A beautiful day in Pisa

Pisa. Home to the Leaning Tower … and that’s about it. But really that was more than enough for Sam and I after the trouble we had had getting there. We had a beautiful room in a nice hostel, and soon enough we were to learn that indeed the website hadn’t lied.
Up early to explore, we walked out of the hostel, turned the corner and down a lane. We had not walked more than 50 metres in total when as we popped out of the lane, there it was. The leaning tower. Our hostel was no more than a 500 metre walk from its base. You couldn’t get a better location.
Finally, with things going our way, it boded well for a good day. First though, breakfast.
We found a cute café just a minute down the road in the opposite direction to the tower and had coffee and pastries for breakfast. It didn’t take long before we were finished and ready to explore the sights we had heard so much about.
By this time it was only about 9.30, so things were reasonably quite in the piazza where the tower, cathedral and baptistery stand. Only a few hundred tourists compared to the thousands that were to descend on the site throughout the course of the day.
We decided to get in early and book our tickets to climb the tower as were had read to expect long queues and long waiting times. As only 30 people can ascend the tower at any given time, you book a time slot in which to enter and if you missed it, bad luck.
Into the ticket office and we were all but the only ones there. Fortune favours the early bird and we decided to climb the tower and pay for entry to the cathedral and baptistery - all up 21 euro each. The tower itself is 15.
Our tower time was 10.20 and it was only 9.45 so we decided to check out the baptistery first.
The baptistery, otherwise known as the cupcake, is a round, hexagonal shaped building where, as the name suggests, people were baptised. It is made entirely of marble so while not as aesthetically pleasing as the cathedral inside, it was much more expensive to build.
I have been to Pisa before but I had never entered any of the buildings, so this was all new to me. Inside the baptistery was sparsely furnished and decorated, with an altar closed to close inspection. Talking was not allowed though photos were and Sam and I snapped away happily at the huge dome above that gave the baptistery its interesting external shape.
A stairway set between the external and internal walls led to the gallery above, the highest point you could climb to below the vast dome.
From here, through the one window that wasn’t closed, it offered spectacular views o the cathedral outside and the tower beyond it. In fact the perspective was one of the best to see the five-degree angle lean the tower was on, compared to the upright cathedral in the foreground.
But the best was yet to come. As we entered a sign had read something to the effect that every half hour staff would demonstrate the dome’s “acoustics” for lack of a better word.
So as we stood high in the gallery above, a staff member hushed those around her, walked to the very centre of the altar below and began to sing, not words, but single notes, one after the other, each a different pitch and key. The acoustics of that dome were amazing. As she finished each note it resonated around the dome for many seconds after, a background to the next note to come. It wasn’t really an echo as such but it was beautiful.
Everywhere we had been so far there were people employed, it seemed, to just sit in corners of museums and such palaces to ensure tourists didn’t touch anything etc. It seemed this lady actually had a higher purpose being that if she wasn’t a trained singer, she certainly sounded like one in there.
Unfortunately Sam wasn’t quick enough to get the video camera out so we don’t have it on tape, but I’m sure the memory of it will last a long time for both of us.
On that high note (pardon the pun) we left the baptistery to check in our bags before climbing the tower. Cameras were allowed but no bags of any kind. This was a quick process and soon we were waiting in line with the rest of the people in our time slot to climb the famous tower.
Again, I had never done this so I didn’t know what to expect. When we bought our tickets the sign said people with heart conditions shouldn’t climb the tower being that there are some 300 steps.
Also people who suffer from vertigo strangely enough.
Keen as mustard, we entered the tower and began the long ascent. The steps were all made of marble and were slippery as buggery. They wound round and round the tower. Hundreds of thousands of pairs of feet had worn deep dips into each step over the years, mostly in the middle but on the leaning side, the dips were biased toward the outer wall. It was certainly a very strange sensation to walk on a lean, the steps seeming shallower than they were and then becoming steeper as you neared the opposite side.
The other problem, apart from the slipperiness, was there were people still coming down the tower while we were climbing up and it’s not the widest of passageways.
And occasionally we struck someone who had succumbed to exhaustion seeking refuge in tiny alcoves at intervals in the passageway.
Finally, after probably 220 steps, we stepped out onto our first viewing platform. I have to say this was very disappointing as the entire view was obscured by a mesh making photos impossible.
But silly me, there was plenty more to see. Up another flight of steps, these set separately to the passageway between the internal and external walls (as the first was) spiralled round and round until eventually we came out to the platform of bells. The leaning tower is actually a bell tower and the bells looked pretty ancient, though the wooden blocks holding one up was marked 1860-something.
Finally we could see the fabulous views and wander among the bells, though we weren’t to touch. If I thought that was it, again I was wrong, which I should have known just from watching the other people on the tower earlier in the morning. There was yet another set of stairs, totally hidden unless you knew where to look. To reach them you actually had to walk around the outside of the tower, near the handrail to a spiral staircase, again of marble and very steep and very slippery. Round and round and we popped out on the very top of the tower. And it was breathtaking.
