Calci.

Rousting ourselves late in the morning we drive to the hillside town of Calci, in the jurisdiction of Pisa, to visit a monastery which Nancy has heard about. It is a huge complex, mostly vacant, and a ticket entitles us to be lead in a small group by a small man who opens selective doors for us, and closes them as we move on, but does not actually volunteer any commentary. This irks the one Italian in our company, a lady who has brought ten or so German tourists in tow; she complains to the man that on her last visit there was a running description provided. I find, though, that he is willing to answer simple questions posed in Italian, and towards the end he evens attempts to throw in a few English words for my benefit.
Photographs inside the building were not allowed, though this proved to be less of a disappointment than one might imagine: for although the founding of the place reached many years back, most of what we saw, apart from the stucture itself, was endless faux-painted Rococo-style decoration. The body of the complex, apart from the church, chapels and offices, was a series of 15 monks "cells" which opened on a cloistered walkway and a huge garden. The cells were remarkable in that each unit possessed 3 rooms, a bedroom, sitting room and workroom, as well as a private garden. Not a bad life, celibacy not withstanding!
Bizarrely, the monastery's huge barns had been converted into a local museum of natural history. We had to take a look, of course, and so another set of 5-euro tickets. We spent another hour or two wandering through this exhibit, which seemed to consist, in large part, of a collection started in the 1700's by some local aristocrat and added to throughout the 1800's. One should picture huge wooden cabinets and cases, glass-fronted, with a Noah's-Ark variety of skeletons, stuffed and mounted animals (with a particular fascination for poses involving killing and eating), sea creatures soaking in tall jars; dioramas of the ascent of man (this, surely obsolete); and upstairs in the former hay loft, its wide arches now glassed in, enormous skeletons of several species of whale suspended from the ceiling. We left exhausted; and in all our explorations, we had been alone and unguarded, and saw only 2 other visitors.
We returned for a late lunch in Lucca. We might have stopped sooner, at a bar or pizzeria somewhere along the road, but we were everywhere within Pisa's territory confronted with such graffiti as "Lucca merda" and out of loyalty to my grandfather's origins, we moved along.

A cultural note: we are informed that, as a general rule, folks from Lucca do not especially like people from Florence, considering them to be self-important, loud and obnoxious, and to have strange speech patterns, and not know how to construct a decent sugo for their pasta (also of an inferior quality). The Florentines, for their part, are sure in their knowledge of being superior in every respect, and certainly in comparison to the inhabitants of Lucca, who are well-known to be reserved to the point of coldness, and very clannish. Yet in one judgement the Lucchesi and Fiorentini are agreed: that the population of Pisa is of the lowest type, mean, duplicitous and prone to thievery; and that they subsist mainly by exploiting the gullible tourists who show up to see their silly curiosity: a tower which tilts to an extravagant degree (being a product of incompetent Pisan builders and insubstantial Pisan soils). No doubt these attitudes descent from ancient rivalries, in which Pisa was rarely the victor (and then only by some treachery, one would think).