Pisa wasn’t really on the list. It was on the list in the way that things end up there — because we were in Tuscany, because it was forty minutes on the train, because you can’t go to Tuscany and not go to Pisa. You just can’t. So we went.
We got off the train, came out of the station, and joined the crowd heading north over the bridge. The Arno was high and grey-brown and wide, and the buildings along the lungomare — terracotta and ochre and pale green — were reflected back in it with the kind of accidental beauty that Italian cities produce without trying. We stopped on the bridge. Took a picture. Said something about how the river was actually the thing here.
Then we followed everyone else to the tower.
The Arno looking west from the bridge. The one photo that makes Pisa look exactly like itself.
Piazza della Repubblica. A Ferris wheel next to a nineteenth-century king on a plinth. Pisa doing what it wants.
The Campo
We got there early enough. Not early enough to have it to ourselves — you’d need to arrive at dawn for that — but early enough that the coaches hadn’t quite started yet, and there was still room to take a proper photograph without someone else’s outstretched arm in the corner of it. The lawn is extraordinarily green for February. The Baptistery is enormous in a way the photographs don’t quite prepare you for. The Cathedral is enormous in a different way — longer, more horizontal, the Romanesque arcade stretching out across the grass. And then there’s the Tower.
Which leans. It really does lean. You know it leans and then you stand next to it and think: that is not right.
The Cathedral and Tower from across the Campo. Scaffolding on part of the Cathedral — restoration work. The lean very clear from this angle.
The Baptistery. Gothic detail on Romanesque bones. The dome is terracotta up close and something else from a distance.
The Tower, from directly below. The lean stops being abstract at this distance.
Then the coaches arrived.
Not one. Many. And with them the same photograph being attempted over and over — the held-up-tower shot, the palm extended just so, the expression of playful effort. We watched for a while. Then we charged around, took as many pictures as we could manage, and got back out again.
On the way out, a street seller appeared. He tied a leather bracelet on my wrist before I could stop him and pressed a shiny ring into Sarah’s hand, smiling broadly and saying it was free. Sarah gripped my arm and didn’t let go. I know the trick. I gave him ten euros. Wrong or right, we didn’t have time, and the truth is — once you’ve seen the tower, you’ve seen the tower. We were done.
The Campo filling up. Polizia Municipale on standby. The moment to leave.
The rest of it
The walk back through the city was better than the Campo. A wide piazza with a baroque fountain and tourists still photographing things. A backstreet palazzo with a stone bust above the door and an arched entrance that nobody was paying attention to. A small mosaic Madonna in a street niche — signed M. Rosi, 1956 — tucked into the wall with a collection plate below it and the inscription La Limosina ai Poveri Prigioni. Alms for poor prisoners. You walk past it in about three seconds and it’s the kind of thing you’d walk past a hundred times and then one day actually stop.
Street niche on the walk back. M. Rosi, 1956. The kind of thing you stop for once you’ve already got the tower out of the way.
A backstreet palazzo, south of the Campo. No queue. No entrance fee. Just a very good door.
We walked back down the Corso Italia — the long pedestrian shopping street, yellow buildings on both sides, the kind of street that could be any Italian city — and got the train south.
Pisa ticked. Done.
I don’t think we’ll rush back. But there’s a run here somewhere — along the Arno, maybe, early, before the coaches come. The city that exists before the tower opens is probably a different one. That version might be worth a return.
Corso Italia heading south. The walk back to the train. Yellow walls and green shutters, same as everywhere else, which is not a complaint.
Definatley a run route down the length of this sometime in the future
Pisa, Tuscany – 3.75 miles – 1hr 26m – 35ft – 8,176 Steps