A Pisa (To Pisa)

Florence is a beautiful city.  Its art and architecture, the food, the people, the beautiful countryside and scenery, the shopping, the food, the art, the scenery...oh, sorry.  I’m just saying: Florence is a sparkling gem, alive, dancing with fire, passion and beauty.  It’s the one you set your eyes on when passing a jewelry store window.  It’s the one you stop for  and smudge the glass with your finger, trying to get others to look at it.  I’m thinking it’s the one we’re moving to!

And as such, I’m sure I’ll miss it, even for this one day.  But off to Pisa we go.  We were going to try to do Pisa in the morning and then take the train to Siena and then back to Florence, but it was just going to be too much.  Besides, my calves were still a little achy from the Duomo climb.

We walked from our hotel to the train station (about a five minute walk) and figured out how to work the ticket machines.  You can choose from about six different languages, English included, so if you can work an ATM, this is easy.  We had one false start and then, prego!  We’ve got it.  Around here, the trains run like Southwest Airlines used to run between Dallas, Austin and Houston...about every fifteen minutes.  We easily caught the next train, found the track and boarded. 

It’s a short ride, even with several stops.  The people watching is phenomenal, as is the scenery passing outside.  Arriving in Pisa, I was a little confused.  I guess I thought we’d be able to see the leaning tower from just about everywhere...sort of like it would be if the leaning tower were in Vegas...frankly, I’m a little surprised it isn’t! 

Anyway, when we exited the train station, I totally expected to look around and go, “Oh! there it is!”  But no, finding it was going to be like a splendid treasure hunt. 

We found a city diagram and mapped out our course.  Basically, it was: follow everybody else.  Pisa is sort of a crappy little town, with one extraordinary destination...what’s weird is that the Campo dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles) is not in the center of town, but on the far outskirts, on the other side of the river and the opposite side of town from the station.  It’s quite a hike, through some winding and not so attractive streets, with not much to look at.  Once you reach the river, though, the streets open up a bit.  There is a beautiful little gothic church right at the entrance to the river bridge and fantastic botanical gardens that go for blocks and blocks as you follow the yellow signs with the picture of the tower and arrows directing you onward.

Then, with almost no warning, you turn a corner and are presented with quite a spectacle.  Although they take up most of your field of view, and are each beautiful in their own right, the baptistery, cemetery and church somehow melt into the background.  I tilted my head back (leaving my jaw on my chest), and exclaimed, “She leans!!!,” as if I were the first to notice it.  You know...you see pictures, you read about it, you hear others telling you about it, but I’ll be damned; the tower is leaning.  A lot.  Seriously.  And up close and personal it is just bizarre.

Now, once you get your head around the fact that there’s a giant building in front of you that’s tilting at about eight degrees, you begin to notice a few other things.  One, it’s beautiful.   The marble is white, nearly pristine.  The other buildings, (the aforementioned, church, baptistery and cemetery) also are in beautiful white and green marble, just a little more worn.  They obviously take their cue from the Duomo in Florence, just not as vibrant...or maybe they were in need of some restoration???  In any case, they are a matched set.  The backdrop to these extraordinary buildings is the ancient city wall and the brilliant green lawns, which set them off even more.

All around are tourists...thousands of them.  About half of them have cameras in their hands, the other half have their hands in the air, posing for that, “I’m holding up the tower” picture that will end up on grandma’s mousepad.  It’s really pretty funny...I mean usually mimes have white-face makeup on. 

Remember Go Big or Go Home?  Well, it’s tower-climbing time.  There are only 300 steps in the circular staircase...hell, we did more than that in the Duomo.  Let’s go!  They only let 36 people go up at one time.  We have a reservation/ticket for 3:40 pm and it’s only just after 1:00, so we walk around a bit and find a small café for lunch.  Delicious.  A little shopping and it’s time.  You have to check your bags and bulky items (at no cost, and the guy wouldn’t take a tip, either) before going up...I guess they don’t want anyone getting any bright ideas to pretend they’re Galileo and drop stuff off the top to see how fast it  falls.  You can take a camera, though.

Okay, so when they started building the tower, it began to lean almost immediately.  You can see in the second and third levels, how they were trying to correct it architecturally...the columns on the leaning side are just a little taller than the columns on the non-leaning side.  Ultimately, I think they just accepted that the tower was going to lean and went back to the original plans to complete it.  Over the years, there have been several attempts to straighten it, and for now, they’ve stabilized it, lean and all. 

Show of hands, here...anyone ever go to Six Flags and go into Casa Magnetica?  It’s this crazy little house in the Spanish section of the park.  The whole thing slants and you have to hold on to the railing while marveling at why fruit rolls up hill. Stepping inside the tower door, I felt like I’d just stepped into Casa Magnetica, without the fruit.

The marble staircase is not steep (oh, thank God) and is the only thing inside the tower, but the stairs are worn and wavy from the footfalls of a million people a year for the last 500 years...you have to really watch your step.  There’s also no hand railing and lots of hands have passed over the walls (where’s that Purell?).  From time to time, you’ll pass a window on the way up and can rest in a little niche if you want (I always want!).  

We finally step out onto the bell tower balcony.  It’s not the top, yet, but you can go outside on the skinny, and I mean SKINNY little platform and walk the circumference.  There’s no way in hell that we’d ever be able to do something like this in America...there was no real railing, There’s one more level of tiny little steep steps (still worn and wavy and with a handrail) before you get to the top. 

So now we’re standing (well, I’m standing...Joe’s a little freaky with heights, so he’s sort of creeping) on top of a tower that’s leaning, the breeze is whipping around and the railing is barely chest high.  No net.  I’M KING OF THE WORLD!!! 

The view is amazing, the Apennine Mountains to east, the coast somewhere off to the west, the ground a little closer on one side than on the other.  God, please let this tower remain standing for at least the next 15 minutes, or until I’m back down on the good earth.  It is truly a Field of Miracles. 

Today’s Italian lesson: Mi gira la testa (mee jee-rah la tay-sta)  I’m dizzy.

More shopping (Joe and I must be 14 year-old girls at heart...we LOVE to shop!).  Finally, it was time to go back to the station and catch the train to Florence.  We decided to take a cab instead of walk; we were hot and tired, there was a taxi stand right in front of us.  We got to the station, bought tickets to Florence and began walking through the station to find our platform.  Now, you have to remember that Europe is a place with not so much regard for public rules (traffic, drinking, pets, etc.), but the last place I expected to see a pile of steamy dog shit was in the train station in an underground walkway.  But I saw it.  It’s just too bad Joe didn’t.. 

We washed it off the best we could with the little bit of bottled water I had left and a Kleenex...really missing those fountains in Rome!!  We laughed the whole way to Florence...fortunately in an air conditioned, nearly empty train car.  

Ciao, Bella!