My Journey to Italia

Pisa

Monday, October 2, 2006

I can now say I’ve seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa! Pisa was a nice little day trip, there’s not a whole lot to do in the town but took at the tower. Saturday morning I got up early and walked down to the train station to meet Jessica and Ali. The ride to Pisa was about 2 hours and we had to switch trains in Empoli. There we had a half hour layover so we explored what little of Empoli we could before we left again. Since Jessica is from Orange County she knew what I meant when I said I had the really strange feeling that we were in Old Town Orange! Empoli looked just like the City of Orange, with orange flowers, a turn about and everything! It looked like a cute little town without much going on.

Pisa was definitely a bigger city and definitely a tourist attraction. It was also really dirty, especially compared to Siena and even Florence. There were some nice clothes stores on the main strip (one called Zara that I want to check out again in Florence, they have in South Coast Plaza, where the clothes are really expensive, but here it is much more affordable for some reason) but not much else. I have to say I wasn’t that impressed with Pisa, just because it was infiltrated with so many tourists, but the tower was very, very impressive!

The Leaning Tower actually leans, quite a bit too! It’s funny looking because I guess when they were building it they realized it was leaning half way into the construction and started building the top half straight. So the bottom is really crooked and the top is straight! Its really big too, bigger than I expected, and when you look at where it meets the ground you can really tell how slanted it is. Apparently it is slowly falling more and more and they are trying to put as much weight in the other side as they can and employ as much mechanical know how to keep it from falling!

There was also another large Cathedral to look in, a Baptistery and multiple museums. After taking the typical tourist photos, us holding and knocking down the tower at various points, Ali and I bought tickets the Cathedral, Baptistery and one museum. The Cathedral was worth it, very grand and beautiful inside, but the other two places were not worth the money. They just didn’t have much to them. The museum was very bare and kind of repetitive, so that wasn’t much fun, and I usually like museums.

After all that we boarded the train for Siena. Since we are all home stayers we all wanted to be home in time for dinner! We were planning on going out in Siena that night, but were too tired after a long day. The night before we had also sat in the Campo people watching and stare gazing until after midnight. That was actually really fun and relaxing. The next day I explored Siena on my own. It as a beautiful day out, and I had this urban trekking map of Siena that I was following that took you to the hard to reach parts of Siena. It was a slow, relaxing weekend.

posted by Madeline Faye @ 3:39 PM