Pisa, Italy

We were fortunate enough to spend our second anniversary traveling through Italy. After our departure from Gaeta, we traveled, via Rome, to Pisa for an afternoon before continuing on to Florence.

The train service in Italy is structured so that it's very easy to spend an hour or two in Pisa while on your way somewhere else. It seems that no one's destination is actually Pisa; they're all just here to see the tower. Here's the scene at the tourist office by the train station:

Me: "Buon giorno." (or a close approximation)
Attendant: "Map?"
Me:
"Si."
Attendant: "Tower?"
Me: "Si"

And with that, in one grand sweep of her arm, she drew on the map a path in pink highlighter from the tourist office to the Leaning Tower. She did it -I swear- without looking, and it was dead-on accurate. It's a short walk through the streets of Pisa from the station to the tower, and along the way there were signs and banners exhorting (rather pathetically: "Pisa is more than just a tower!") us to visit the other sights of Pisa. As our guidebook stated, were it not for the tower, Pisa would be just a mundane university town.

But the tower alone is well worth the detour. Tall buildings often give the impression, when you're standing near them, to be falling toward you; well, this one really is. We learned that the tower originally pitched in the other direction and it has been over-corrected to its current position. They'll never get it right, though, because the whole tower is bent. After the lean had begun to manifest itself when the first three floors were built, the builders tried to compensate by building the upper floors to lean in the other direction. (This from the country that now gives us Ferraris and Lamborghinis.)

We walked around the site of the tower for a while, the Campo dei Miracoli, and visited the adjacent Duomo and Baptistry. After a cold beer at a nearby pub, it was time to catch our train to Florence.