Pisa: It's really crooked!
Friday marked the last day of our Italian Culture week-long class. Yesterday I began a three week cooking class called Food, Culture and Society of Italy. My class time runs from 3-5:30pm so I will still have most of the daytime to see the interior sights of Florence (most of which I haven't yet) and have lots of amazing dinners. I want to tell you about Pisa – it's really leaning!
After class, and with very little sleep due to the last minute writing of papers and presentations the night before, a group of seven of us boarded an afternoon train to Pisa. It's about 2 hours away from Florence. Arriving in Pisa, we walked through the center of town to an expansive lush green carpet of grass called the Piazza dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles) where the three main attractions sit – the leaning tower, the cathedral, and the baptistry. The city seemed a lot sketchier than Florence but I did love that there were actual sidewalks to walk on. In Florence the sidewalks are really narrow, and in many places you can only walk single-file. The buildings had a lot of graffiti, and the writers apparently do not like Pisa. I wondered if the vandalism was authored by disenchanted locals or if tourists came here and left really disappointed for some reason…
Walking block after dreary block, suddenly I was staring at the leaning tower. It's really crooked! I took a picture and the sky was so beautiful that it looks photoshopped – but I promise it's real. My friends walked around the tiny interior spiral staircase to get to the top and I stayed outside to take pictures and to place a phone call to Kevin. There were so many people will small dogs there and I missed home. Plus, I was excited to tell Kevin that it was really leaning.
Next I went into the Cathedral, which was suggested to me as one of the most beautiful churches in Italy. First I went into the "free" entrance for people who want to sit at the altar and pray. I lit a candle and soaked in the majesty of the place and then went back outside to enter the main entrance which cost 2 euro. Memories of a year of high school AP art history and 2 semesters worth at Brooklyn College all came back to me when I saw the artwork of the cathedral in person. One of my favorite features of this church and some others is the domed ceiling with a circular cut out (which is plugged now). The idea was to let the divine in through the ceiling, and the artists had the idea that people would look up and not just see the beauty of the coffers and frescos but of the sky. They called it an oculus – the eye of god. And there is a lot more famous art here, too.
We didn't have time to go inside the baptistry – which is basically a round church where they baptize people. Since the area outside the piazza did not feel safe, we wanted to get back to the train before dark. We hit the train station 2 minutes before our train was about to depart and bought our tickets awkwardly using every machine in the lobby, validated the tickets at a separate machine and ran as fast as I have ever run in my life toward platform 10.
Let me pause here to tell you about how hard it is to keep up with the 19 and 20 year old college kids that I'm hanging out with. They can stay up later, drink more, and certainly run faster. And although they are really great kids, they don't think to make sure everyone stays together. That is usually my role. I was literally running for my life as I didn't want to sit for an hour in the scary Pisa train station by myself if I got left behind. Our group split up and we had no idea if the other half of us was actually on the train until it was moving.
We made it back to Florence in time to walk home from the train station with the biggest group of tourists I have ever seen. At least 150 people all with rolling suitcases walked in the street alongside our little group for a few blocks. It looked like the running of the bulls – but with rolly suitcases! The roar of the wheels on the cobblestones, echoing off the stone walls was pretty amazing, too. After I midnight-ish dinner of chocolate gelato I was off to bed and my friends went out to party.
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