PISA. Pisa / Pisa 1

TEXT IN ENGLISH BELOW / TEXTO EN ESPAÑOL EN SET PISA 2

ENG
JUN 2007 – PISA

CITY Pisa is a city in Tuscany, in central Italy, on the right bank of the Arno River (which also crosses Florence). It is the capital of the Province of Pisa. According to the Wikipedia “The city lies at the junction of two rivers, Arno and Serchio in the Ligurian Sea forming a lagoon area” which might not specially impress some, but I liked the phrase. For more general info visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisa

Pisa is a city that currently lives under the shadow of other better known Italian cities like Florence, Venice or Rome; however, it seems that Pisa was once a powerful city. I must say I went to Pisa mostly because the airport was there (it was cheaper to flight to Pisa and take the train to Florence than fly directly to Florence) and I figured I would take a day off my trip to see the famous Leaning Tower. What I didn’t realize is that Pisa is a place with a charm all its own and that it deserves more than a day (okay, two or three if you’re like me –“intense” should we say–, a week if you’re more the leisurely type). First of all, it’s not just the Tower.

The Tower is actually the bell tower of a complex that also includes the Baptistery, Cathedral, Monumental Cemetery or Camposanto, the Opera del Duomo Museum and Sinopie Museum. Not counting the many souvenir shops (sort of a permanent, colourful market) surrounding the Piazza, and a very ample, lovely grass area where to sit and relax. The entire complex used to be called the Piazza del Duomo but since the 20th century it’s known as the Piazza dei Miracoli or Square of Miracles. It is located north of the old town center but just follow the tourist flow to find it. You’ll be amazed once you get there as it spreads largely before you. As mentioned before, Pisa was once a powerful city although later it faded into a secondary, undeserved background. If you go into the Monumental Cemetery, you’ll be able to read a summary of its history in a large sign (in Italian and English). I wish I had taken a photo of the text to reproduce it here but I didn’t. I won’t cite the history cited in the Wikipedia because it’s too long and can be rather tedious for those not passionate about history (this is a set about travel not history, though obviously one is related to the other. If interested I added a summary at the bottom, in the INFO section).

Here are two official web site for the city of Pisa, www.pisaturismo.it/site/home_en.asp (Italian and English) and www.tuscany.org/Cities/Pisa/ (Italian and English), and the Leaning Tower’s official web site www.opapisa.it/ (Italian, Spanish and English)

PLANNING The idea was to fly in late to Pisa, sleep there and spend a bit more than half a day seeing what I could of the city and the main monuments before taking the train to Florence to spend three days there. In Florence spend half the time outdoors and half the time indoors, since half of Florence’s beauty is indoors, within museums, galleries, palaces, etc. Then on the last day take the train back directly to Pisa airport and fly home.

TRAVEL Flying in to Florence directly cost about 300 euros and up, so I looked for alternatives instead and flew to Pisa with www.ryanair.com, which flies out of Girona, no Barcelona. I booked the flight 5 months prior. A month later www.clickair.com came out with a Barcelona–Pisa route. The inconvenience with Clickair is that they don’t have back-up planes so if it can’t fly because of a plane malfunction, there’s no other plane, you’re stuck. Ryanair has the inconvenience of having to go to Girona (about an hour’s distance from Barcelona), paying 21 euros for a bus return ticket and assuming –almost for sure– that it will be running late. I factored in an hour’s delay in my schedule and right enough; there was an hour and a half delay coming and going. Still how else could I go for 68 euros, all included?

There is a special bus connecting Barcelona with Girona and viceversa. The single ticket cost 12 euros and the return ticket, 21 euros. It is valid during 30 days (for the return trip since first used), and it can be purchased on the first floor of the Estació del Nord bus station in Barcelona. Check out www.ryanair.com for bus times but for this particular flight, I’ll detail the info here.

