Pisa

Top things to do in Pisa

1. 01

   Leaning Tower - climb the campanile that has been tipping since 1173

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   Begun in 1173 as the cathedral's bell tower and leaning before the third storey was finished, because it stands on soft estuary silt that compresses more on one side than the other. Two long interruptions for war, each of about a century, let the ground consolidate and almost certainly saved it; the masons who came back built the upper storeys on a curve to chase the vertical, so the tower is subtly banana-shaped rather than straight and tilted. The climb is a spiral of marble steps worn into hollows, and the tilt is genuinely disorientating underfoot, pulling you towards the outer wall on one side of the turn and the core on the other. Entry is timed and numbers are capped, bags cannot come up, and small children are not allowed on the stairs.

2. 02

   Duomo di Pisa - the cathedral that invented the Pisan Romanesque

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   Started in 1064 on the proceeds of a raid on Palermo and finished over a century and a half, its striped marble and stacked tiers of blind arcading became a house style copied across Tuscany, Sardinia and Corsica. Inside are Giovanni Pisano's pulpit of the early 1300s, taken apart after a fire in 1595 and only reassembled in the twentieth century with pieces still missing, Cimabue's mosaic of Christ in the apse, and the bronze door on the south transept that faces the tower. The hanging lamp that Galileo supposedly watched swinging while he worked out the pendulum is here too, though the lamp itself was installed after the event, which is a fair summary of how Pisa handles its own legends.

3. 03

   Battistero di San Giovanni - the acoustic demonstration under the double dome

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   The largest baptistery in Italy, begun in 1152 by Diotisalvi as a plain Romanesque drum and finished a century later in bristling Gothic, so it changes style halfway up. Nicola Pisano's pulpit of 1260 is the reason to go in: the figures are lifted almost directly off Roman sarcophagi and they restart classical sculpture in Italy. Every half hour a custodian stands in the middle and sings a few notes, which hang in the double shell of the dome long enough to overlap into a chord, and the upper gallery puts you level with the cathedral front across the grass.

4. 04

   Camposanto Monumentale - the Triumph of Death in the burnt cloister

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   A long marble cloister begun in 1278 around a plot of earth that crusader ships are said to have carried back from Golgotha, lined with reused Roman sarcophagi and once covered wall to wall in fresco. The great one is the Triumph of Death, a fourteenth-century panorama of hunting parties meeting open coffins and demons carrying off souls that is stranger and blacker than anything else in the city. In the summer of 1944 shellfire set the lead roof alight and the molten metal ran down the walls, destroying most of the painting; recovery and restoration have run for decades. It is the quietest of the four buildings on the square and the one people skip.

5. 05

   Borgo Stretto and Piazza delle Vettovaglie - the arcades and the market square

   food nightlife music culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   The medieval spine of the city runs north from the river under stone arcades, full of bookshops, bars and the kind of shopfronts that serve residents rather than visitors, and one block west it opens into an arcaded produce square that trades vegetables in the morning and turns into the student drinking room from early evening. Nothing here is a monument and that is the point: this is the half of Pisa that explains why anybody would sleep in it, and it is a ten minute walk from the tower that nobody on a coach ever makes.

6. 06

   Piazza dei Cavalieri - Vasari's square and the tower where Ugolino starved

   history culture arts

   The civic heart of the medieval commune, wiped and rebuilt by Vasari in the 1560s for Cosimo de' Medici and his new crusading order, the Knights of Saint Stephen. The Palazzo della Carovana carries a facade of grey sgraffito decoration and busts of grand dukes and now houses the Scuola Normale Superiore, so the steps are usually covered in some of the most competitively selected students in Europe. The church alongside kept banners captured from Ottoman galleys, and the clock building on the corner swallowed the tower where Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his sons were locked in and left to starve in 1289, the episode Dante put near the bottom of the Inferno.

