Friday, 20 October, Cinque Terre (not), Pisa, and Florence

Written 27 February 2024

On Friday morning, we were supposed to enjoy a scenic cruise up the coast of the Cinque Terre—the Italian Riviera—but Anna had been watching the weather forecasts and had warned us that things weren't looking good. She promised that Tauck had plans A through F in place to handle all contingencies. Come the dawn, the day's forcast was for 3.5- to 4-meter swells and violent thunderstorms along the very stretch where we were supposed to visit, with the result that the government closed down all shipping and declared that only through trains could run. So we went to plan D and visited Pisa instead.

On the way, Anna entertained us with a whole list of Italians' stereotypes of each other:

• Milan is the financial capital and the fashion capital, and the people there aren't really Ialians, because they're always in a hurry.
• Genoa was one of the great maritime capitals; Genoese are cheap and are always involved in trade. Genoa is tied with Padual for Italy's oldest university.
• People from Turin are aloof.
• People from Venice are vicious. Venetians are a bit self-contained.
• The people in Bologne eat very well; they are fat, the red (Bologne is built entirely in red terra cotta brick), and learned.
• Florentines are snooty and snobby, convinced they have the best of everything. Florentine is the official language of the country, because it's what Dante wrote in.
• Romans are aggressive, especially the women.
• Those from Abruzzo have very wide feet; they're very grounded and industrious.
• Neapolitans (from Naples) are suspicious and superstitious.
• Cabrese are also hard headed, like the Neopolitans.
• Calabrese, very spicy food and very spicy personalities, they are very calm until suddenly they're not.

The south of Italy is generalized as taking afternoon naps, being laid back and not as industrious, whereas northern Italy is more industrial and its people more industrious. Americanss impression of Italians are based on the south, where the immigrants all came from.

As we approached Pisa, we crossed the Arno River, which, farther along, cuts Pisa in half. It also goes through through Florence.

Early in the morning, when it became clear that Plan D was the way to go, Anna got on the horn and booked a little blue tourist train (left) to take us from the giant suburban parking lot where our bus had to stop to a spot just outside the city walls and an easy walk from the Plaza of Miracles, where the cathedral, the baptistry, the marble cemetery, and the leaning tower are tightly clustered.

The walk from the train stop to the city gate passed through this dense gauntlet of souvenir stands. Each of the green teepees in the right-hand photo is a souvenire kiosk, mostly closed in this shot.

But as you can see in the left-hand photo here, they were opening as we passed. You can see how each one raised its sides to reveal loaded counters.

Here's a sampling of the sorts of things on offer: mugs, shot glasses, magnets, bottle openers, key chains, and zipper pouches, all featuring either the tower alone or the tower and its neighbors. And many, many models of the tower, in a range of sizes. Plus a few wooden Pinocchio items.

Written 28 February 2024

Once we cleared the crowd of vendors, we came to this gate in the city wall, which in the 12th century was 12 km long. Today, only about 4 km of the wall remain. At the gate, we met our excellent guide. Anna had also managed to line up this local lady on very short notice, despite the huge press of tourists that continually mob the place even in a normal year, let alone a blockbuster like this one.

And on the other side of the gate, there it was—the Piazza dei Miracoli (the Square of Miracles). When Pisa was in its economic heyday, in the 11th and 12th centuries, it built these four eccliastical monuments to show its wealth. They represent the four stages of life. The tall, round baptistry is where you start your life (at least your religious life. The cathedral beyond it represents the duration of Christian life on earth. The long, low indoor cemetery (to the left of the baptistry) marks the end of Christian life on earth, and the leaning tower at the far end (the bell tower for the church) symbolizes the soul's rise to heaven. The perspective can be deceptive. The baptistry and the tower are actually the same height.

Of course, the first order of business was the traditional trick photos. Here at the left are members of our group lining up for pictures of them holding the tower up. Our guide knew the perfect location, angles, and techniques for them and save us all time by lining up and taking the shots herself, using each couple's camera in turn.

At the right is a more dignified shot of David, just posing with the church and tower to prove he was there.

In that photo, if you look at the second row of small arches (above the large arches framing the doors), you can just see that one of the shorter columns on the right-hand side, where the roof slopes and the arches taper down in size, is dark-colored rather than white like the others.

