Pisa and the Field of Miracles
Saturday we packed out bags, said our good-byes, and David drove us to Pisa where we were to stay the night at the Royal Victoria Hotel.
When you mention Pisa, it is usually in the context of "Leaning Tower of-" but there is quite a bit more to it than that. There is the Royal Victoria Hotel, for one thing.
The oldest part of the building was erected in the 10th century, and evolved over the centuries into a very stylish and charismatic establishment. The floors are all tile; the only lift is tiny, slow, and makes funny noises; stone stairs are chipped around the edges, but polished from years of use. Breakfast is served in a lounge on the first floor, and there is a rooftop terrace on the fourth, filled with potted plants and dotted with chairs and tables. An adjoining abandoned building, face overgrown with false grape, provides a home to a flapping, cooing family of pigeons, and the entrance to the hotel is guarded by these two fine specimens of feline loyalty:
Our room key wasn't a modern key-card, or a modern key at all: it was a skeleton key, the sort used for unlocking trunks that invariably contain magic swords or jewelry, and often obtained from the jaws of some ill-tempered dragon or similar beast. In our case all we had to do was pick it up at the front desk, though the hotel asks that you leave your room key with them when not in your room. Understandable, since if it were lost it would probably be sold to a recycler as scrap metal to build one of those tiny Italian cars.
After some tramping around up and down stairs Aunt and I uscita'd the hotel for an afternoon on the town. We got lost and rained on navigating our way to the Campo di Miracoli, and spent a little more time exploring. The city was heavily bombed during World War II, far worse than Florence, and this damaged is still evident today when walking down most any street, where one will find strict, later 20th Century buildings, all right angles with modern cooling systems, across from rambling, overgrown stonework constructions that appear better equipped to handle horses than modern plumbing.
But eventually, partly by intuition and partly by Aunt's GPS map app on her phone, we found our way to the Piazza del Duomo, also called the Field of Miracles, home of the city's famous leaning bell tower.
The Duomo of the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence makes an impressive entrance, all majestic arches and red-brick rising above the delicate stonework of the cathedral's facade. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, however, has an opening act.
First, the tourist booths, crammed with much of the same merchandise as the ones upriver, lining an otherwise unremarkable line of typical Tuscan city-houses. Then, across from these and from behind the imposing shoulder of another such building, you see the Baptistry: a free-standing circular building of pale marble with a domed roof decorated with spikes and crowned with a globe. Taking a few further steps to get a better look at this visage brings the Cathedral into view, a domineering construction of the same white and gray marble, cutting a jagged shape against the clouded sky. And then, not far from these two upstanding examples of religious devotion, is another structure, immediately recognizable for its countless arches and pillars, leaning away from its two companions like an embarrassed teenager from its parents: the campanile bell tower.
Climbing the Tower costs 15 euros a ticket, and is a somewhat tricky business: all the guide books we read warned that, to get a chance at climbing this example of obstinate engineering, you had to book your ticket weeks in advance-before you even arrived in Italy, preferably. But since this was an improvised part of our trip we had been content to merely walk around the piazza, admire the tower, and perhaps get into one of the less celebrated (but better calibrated) attractions on campus. And we visited on a Saturday: by rights the place should have been packed. And indeed it was crowed with tourists, but it was also September, after Labor Day, and it had been raining. It was not, by a longshot, Sunday at Disneyland.
We managed to get tickets for the tower at 5:40 (every forty minutes or so 30-45 people are allowed to climb the tower, and are allowed a limited amount of time inside), and to pass the intervening time we also got tickets to see the Cathedral-which, by contrast, were only 2 euros each.
There are four attractions of note on the Field of Miracles: the bell tower I have already spoken of, but there is also the Cathedral, the Baptistry, and the Camposanto-the monumental cemetery. We chose the Cathedral, as we did not have time for all three before our tower climb, as the largest and-since we did not have the time to tour the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence-a suitable substitute.
It is not a building to be underestimated. The doors alone-the tallest of which could easily clear three people stacked on each others shoulders, are carved from some bronze-like metal, with men and saints and horses literally leaping out at you. The interior is dark, magical, and-perhaps-a little hypocritical. For though it is majestic and beautiful in its dedication to glorifying God, the Catholic faith and an ideology which pretends to hold out grandiose stories as solid answers to the greater questions, it is the reliable and honest scientific world-the world that the church at every turn has tried to reject-that makes this fantastic and awesome monument to the supernatural possible at all.
There is hard geometric knowledge and proofs needed to build an arch-let alone the dome, the pillars, the stained glass windows. The builders of this-no doubt devout in their faith and love of God, for nothing less than such all-consuming love of something can, in my experience, inspire such artistry-must have had, certainly did have, at least a working understanding of such principles, otherwise this ceiling would, quite simply, not have been possible:
Those amazing latices and vertices of wood and gold, the soaring arches and the heavenly light they let fall, is not the work of any god or supernatural being: it is science and chemistry, geometry and thermodynamic radiation-and, in my eyes, no less beautiful for it. Indeed, I see it as one of the crowning achievements of humanity, something I am genuinely proud of, that we can take such bare, emotionless scientific theories and principles, and effortlessly imagine them into something so moving and beautiful.