7. 07

   Museo delle Sinopie - the underdrawings the fire brought to light

   culture arts history

   When the burnt frescoes were lifted off the cloister walls to be saved, the red-earth preparatory drawings underneath came away with them, and they now hang in the medieval hospital across the square. They are full size, drawn freehand and straight onto plaster, and in several cases they are livelier than the finished paintings ever were, with figures shifted, arms redrawn and whole compositions argued out in front of you.

8. 08

   Museo dell'Opera del Duomo - the original sculpture taken off the buildings

   culture arts history

   Where the weathered originals went when copies replaced them outside: Giovanni Pisano's small ivory Madonna, cathedral silver and vestments, and the Pisa Griffin, a big Islamic bronze animal taken as war booty and left standing on the cathedral roof for centuries before anyone worked out what it was. The terrace gives you the tower framed against the cathedral apse without the crowd on the lawn.

9. 09

   Santa Maria della Spina - the pinnacled reliquary church on the embankment

   history scenic

   A tiny Gothic church on the south bank, all gables, spires and tabernacles, built to hold a thorn said to come from the Crown of Thorns and carved as though it were a jewellery box scaled up. The river kept getting inside it, so in 1871 the whole thing was taken apart and rebuilt a course higher on the wall. Look at it from the opposite bank, where the whole silhouette reads against the water.

10. 10

    Tuttomondo by Keith Haring - the last mural, on a church wall by the station

    culture arts off beaten path

    Thirty interlocking figures across the whole rear wall of Sant'Antonio Abate, painted in 1989 with help from local students and a paint firm, a year before Haring died. He picked the wall himself on a visit to the city. It sits two minutes from the station and is the one thing in Pisa that is neither medieval nor made of marble, which is a decent reason to walk up from your train rather than straight past it.

11. 11

    Museo Nazionale di San Matteo - Pisan gold-ground painting in a riverside convent

    culture arts off beaten path

    A converted convent on the north embankment holding the city's medieval painted crosses, a Simone Martini polyptych, a Donatello bust and panels by Masaccio and Fra Angelico, plus the sculpture that came out of the local churches. On a day when the lawn up at the monuments is a scrum, you can have whole rooms of this to yourself, which tells you something about how the visiting works here.

12. 12

    Orto Botanico - the university garden planted in the 1540s

    nature wildlife off beaten path

    Founded under Cosimo de' Medici by the botanist Luca Ghini and generally counted the first university botanical garden anywhere, a claim Padua disputes and which depends on how you treat the fact that Pisa's garden moved sites twice in its first decades. What you get now is a walled few hectares of magnolias, a bamboo stand, a lily pond and a row of old glasshouses, five minutes from the tower and almost always empty.

13. 13

    Museo delle Navi Antiche - Roman ships pulled out of a railway site

    history off beaten path

    Excavation for railway works at San Rossore in 1998 cut into the silted bed of an old harbour channel and found a graveyard of Roman hulls, some with cargo, rope and a dog still aboard, buried by successive floods. They are conserved and displayed in the long Medici arsenal on the river, and between them and the maps of the vanished lagoon they explain better than anything else in the city how a place ten kilometres inland was once a naval power.

14. 14

    The city walls - walk the parapet above the monuments

    scenic history

    A long stretch of the twelfth and thirteenth century circuit is open as an elevated walkway, entered near the northern gates, and it is the only way to look down into the great square rather than across it. The rest of the circuit gives you back gardens, roof terraces, bell towers and the flat green plain running west towards the sea.

15. 15

    Cecina and bordatino alla pisana - eating the way the students do

    food

    Pisan cooking is poor-kitchen Tuscan with a coastal edge. Cecina is chickpea flour batter baked in wide copper pans and sold hot by the slab, salty and floppy in the middle, often shoved inside a bread roll; bordatino is a thick bean, cavolo nero and polenta soup; salt cod with leeks and chickpeas turns up on the same menus, along with beef from the local mucco pisano cattle and white wines off the Colline Pisane. The trattorie around the market square and the lanes off Borgo Stretto do all of it plainly and well, and the places closest to the tower do it worst.

Getting to & around Pisa

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