Here's a telephotoed shot of that column, which is made of red porphyry. It was stolen from an ancient temple of Venus somewhere, and legend has it that, if you look at it for a full minute, your husband will be faithful until 10 am the next morning.

To the right of David, as he stands in front of the cathedral, the square is closed off by this long red-brick building. It was a hospital from the late 13th century until the well into the 20th. It has both a clock an a sundial on the front.

Next we toured the Camposanto ("holy ground"), the indoor cemetery. It's a long low rectangular building with a long rectangular courtyard inside, and it houses thousands of graves, including those of some important historical figures.

In addition is has 1000 m³ of painted frescos on the walls.

The roof is new, because, being so close to the railroad station and military depots, the cemetery got bombed 50 times during WWII. As a result of the damage, and especially the melting lead from the old roof, the frescoes were hastily removed for safety. When frescoes are made, the images to be painted are sketched on dry plaster, then colored in on a thin layer of fresh plaster, applied right over the sketch. Those removing the frescoes covered them with animal glue, then applied cloth. When the cloth was pulled off, the thin layer of painted plaster came with it and could be moved to safety. But when it was removed, the sketches underneath were revealed. Because the sketches were themselves of historical and artistic value, they were removed as well. Those sketches are called "sinopias," and the old red-brick hospital across the piazza is now the world's largest museum of sinopias.

As you can see from the view at the right, the place is pretty full. Only archpriests can be buried there now; the most recent grave is from 2009.

As the righthand photo shows, the graves were quite diverse, ranging from traditional burials in the floor to larger vaults with statuary.

Pisa used to be a port—the waterfront was right outside the wall, now, I think the guide said, it's 8 miles away. But when it was a sea power, chains were used to close off the harbor. When Genoa conquered the city and captured the harbor, its forces took the chains home to hang up as decoration on the fronts of houses. They gave part of them to Florence, where they stayed until 1848, when Florence gave them back to Pisa. Now you can see them hanging here, flanking some important grave.

At the right here is a view down the length of the interior courtyard.

Particularly spectacular frescoes included the one at the left here, showing God (protrayed, unusually, as a young man) holding the university in his hands. Of God, you can only only the head (sorry I cut part of it off), feet, and fingers (at 10 and 2, holding the disk). The rest of him is hidden behind the big disk representing the universe.

Another is this scene of angels and devils pulling the souls (in the shape of miniature, nude people) out of people's bodies through their mouths. (Another section shows an angel and a devil playing tug-o'-war with a soul, apparently not good or bad enough for its fate to be clear.

In another (not shown here), the seven deadly sins are shown as sections of hell.

Some of the graves in the floor were more elaborately decorated than others. These two were roped off, to discourage wear to the carvings, to keep tourists from tripping and breaking their ankles, or both.

One I was especially taken with was that of Leonardo Fibonacci (12th century mathematician). I've long known of the marvelous number series named after him (in which each number is the sum of the two before it), which figures so prominently in botany (the arrangements of, e.g., sunflower seeds in their seed head, scales on a pine cone, and eyes on a pineapple), but I had not realized that, as the guide told us, he was the one to introduce Arabic numbers to Europe. All of us should be profoundly grateful to him that we didn't have to learn arithmetic using Roman numerals!

Pisa has a very old and venerable university. Fibonacci taught there, and many other famous historical figures were either born in the city or came because of the university—Enrico Fermi was a student there, Nobelist Carlo Rubbia taught there. Our guide pointed out the grave of the inventor of the dynamo (which I take to mean Antonio Pacinotti, 1841–1912), but I didn't take a photo because it was under a big heap of scaffolding.

Outside the cemetery is a lawn that used to be an open-air cemetery, but those graves have been moved inside. Also just outside is a wooden grilled gate, just on the other side of which is Jewish cemetery.

Next we had a quick look at the cathedral itself. Over each of the three front doors was a colorful mosaic, this one of Mary surrounded by four angels. The photo at the right shows a closer view of the intricately carved columns flanking the door.

At the left here is just one of the richly decorated bronze panels on the main door. The botanical detail of the trim was amazing.

At the right is a view down the nave to the apse. A wide mixture of styles was used inside the cathedral.

