I believe I said, "Hello leaning tower of Pisa. It's nice to meet you."
It sealed the deal.
I was really excited to take Jessica to Pisa. Most people just stop at the leaning tower, take a stupid picture, and maybe check out the Duomo, but the rest of Pisa deserves some respect as well. (That said, we somehow didn't take hardly any pictures outside of what I just listed.) Besides lacking what Florence has in Ponte Vecchio, I’d say that the stretch of buildings along the river are just as beautiful. And it’s a pretty quiet city with a big student population, so it never feels that busy because I guess they’re good students or something because I don’t know where the 30,000 of them hide.
In the six months I was in Pisa I didn't ever go inside the tower, or the Duomo for that matter. I guess I thought walking by it 700 times was enough of an experience. But Jessica had no I idea that you could go inside the tower (she thought it was too precariously perched or something) so we had to do it! It was truly fantastic actually. You have to get a reservation, which means it’s not crowded at all and you don't have to wait in a line.
They start you out with a little speech while you’re sitting inside at the bottom. When we stood up to start the spirally ascent I had kind of forgotten I was in a leaning building and it was trippy to see the flat ground outside. The climb up is also trippy; you’re in a narrow staircase that spirals around the outside wall of the tower and depending what side of the tower you are on you feel pulled to one side or the other and you can’t really see outside to know how you're leaning. Freaky gravity stuff.
The duomo and the baptistry.
The Duomo is also very beautiful. My favorite part about it is that it was funded by a great pillage of Palermo and a lot of the marble for the outside was just stolen from buildings in other cities the Pisanos pillaged. You can see random sideways engravings all over the place that definitely were on another building at some point.
No matter how many times I walk through this piazza it will never get old. It’s truly fascinating, beautiful, and funny. I wish we'd taken pictures of all of the hundreds of people taking tower-pushing pictures.
A few other photos from around Pisa:
After our morning exploration we went to Lucca, which is about 30 minutes away. Lucca is the perfect little Italian city, as long as you aren’t really trying to find anything quickly. The old part of town is surrounded by huge beautiful walls that are now a park lined with bike paths and trees. We rented bikes and rode around the whole loop on top of the walls and then descended into the city. The streets are narrow and windy and don’t really make it easy to get to anywhere, but it is the best possible place to get lost. Basically we just wandered until we found all the beautiful piazzas.
We found this random little brass hardware shop where the owner also sold locally made copper pots and olive wood cutting boards and spoons and stuff. We got a couple small things, but it was hard to not buy out the whole lot. Our backs will thank us later. We stopped in a little store and bought some fresh picked wild strawberries and gorged ourselves on the steps of San Michele.
We returned to Pisa and wandered around the streets until Patrizio picked us up for some pizza with his family where he used to pick us up to teach his family on my mission. It was so wonderful to be reunited. When I lived there, their daughter Alessia was about two years old, and now they have a two-year-old daughter, Valentina who looks exactly like Alessia did. It was seriously like I had gone back in time.
We had a great evening stuffing ourselves with pizza, remembering good times, and trying to remember Italian. Jessica was wiped out afterwards because they were talking to her in Spanish and she was trying to remember all her words to complete the Mad Lib that was going in her head. She'd spent the whole week working hard on her Italian, and it was rough to have so many languages jumbling together. She loved it though.
After 6 years Patrizio and Paola finally get to move back to Ecuador where their family lives. They’re really excited to be close to family, many of whom are members of the Church. I hope to have to make a trip to Ecuador soon for them to go through the temple.
It felt so good to be back in Pisa. I only wish that I would have given a better heads up that we were coming because I had about as much success knocking on doors and finding people home as I did on my mission.
Peace out Pisa. A presto.
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