A Bad Day with a Happy Ending

On my own but also reconciled with life after one of those bad days!

The very pleasant outdoor terrace of the restaurant.

Steamed turbot in a delicious leek and courgette cream.

Large pasta strips mixed with baby squids and seafood.

Grilled calamari on a mixed salad. A real delight!

There are days – like yesterday, for instance – when everything goes wrong. I’m sure that you experience such unpleasant days once in a while. I won’t tell you about yesterday here – I still have to recover from it, – but about that one day I spent in Lucca, Tuscany, last October.

First, I woke up with a sore eye, a stye. Nice start! Then I got lost, after leaving home a little too late, on my way to La Cappella, one of our Trust&Travel estates. I was supposed to have lunch with the estate owners, but as they had a very important appointment with Lucca’s bishop early in the afternoon, we agreed by phone to postpone our lunch to some later date.

Then I thought: “Okay, why not go to this restaurant in Lucca called Vipore – which a friend had recommended to me, – treat myself to a nice little lunch, and eventually write a blog post about it!” The problem is that I followed wrong signs – blame it on my sore eye! – and never found the place. Frustrated, I drove towards  La Mora, an excellent restaurant on the outskirts of Lucca where I had been a few years before. Guess what: it didn’t exist anymore!

At that point, I just felt like throwing the towel. I parked my car behind Lucca’s cathedral and walked into the old part of town. I first ran into a pizzeria, Da Sergio, but didn’t feel like having a pizza. So I wandered on, fell into a big shopping street, strayed away from it, turned left, turned right, got dizzy and then, by some miracle, finally emerged into a beautiful little piazza where I found a nice-looking restaurant beckoning me, beckoning me, beckoning me…

Specializing in fish – which was what I was dreaming of at that point – All’Olivo  reconciled me with life. I had the nicest of meals at a very reasonable price: a cream of leek and courgette with steamed turbot, large pasta strips covered with seafood, grilled calamari and a mixed salad. I also had a glass of Palistorti Bianco di Valgiano, a local organic wine which I had wanted to try for a long time. It was bliss!

All’Olivo was recommended by a famous French tourist guide in 2012. Here is the link to its website: www.ristoranteolivo.it. The address: Piazza San Quirico, 1, Lucca. Phone number: 0583 496264.

If you’d like to tell me about one of your “bad days”, please go ahead: I want to hear about it!