Finally, we got a closer view of the tower. It was designed by Giotto, but he died long before it was finished. It was begun in 1173 AD, so just this last August, the city celebrated its 850th anniversary (though it wasn't finished until 1350).

It's 186 feet tall, and building it took 30,000 blocks of marble, weighing 14,000 tons. It leans 4.1 m out of plumb, and it was leaning 4.5 m before they shored it up. (In Suurhusen, Germany, a church tower leans even more steeply. It claims to have the greatest unintentional tilt in the world. Some modern buildings lean farther, but they were built that way intentionally.)

Several different techniques have been used to stabilize the tower in Pisa, including lead counterweights on one side and excavation under the back of it. It's apparently stable now, and I think you're even allowed to climb it!

From the tower our walk continued into the town proper. Our guide explained that Pisa had 69 churches but that we were not going to visit all of them.

In the Piazza dei Cavalieri (Knights' Square) stands the Palazzo dei Cavalieri, the headquarters and training center for knights of the original Order of St. Stephen (crusaders fighting the Saracens), shown here in the right-hand photo. The statue in front is Cosimo I de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Napoleon turned it into the university-level Scuola Normale Superiore in 1810. He intended it to be a branch of the École Normale Supérieur in Paris, and it's still going strong. It currently has about 600 students, and many famous people are graduates of it.

A final interesting factoid our guide left us with is that, just as Michelangelo died Gallileo was born, and just as he died, Newton was born. Puts things in an interesting perspective.

Then Anna and the guide turned us loose to find our own lunch, with instructions to reconvene at the city gate where we entered at 1:10 pm together with directions for the walk back there.

We chose a trattoria that looked promising (Lo Sfizio, meaning "the whim"), where a number of other Tauck folks joined us. We had booked a Michelin 2-star restaurant for the evening, so we kept it small. I had a pizza with tomato, mozzarella, and “spicy salami,” and David ordered ravioli filled with Gorgonzola and smothered in not the tomato sauce he expected but a white cream sauce.

Although the choices were were myriad (left and right here), we didn't really have time for dessert before setting out for the rendezvous point.

On the way, we passed this statue of yet another favorite son of Pisa, mathematician and politician Ulysse Dini.

Rain threatened the whole time, but we lugged our raincoats around all morning, so it never actually fell.

Back at the gate, our guide directed us to what she insisted on calling our "choo choo train." I wondered at the time whether she didn't realize that "choo choo" is baby talk and that Americans don't always apply that term to trains, but then as we were boarding, I spotted the brand name of the German-made vehicle embossed on its tailgate—"Tschu-Tschu," i.e. "Choo Choo." Fair enough.

Then it was back to our faithful bus, which took us on to Florence as planned. The trip was supposed to be 90 minutes, but the driver got bulletins about a stretch of road that had to be closed, so with the detour it took more like two hours.

Driving into town, just a block or two from our hotel, we got our first views of the cathedral, including Brunelleschi's famous dome. We had both just reread Ross King's book on the subject (Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture) and were anxious to see the actual structure. Until we saw the building, I hadn't paid much attention to the appearance of anything but the dome, and I have to say that it looked to me like it was entirely clad in giant antique ivory dominoes!

On arrival, we checked into the Hotel Brunelleschi, a very nice establishment indeed. Brunelleschi was apparently one of the first owners of the building. Today, the hotel occupies five different medieval buildings, including the 13th-century cylindrical Pagliazza tower in the photo (supposedly the oldest building in Florence).

Inside, of course, it's all very modern. The floors in the hallways undulate up and down like rollercoasters, smoothing over the differences in floor levels between buildings, and at one point, going to the elevator each day, I crossed a short glass bridge from one building to another, over a little alleyway in between. According to Anna, the hotel appeared in A Room with a View. It has part of an old Roman bath in the basement.

The 2-star restaurant at which we had dinner reservations in in the tower (the windows visible just above the café umbrellas in the left-hand photo.

At the right is the handsome four-poster bed in my room.

For dinner, we chose the larger (7-course) tasting menu, on which they had to modify several dishes for us because the chef loves cucumber (which David hates) and avocado (which I’m allergic to). The chef was one of those compulsively innovative ones, so we were served many strange new things, often with entirely inappropriate utensils, but it was a very good dinner nonetheless.

