Pisa

27/9  BIG FELLA JEFFIE BOTICA’S BIRTHDAY!

PISA - Galileo & Leaning Tower

The J’s enjoyed a magnificent morning run along the seafront & through the old train tunnels & tracks that we rode as a family yesterday.  The day was just waking up and the plane trails like scratches, criss-crossed the sky and were filled with the glow of the rising sunlight as if golden glitter were rubbed over and caught in the furrows.

Back at home, we powered through school, tidied Ed, put up his signs, loaded the blog and skyped, called, messaged Mr Big Fella Jeff.

Our drive alongside the extensively quarried Dolomite like Apennines (how many of us have chunks of kitchen from this area?) had us pulling into flat Pisa in no time where tantalizing snapshots of the Leaning Tower poked out between pencil pines. 

We easily located our rest stop only 2 kms away from the Torre, enjoyed a smelly pasta lunch of anchovies, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, boccincini, pesto, egg, tomatoes, carrot and pasta in a mushroom sauce and jumped on the bikes despite the rain.  

Coming into Piazza Del Miracoli was thrilling.  Claimed to be one of the world’s prettiest, we rapidly concurred, despite the drizzle.  The Tower’s lean seems incredulous and it is easily the prettiest, almost cute and quite little bell-tower we’ve seen.  

The surrounding large grassed Piazza houses Romanesque beauties including the Cathedral, the striking Camposanto (cemetery), the baptistry and the museum.  Even though it was raining ,there were thousands of folk delighting in the famous square along with us - imagine it on a sunny day!  What makes it utterly gorgeous is the concentration of almost gleaming white & green marble - even on the footpaths.  Sufficiently ‘wowed’ lingering and pouring over the majestic exteriors & the really interesting video about Bananno Pisano’s architectural botch up (never got a soil test) without having to pay entry tickets to anything, we then enjoyed coffees and hot chocolate before taking a soaking ride home to Ed.  

We sat and chatted about how cleverly the tower’s stability has been secured. It took a panel of international interdisciplinary experts 10 years to work out & execute.Using 40 massive archimedes screws on its northern face ,they removed enough claylike (once bottom of the ocean) sandy soil to reduce it’s tilt enough to allow another 300 years of visitor traffic!  Jeff wondered why the hell they didn’t bother simply bailing out in 1061 when the first 4 tiers developed a scary tilt.  Why pull it down and rebuild it then?   Wil reckoned they knew about the tourist Euros to come.  The project was abandoned twice over several hundred years before it was finally completed in the late 1300s with the belfry placed at an opposite angle to it’s lean.  And then all the Euros and sense (international team of experts ) that went into the recent (last 20yrs) strengthening and replenishing - we are sure that with today’s technology they could have straightened it up to perfect vertical, and bolstered/supported it there for another 1000yrs+, but for the touro Euros - who would visit then?  Big Al and his Root Barrier could have done it!  Just need a 2m trench, some sheets of polythene and a garden hose.

Whilst now largely a busy university (which has taken over the most gorgeous Piazza del Cavallieri with it’s incredible rich graffiti plaster work) & tourist town, it’s clearly very wealthy maritime past is evidenced by these piazzas & splendid monuments. Apparently the river silted up preventing access to the sea. There was not much fuss sadly about the city’s famous Galileo who taught at this university - we’ll chase more about him in Florence.

So, we dried off in Ed for an Italian lesson, dinner and a big juicy read.