For the outgoing flight you can take the bus at 6:30pm (arrival 7:40pm), or 6:45pm (arrival 7:55pm), or 7:00pm (arrival 8:10pm) or 7:15pm (arrival 8:25pm) or the last bus at 7:30pm (arriving at 8:40pm) to catch the 22:10 flight. The ticket sales desk (1st floor in Estació del Nord main bus station– Arc de Triomph metro stop) supposedly closes at 7pm however the day before I got there at 6:50pm to buy it beforehand and the desk was already closed so don’t leave it till the last moment just in case.
To come back to Barcelona after arrival (if the plane is not late) at 9:45pm take bus at 10:15pm (arrival at 11:25pm) or 10:30pm (arrival 11:40pm) or 10:45pm (arrival 11:55pm) or 11:15pm (arrival at 12:25am) or 11:30pm (arrival 12:40am) or midnight (arrival at 1:10am)

LODGING Booked through www.hostelworld.com like always; Michele Guest House. The hotel offers the bare–bone basics. One great inconvenient for me was that there isn’t always a person in reception (it’s not open 24/7) and must call a cell or mobile number (call from a public phone, if you do it from your own cell it will count as a long–distance phone call) for someone to come and let you in. Who I must say was polite enough at the beginning but since he had to bike in from his home every time I needed to get in (three times in a period of a day and a half), became a bit impatient and not so polite. I found the price a bit expensive for a shared bathroom with no breakfast. Normally I say key on Location and Cleanness ratings when choosing lodging, and I must say that the room was ample and clean and indeed 2 mns away from the train station and at a 7.50 euro taxi ride from the airport. For one night its okay, but I might look at another if I meant to stay longer.

TRANSPORT As mentioned before Pisa is home to the Galileo Galilei Airport (named after the physicist, Galileo Galilei, who was born in Pisa). You can visit their web page www.pisa-airport.com/ for more info.
“The centre can be reached in 10 minutes by city bus — the bus line L.A.M. Rossa (Linea ad Alta Mobilità) connects the airport, the central railway station and Piazza dei Miracoli. Otherwise the centre can be reached in 5 minutes by train. / Buses: Local bus service in Pisa is managed by Compagnia Pisana Trasporti (CPT). Intercity buses depart from the main bus station in Piazza Sant'Antonio. There are also several privately run bus services going from the airport to Florence, Siena and other cities in Tuscany. / Trains: The city is served by three railway stations: Pisa Centrale, Pisa Aeroporto and Pisa San Rossore. / Pisa Centrale is the main railway station and is located along the Tyrrhenic railway line. It connects Pisa directly with several other important Italian cities such as Rome, Genoa, Turin, Naples, Livorno, Grosseto and Florence. Pisa San Rossore links the city with Lucca (25 minutes from Pisa) and Pistoia and is also reachable from Pisa Centrale. It is a minor railway station located near the Leaning Tower zone. / Pisa Aeroporto connects the airport to the central railway station, as well as the city of Florence. It is located next to the Galileo Galilei International Airport.” Text taken from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisa

CURRENCY Euros like most of Europe. If you need to check out current rates, visit this web page for more info www.oanda.com/convert/cheatsheet?user=kidon

WEATHER Myself I had good weather as the photos show. However, check out this weather web page www.wunderground.com/ or any other similar page, to get updated info.

FOOD Italian food is considered as one of the best in the world, and rightly so. The dishes are made with straight-forward, healthy ingredients such as sun-roasted tomatoes, cheese, vegetables, pasta. You can eat very well for about 5 euros. It is true that the closest you get to the Piazza dei Miracoli the higher the cost of the meal (touristy = pricey) but if you walk a few minutes off the beaten path, you’ll find side streets with restaurants offering a plate of pasta, full to the brim, with pesto sauce and a drink for about 5 euros. If you’re curious about Italian cuisine check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_cuisine or www.italianfoodforever.com/ or any of the hundreds of pages dedicated to it www.google.co.uk/search?hl=es&q=italian+food&aq=f... (63,700,000 in total). ;0D