The amuse-bouche alone consisted of six different preparations. I got chestnut cream with hazelnuts (left), concealing a raw oyster. David's oyster was concealed by guacamole and lemon.

In the same photo is a little cube of smoked mackerel with a green olive on top.

In the right-hand photo are (1) a cube of gin-and-tonic cube of jello with poprocks (yes, the exploding candy) and (2) a "cherry" made of liver pate with cherry glaze on it. Note the peculiar little two-tined fork along the right-hand edge of the photo.

On the tall pedestal, still part of the amuse-bouche, were little cylinders of olive filled with something with yuzu.

The bread service was three-fold: bread sticks, slices of bread, and little yellow crackers (made of polenta, maybe)?

Strangely the olive oil they gave us to dip the bread in was rather bitter.

Then came a real course, I think. It was eel covered with yakitori sauce and accompanied dabs of by almond cream and a smoky gel of something I didn't recognize the Japanese name of. It was garnished with a tiny, fragile cookie in the same of a leaf cookie, and it was all served with hot tea (left).

The sweetbreads (left) were really excellent, but David was not thrilled with the restaurant's choice of a red Valpolicella to serve with them.

Then came spaghetti dressed with spirulina, bottarga, crispy bread crumbs, and maybe some green olive. Spirulina is a freshwater alga, basically pond scum, that was very popular as a health food supplement a while back (maybe it still is?). To harvest it, producers simply raked it out of ponds (complete with all the little animals living in it and a modicum of plain mud) and left it to dry on the bank before grinding it up and packaging it for sale. I hope the restaurant has a more conscientious supplier.

Next came a small pasta of some kind stuffed with braised oxtail with mushrooms. It had shaved porcini mushrooms on top and was surrounded by a porcini soup.

The mullet was followed by small croissant-dough breads stuffed with pumpkin and chocolate and maybe. They were yummy, but they scattered crumbs everywhere, and the staff in this place were absolutely obsessive about crumbs. They swept the tablecloth after every course and sometimes in the middles of courses if they spotted a crumb.

Once they had cleaned up after the crumbly breads, they brought (I think) pigeon with strips of artichoke, crispy leaves, a little rose made of apple, apple jelly, and something crisp, chips I think he said.

At this juncture, we were issued new napkins (confetti-colored) and new water glasses (also confetti-colored). I found the change out of keeping with the rest of the decor—I might use the glasses at, e.g., a picnic. But then later in the trip, I discovered what those glasses cost at the high-end Venetian showroom of the Murano glass blowers. Still, I wonder, what were they (the restaurant and the glassblowers) thinking?!

My first dessert was cucumber sorbet with cucumber chips. It was actually more of a cucumber granité or cucumber ice with cucumber dice on top, then the chips, lightly sweetened. It was a little difficult to eat with the single spoon they gave us because the stuff scooted around in the dish and was difficult to scoop up. I wished I had another implement with which to steady it rather than having to use my finger.

David got spirulina sorbet with chocolat ribbons, flower petals, and some sort of dark-colored crumble.

My second dessert was described as a “fake salad.” It was a composition of carrot ice cream, a freeze-dried (but very tasty) parsley leaf, carrot shreds, slightly sweetened cucumber loops, and a strange salty, crumbly white substance, vanishingly insubstantial on the tongue, that turned out to be extra virgin olive oil and salt, which foams and solidifies when liquid nitrogen is poured into it, then crumbles and holds its shape when it returns to room temperature. The whole thing was drizzled with olive oil and was surprisingly delicious! My favorite course after the sweetbreads.

David got sambuca (i.e., elderberry) sorbet with chips of something on top and what looks like blackberries.

The mignardises were five-fold, and I only remember what some of them were. On the low dish, nearest the camera, were chocolates; in the middle behind them were macarons (chocolate maybe), and behind those, little pear-shaped things draped in pear-colored frosting and decorated with small salad leaves. Standing in the mug were lollipops, of some kind of sorbet, I think, with flower petals on top. On the tall block? I'm baffled. Dollops of something creamy with crumbs on top; I don't even remember whether the transparent blocks they're resting on were edible or, e.g., made of glass. The former, I suspect, as they seem to have grains of something embedded in their bottoms.

So count the courses however you want. I couldn't make it come out to seven.