Today's 'day-trip' to the beautiful town of Lucca needed some careful planning as we needed to fly into Pisa airport which is notoriously busy with it's daily influx of tourist charter flights and such like. We left the hotel in Rome at 5pm and got out of the city with no problem. I think that during the heat of mid-summer here, a lot of local people get out of the city and head for the beaches whenever possible. I certainly would. It must be the huge amounts of stone and marble which act as a gigantic storage heater as the temperature in this city just seems to be hotter than anywhere else. Consequently, there was little weekend traffic to worry about. The flight crew were ready and waiting and we were soon off and running on the 40 minute flight up the West coast to Pisa. Then it was a 30 minute drive inland to Lucca. The potential for traffic increased as we neared the town so a police escort was arranged to guide us in. In the event, it was one of the local security guys in his own car which met us at the toll on the exit to the autostrade. Thankfully the traffic once again was not too bad and we wound our way through the narrow streets near the venue and into the familiar courtyard where the dressing rooms had been set up. I say familiar as we did indeed play here in 2001 and little if nothing has changed about the beautiful piazza. A perfect setting for a concert. The only issue was the heat. I can't recall ever experiencing on-stage temperatures as high as these at 9:30pm before.













With most of the production (PA and lights being local) Simon was on the stage well after the doors opened, he was reprogramming the unfamiliar lighting rig to be controlled by his desk. No mean feat I can tell you.



We took to the stage promptly and the heat of the day was very much still there, maybe some stone-heat-retention contributing since the piazza is completely surrounded by ancient buildings. We rattled through a set which was slightly shorter than usual due to an aircraft slot restriction out of Pisa but we all felt the show flowed just as well as normal. I thought we had plenty of time but when we got back to Pisa airport, after a comical delay in the van taking us to the plane, we had to sit on the tarmac for an age and wait for a Ryanair plane to move, which it didn't, so our fiery expletive-shouting Italian ground crew driver spun the van around and drove us the long way round the airfield, cursing the Irish low cost airline all the way. We pulled up to the worried looking faces on the crew of the Legacy with five minutes to spare. Engines were started immediately and we were in the air at exactly midnight.

Back to Rome and relatively early too, it was 1am when I got to the room, time for a quick cuppa and straight to bed in preparation for tomorrow's day off tennis game, British Grand Prix and Spain to win the World Cup.


pic Isabella Lari