WHAT TO SEE Though the city is best-known –to some almost exclusively so–, by its leaning tower, it actually contains more than 20 churches, several palaces, and (again, not as famous as Florence’s Ponte Vecchio) various bridges across the Arno River.
Monuments and others: Knights' Square (Piazza dei Cavalieri), with its Palazzo della Carovana. The Borgo Stretto, a neighborhood where one can stroll beneath medieval arcades and the Lungarno, the avenues along the river Arno. From what I read in internet but did not know at the time, there are at least two other leaning towers in the city, one at the southern end of central Via Santa Maria, the other halfway through the Piagge riverside promenade. More things to see, The Medici Palace, The Orto botanico di Pisa is Europe's oldest university botanical garden. The Palazzo Reale ("Royal Palace"), Palazzo Gambacorti, a Gothic building of the 14th century, is now the town hall. Palazzo Agostini, also known as Palazzo dell'Ussero. And the Tuttomondo mural on the Church of Sant'Antonio convent’s rear wall, though it’s not an antiquity since it was painted in 1989.
Museums: Museum dell'Opera del Duomo, Museum delle Sinopie, Museum Nazionale di S. Matteo, Museum Nazionale di Palazzo Reale, Museum Nazionale degli Strumenti per il Calcolo, Museum di storia naturale e del territorio dell'Università di Pisa, located in the Certosa di Calci, outside the city. And though not a museum, since it is a cultural centres, I’ll add them here, the University of Pisa, the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and the Scuola Normale Superiore.
Churches: Baptistry at Piazza dei Miracoli, San Francesco, San Frediano, San Michele in Borgo, San Nicola, San Paolo a Ripa d'Arno, San Michele in Borgo, San Paolo all'Orto, San Pietro a Grado, San Pietro in Vinculis, San Sisto, San Zeno, Santa Caterina, Santa Cristina, Santa Maria della Spina, Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, St. Sixtus and Santo Sepulcro, among others.
Palaces, towers and villas: Palazzo del Collegio Puteano, Palazzo della Caravana, Palazzo delle Vedove, Torre dei Gualandi, Villa di Corliano and Vornys Vag.

INFO Bit of history here but summed-up to make it speedy. During the later Roman era, Pisa became a great city due to its role as a main trading and commercial centre between Tuscany and Corsica, Sardinia and the southern coasts of France and Spain, and its strategic position as a main port of the Upper Tyrrhenian Sea, which controlled a significant part of the Mediterranean maritime transit up to the 11th century. In the 10th century though Lucca was the capital, Pisa was considered the more important city.
Continuing to sum up, it’s had a warring past that gave it honour, treasures, spoils, and animosity from other cities (such as Lucca, Massa, Volterra, Genoa and Florence and later Venice, when they tried to defy their rule of the Adriatic Sea, and with whom it went to war in 1206) but also a long period of power and splendour.
It ended up weaken, as it’s common in these cases, as much by external forces as by internal struggles. It lost a great part of its mercantile fleet, and later it was conquered by Florence in 1406. Its access to the sea became more restricted by the port silting up and cutting off access from the sea, and it lost its role of Tuscany’s major port over to Livorno. Though already past its best times and doing a jump way ahead to the future, in more modern times it suffered repeated destruction during World War II. (Though I’m curious to know to what extend since I didn’t see any overt sign of it in the Piazza dei Miracoli’s buildings. At first I thought maybe they started calling it the Square of Miracles in the 20th century because it survived bomb damaged but according to a couple of texts en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piazza_dei_Miracoli and www.toscanaviva.com/Pisa/piazza_dei_miracoli_eng.htm it’s more or less because of its architectural beauty).

ENG The information contain herein is valid as of the time of the trip (date stated in the tag section). The information given is only meant for informative purposes and the author is in no way responsible for any inconvenience, expense or other that might arise from its use. / ESP La información contenida aquí es válida en el momento del viaje (fecha mencionada en la sección tag). La información proporcionada solo tiene el propósito de ser informativa y la autora no es de ningún modo responsable por cualquier inconveniente, gasto u otro que pueda surgir de su uso.