Pisa

Last Monday, Carmen said to me, "I need to see the ocean."  This struck me as a little strange since I am the one who actually goes IN the ocean back in Encinitas and I hadn't felt the need.  Continuing her thought, she said, "Let's drive over to Pisa tomorrow."  And so we did.

where the Arno joins the Mediterranean

When I say "Pisa," I know what you are thinking, so here it is:

Lean?  What lean?

I had thought that the tower was a medieval office building, but in fact it is the bell tower for the Duomo Santa Maria Assunta, to which it stands near but separate.  Construction on the tower started about a century after the duomo, and clearly the later generation had lost the knack for putting something up straight.  The names of the original architect and builder are not known, presumably because they did not want to be remembered for their monumental screw-up.  I imagine they had a hard time finding work after doing the tower. 

Bapistry (Battistero di San Giovanni)

The tower, duomo, and bapistry are set in the huge Piazza dei Miracoli.  One of the miracles is that nobody has been killed by the tower falling over.  Most of the piazza is a giant, well-kept lawn.  On the sunny fall day we were there, many families with young kids were lounging on the lawn, blithely ignoring the "keep off the grass" signs in true Italian fashion.

Details from bapistry exterior

Pulpit by Nicola Pisano

The bapistry is a treat for the eyes, inside and out.  The pulpit was sculpted by Nicola Pisano over a five year period; its completion in 1260 is marked by some as the start of the Italian Renaissance.  Carmen really got the lighting right in her photo of it here:

Some other shots inside the bapistry:

Pisa is also famous as Galileo's home town.  You know the story: he demonstrated that objects fall at the same rate, independent of their weight, by dropping cannonballs of different sizes from the top of the tower.  The story is doubted by scholars, who argue that nobody, much less Galileo, could hire an Italian who would be willing to haul cannonballs up the 294 steps.  The Inquisition liked the story, however, and suggested to Galileo that they would be interested in an experiment to see if he fell as fast as his cannonballs.  Now Galileo is famous as the founder of the scientific method and the Pisa airport is named in his honor.  Payback for bad dogma is a bitch.  How wonderful it is that the same institution that ran the Inquisition for more than 500 years should now find itself a leader who speaks clearly for the highest human values.  

To wrap up this post, here are a few of Carmen's photos from inside the duomo: