No one expects … the Leaning Tour of Pizza !!!
(This was a long, entry-length response to a comment left on my last post)
"Man look at all the tourists"
Yeah.
Funny thing is I arrived at dusk on Wednesday night, and took a cab from the hotel (which was, after you know the way, a 15-20 minute walk) to a restaurant in the old town to meet work colleagues from my new job (I was in Pisa for meetings). We had an incredible meal. Then a group of us decided to walk back.
After getting lost int he old town, suddenly we turned a corner and we were there at the site of the tower and church. It was about 10.30 at night (maybe 11?) and the place was deserted. It was the five us and these magnificent buildings. (The tower was lit by huge spotlights nearby.) And that was my first time to see it. I took iPhone photos (which frankly are much more impressive without the throngs of tourists) but the phone crashed (as I said in another post) and the pictures were lost.
We walked past on two other occasions during the day and both times the crowds were verey sparse. One evening it was raining (which might also explain the sparse crowds) and so the tower and church buildings were shining in that wet late evening sheen. (Again the iPhone crashed). So I was surprised to enter the square on Saturday (this time with my cheap digital cam not the iPhone) to see hordes of people … but it was Saturday so i guess I shouldn't have been too surprised.
(There seem to be few hotels catering to tourists in the area so I think they bus the tourists in for the day, so if you actually stay overnight and wait of the busses to leave the experience of Pisa is going to be much different.)
Pisa is a small and kinda run down town. So the Leaning Tower is definitely it's main draw. And as I'm sure you've heard the Tower is kind of in contrast to the things around it. Cause it's kinda "m'eh m'eh m'eh OMG TOWER m'eh m'eh m'eh."
The tower and church are extremely impressive at any rate. (and the food.)
On the other hand there are a lot of nooks and crannies in the town to discover other things. One thing they do there (in all of Tuscany?) that I'm not used to seeing other places is build around older buildings (instead 1. tearing them down, or 2. simply restoring them to the way they would have looked 100's of years ago). So you find a municipal building and when you go inside that building is an ancient clock tower that the building has been build around. We also saw apartment buildings where the facade combined ancient marble with brick and glass and stucko. You might see half a marble arch that is cut off by an ugly brick wall. But apparently they just incorporated the ruins of a much older building into the new construction (I didn't get a picture of that … I wish I had).
Anyway, I will post some more pictures of non-tower small slightly run-down Italian town stuff that might interest folks on The Facebook.
