An Italian Hen Party

Stop one on the Summer of Love took me to Pisa, a rather unconventional place for an extended stay, let alone a hen party. Pisa has its charms: it's a university town, it has a tower that leans. But it's fairly small and a little rough around the edges. All this aside, I've probably flown from this airport more than any other mainland European airport due to its cheap flight hub and proximity of airport to city. 

The decision to host a hen do in Pisa was made wholly because people were coming from five different places in four different countries and not a lot of Italian airports can do direct flights from Paris.London.Manchester.Copenhagen.Southern Italy.

I won't bore you with the logistics but there's a lot of drama in trying to organise 10 people who live all around the world. 10 eventually dwindled to six and when we arrived in-country the palazzo that we unknowingly rented seemed just a little too big. And motherfucking haunted. 

The house was located on the outskirts of the city, a supposed 20-minute walk to the Leaning Tower. I doubt the truth of this claim. Outside, a very welcome swimming pool meant that we could sip copious gin and tonics in relative comfort.

Downstairs we were greeted with two sitting rooms, two dining rooms, a women's sitting room (pink couches, why??) and a huge kitchen.

 And a ton of plates stuck to the wall:

Questionable artwork lined the walls of the entire house; the portraits on the landing of the stairs were particularly nightmare-inducing.

Upstairs, six large bedrooms and two bathrooms waited to be occupied. Technically this meant that we could all have our own rooms. Practically, I lasted five-minutes before I begged Gemma to share a room with me. I mean, just look at this room, the one we dubbed 'the psych ward.'

It didn't help that some of the doors were equipped with bank safe style locks and one of the corridors had a door with deadbolts in order to lock the occupants of two rooms behind it. It goes without saying that I have an overactive imagination and I was the kid who had to be picked up from sleepovers after someone cracked open the scary stories. Suffice it to say, I slept very poorly for the whole long weekend.

Wine Tasting in Lucca
Fortunately, the days were filled with lots of relaxation. Our only real adventure out of the haunted mansion was to do a cycling wine tasting tour in Lucca. Our guide, a lovely woman decked in cycling clothes, took us 23 kilometres over the city walls and outside of the city.

We were sweaty messes by the time we arrived at the Bio-organic winery. The proprietor took the whole experience a lot more seriously than we did and we ended up being the rowdy young 'uns at the table of compliant tourists. Oops. 

Another sweaty cycle back took us to Lucca, a place Paul and I visited (and one I STILL need to blog) on holiday six years ago. It's a stunning place all enclosed in ancient city walls. After ditching our bikes and thanking our wonderful guide, we stumbled into a little cheese and salumeria just in the central piazza, eventually working our way into a fit of drunken giggles.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa
We then took a baking hot walk through the hottest part of the day and gave up shortly after realising that we were the only real idiots out. One short train back to Pisa, we then decided that it was now or never with the Tower.

I can't remember the last time I've laughed this hard. We must have taken over 100 pictures, trying to hold the pose, capture the angle correctly.

We spent much of the rest of the three days in the pool or in the kitchen, preparing epic feasts of local cheese, meat, pasta and fresh vegetables. 

We taught Petra's senior citizen mum how to play Cards Against Humanity. We laughed a lot. We enjoyed the fact that despite living in five different countries, we were able to pick up where we left off. It was an entirely unconventional, entirely wonderful way to spend a hen do.