Did I mention this was the clearest of clear beautiful days ever? I guess the storms the day before that had diverted our plane had washed away any pollution from the surrounds because it was amazing. We could see the alps with their snowy tips and terracotta-tiled rooftops as far as the eye could see.
I did get video of this, which you will all have to watch, a 360-degree view from the top of the tower across all of Pisa and beyond.
We had about 10 minutes up there before it was time for us to descend and the next group to pass us.
Two steps into the first spiral staircase, my shoes came off. My thongs were slippery enough on wet cobblestones, there was no way they were going to withstand marble polished by hundreds of thousands of pairs of feet at an angle.
I have to say while the climb down was much less demanding than the climb up you still had to focus on what you were doing and where you were putting your feet, particularly on the leaning side. It was almost a relief when we finally got to the bottom and had our feet firmly on the even ground.
We both agreed it was well worth the money and after retrieving our bags, set towards the cathedral.
From the outside the cathedral is amazing. All white and green marble striped façade and exquisite detail on every cornice, archway and door.
Inside was no different.
It was spectacularly high, with frescoed walls and ceilings, and an imposing high altar that was roped off to tourists.
Oh and I had to wear a green “apron”. I had forgotten to buy a cheap shawl/scarf to cover my shoulders - a rule strictly enforced in Italian churches. So looking very fine indeed, we explored the inside of this impressive structure, snapping pics everywhere we went of course.
We took a time out and sat in here for 10 minutes of so, absorbing what we had seen so far and what surrounded us.
I told Sam countless times before we left Australia that by the time we leave Italy he will be sick of seeing churches, but it seems for now, they can still manage to impress us.
By now it was close to lunchtime and back out in the bright sunlight, we found a tiny eatery just outside the piazza, and actually the city wall, to eat. Pizza of course.
Fed and watered, it was time to explore what else Pisa may have to impress us, having done the major attractions. We wandered up a street here and street there until we came to another piazza with buildings from the 13th and 14th centuries. It was very hot in the sun and we didn’t last long on our wander before we found a medieval church and the oldest in Pisa. It was nothing compared to the ornate styling and grandeur of the cathedral we had seen earlier than morning but it felt old.
It was all exposed wooden beams, without paint and gilt that adorns so many of the other churches we had seen. It was stone walls and simple in construction. And it was empty. We had the entire place to ourselves for at least five minutes which is rare in a place like Pisa in high tourist season.
Sam and I have more than once agreed that while every church is at heart the same, the decoration, the flamboyance or the history of each make them all so different from one another.
Just to prove our point, we set off for another church, of Gothic construction this time.
This church was exquisite to view from the exterior, the detail of the roof and the small statues that adorn it was something to see. The interior was extremely plain in comparison and a quick read of its history explained why. It had been pillaged basically, but by the state and the statues that adorned the exterior were all replicas. The real art was housed in a museum somewhere else and inside it had been a similar story. Most of the furnishings and art had been removed to museums. The fact the interior was tiny in comparison to some of the churches we had seen didn’t help. This one wouldn’t have been bigger than the newsroom in floor space.
What was also interesting about this church though was that it was constructed on the banks of the river. Not across the road from the river, as everything else seemed to be, but on it. It’s foundations were lapped by water and it was to a certain extent part of the reason for its plunder. In fact, in the 16th century, the entire building was dismantled and reconstructed about seven metres higher, away from the river to prevent the entire things falling into the water.
It probably wasn’t worth the two euro to go inside, but I was glad to read its history.
With sore feet we returned to our hostel for a quick freshen up and rest before dinner.
We scouted a few places on the walk back but when the time came to go somewhere we ended up no further than about 100 metres from our hostel, and within view of the tower.
There we ordered bruschetta, a pasta course, a meat course and a bottle of Chianti, the famous wine of the region. We probably spent way too much, but it was our first proper dinner just the two of us the entire trip and it was nice.
It was probably also the first full day Sam and I hadn’t snapped each other’s heads off at least once.
We felt relaxed and refreshed after weeks of being “guests” in other people’s homes.
After dinner we wandered back toward the tower, past the dozens of Sudanese selling knock off handbags on the roadway.
The crowds were much dispersed and only a few die hards were still about trying to snap some final tourist pics before the sun went down. Of course, this is exactly what we did too. Earlier in the day Sam had been loathe to do “the photo” holding up the tower but the wine must have lowered his artistic instincts.
We took several stupid shots and then found a good spot to sit in front of the tower to watch the sun set. We had hoped they might turn on the tower lights, lighting it up like it was in so many postcards we had seen that day but alas, by 10.30 it was still relatively dim so we headed back to the hostel.
A quick Skype to mum and dad and it was time for bed. We were headed to Florence in the morning by train and who knew what adventures were in store for us there.
- Alysia (August 6)