls and you can, they're all intact.

A really wide ramp up that they build up on actually. I think it's something like five kilometers round.

And I ran around it twice in different directions and passed at one point past Mario Chippelini,

who is obviously disgraced these days, having been handed a suspended sentence and a conviction. But, yeah, I ran past Mario Chippelini wearing compression socks and a kind of sleeveless singlet and wearing a headband with his enormous teeth and dark glasses and kind of exchanged to

ciao as I rode past him as a road passed and ride past him. And my other

stand-up memory of the brief time we spent in Lucca a couple of years ago was walking

through the city at dusk and listening, a bit like in Greenwich actually, where the music college offers a similar, in the old

Nagel College, the music college seated down there, offers a similar experience that you can walk

through a courtyard and windows are open and you can hear individual classical

musicians from the academy practicing their craft and there's this kind of free-form cacophony of different music coming

and filling the space. It's just beguiling. I remember experiencing

that in Lucca as well. What I didn't realize though, and I've only just kind of sat here

and figured out, because I saw a poster walking into

Luca today for on the 13th of May. So starting very soon next week, the there is a brief

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