Nevertheless I find it also darkly amusing that the very scientific laws that allow such religious monuments to be built, would, with a few more centuries of research, soon be tearing great chunks out of those very religions; forcing Gods and Demons out of the clouds and shadows and further and further from tangible reach by the human mind. Just as the enhanced understanding of physics in the Renaissance allowed builders to construct wider windows, letting in more light to illuminate the church, that same knowledge was also building larger windows into our own minds, letting in refreshing winds and soothing light to drive out the superstitious prejudices and slowly burn away the fear of the unknown that had caused us so much damage in ages past-fear that, let's face it, had been wellspring of power for institutions such as this.
And though I can appreciate the art, and beauty, and the immense amount of work that went into the construction of these buildings, I cannot help but get the feeling that these artisans-though they obviously felt a great deal of passion for their work-were not thinking very clearly about why they were doing it. They did not question or observe the world they lived in very closely; or if they did, they carefully ignored those observations that did not confirm what they already believed. Those who didn't ignore their observations were people like Galileo, or Leonardo, who applied their art and passion to very different, and ultimately much more powerful ends.
I guess what I am trying to say with all this atheistic babbling is that, although I found this and every other Italian cathedral I visited to be very beautiful and evocative, I did not find them to hold any answers: only art and stories.
And as an artist and a storyteller, I find myself judging them on their own merits. And against the vast ocean of other arts and stories in the world, I find the Christian arts exemplary only in the degree to which that have captivated so many audience members.
But enough of that, let's go climb some stairs!
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a miracle, not in any preposterous religious sense, but in the very real sense that it has had to overcome obstacles from its very conception.
Built on unstable subsoil of the Arno/Serchio river delta, it began to lean almost as soon as construction began. After three floors the builders took a hundred year break, allowing the soil to be compressed and settle-without this step, the tower probably would have toppled, and it also made the tower's base is not only tilted; but sunk below the ground level of the Cathedral and Baptistry. Because of this, when beginning to climb the tower, you get the odd sensation of going down a few steps before beginning to ascend.
Work on the tower was resumed in 1272, and the new architect came up with the brilliant plan of building the upper floors with one side taller than the other, to compensate for the tilt. Because of this the tower is not only sunken and leaning, it is also slightly bent. The seventh floor was finally added in 1319, and the bell-chamber bolted on in 1372, two hundred years after the first stones were laid.
Then, in World War II, Allies found out that the Nazis were using the tower as an observation post, and laid the fate of the sunken, leaning, bent tower in hands of an anonymous U.S. sergeant. And, in a rare case of good luck for the Italians in that period, he decided not to blow it up.
Then in the 1990's a huge, multinational team converged on the tower to restore it and keep it from toppling over-while retaining its trademark tilt. Today it has finally been stabilized to the point that it is no longer actually falling (albeit at the rate of a few millimeters per year), and should be stable for the next two centuries. Guard rails have been installed where you can walk around the outside, and two security guides wait at the top to make sure no one does anything foolish.
Walking up its worn marble steps on a gray Saturday afternoon in September, I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was considering the steps themselves, which unlike the steps inside the Duomo which have been resurfaced in cement, these are the original marble, and have grooves worn in the center from a thousand years of climbers. These grooves become more pronounced the higher and narrower the stairs get, until the last push to the very top where they are so smooth and curved it is a little difficult to find solid footing.
I've climbed towers before. And hills. And jumbles of rock. The Leaning/Sunken/Bent Tower of Pisa inhabits an uncomfortable area between these three. Because in a tower generally everything is engineered to be level and solid, stable. This tower, by definition, is not. It is tilted enough that the stairs do not have an even grade as you ascend, and once at the top there is a permeating feeling of off-balance, hard to pin down and deeply disconcerting, until you reconcile the line of the horizon with the surface you are standing on.
Then everything is fine. Or you scramble back down and lie in a heap at the feet of the security guides.
The view is spectacular, as is to be expected. Better, you can look down on the nearby monuments and see them from all sorts of angles they were probably not originally intended to be seen from. Like this they are no less beautiful, but to me I like them even better. Looking down at them, surrounded by the green lawn of the campo and the city of Pisa beyond, they seem more like the natural rock formations of my home mountains. Something that is a part of the land and earthly scenery, rather than a construction built to be set apart from it.
After about ten minutes at the top we were called down, and after the descent made our way down the shop lined street opposite the campo. On the lawn-side are a series low cement pillars, topped with spheres, which provide the favorite stage for the hordes of tourists taking forced perspective shots of themselves popping up the tower. Being the attention-monger that I am, I could not resist taking a turn at this, though in my own fashion.
(In joke for 2 Sense fans. Love ya.)
We then treated ourselves to a long, satisfying dinner out under the awnings of a caffetteria at the Piazza di Dante, complete with booze and frustratingly slow WiFi (I tried, and failed, to post yesterday's update), followed by a leisurely walk though the spitting rain back to the hotel along the western terminus of the Arno river.
Thus closed our trip in Italy, but I will save my closing thoughts-and the account of the flight home-for another entry.
Arrivederci!