Pisa | Beyond the Tower
Pisa in January, in the rain, and the half of the city the day trips never see
It was a Tuesday in January, ten degrees, the kind of soft grey Tuscan winter rain that does not quite commit to being rain, and we had been on the coast for less than a month after a fall spent up in a stone village above Carrara. Marciaso had been beautiful and silent and very, very cold, and Sophia and I had eaten our way through Lunigiana, and what we wanted, in a way that surprised both of us, was a bowl of Japanese noodle soup.
The nearest place to get one was Pisa.
So at eleven in the morning, we got in the car and drove the thirty minutes inland, and at quarter to two, we found a parking space at the end of a street I now cannot find on a map, and we walked into MIU Ramen ten minutes before the kitchen shut for the afternoon, and the cook looked at us once and then nodded and we sat down. The broth came out steaming. The rain on the window of the small room was the slow, grey kind. We ate the way two people eat ramen when they have driven thirty minutes through winter weather to find it, which is to say without talking, very fast, until the bowls were empty.
This is not how anyone visits Pisa. Anyone visiting Pisa goes to the tower. We went for ramen, ate ramen, walked back out into a January street with the rain finally stopping, and only then, as a kind of afterthought, since we were already in the city and the weather had improved and we had to walk off the noodles anyway, did we point ourselves toward the Campo dei Miracoli to look at the thing everyone else comes here to see.
I want to make a small confession before going further. We had been to Pisa once before, years earlier, the way one visits Pisa, which is in summer, as part of a day trip from somewhere else, and we had hated it. The Campo was a sea of held-up tower selfies, tour groups, and restaurants whose touts shouted prices at you from doorways. We had walked through it, looked at the tower for ten minutes, and left. So this second arrival, on a damp January Tuesday with no one in the city and the rain off and our bellies full of broth, was almost an experiment. We wanted to see what the place looked like without the crowd.
What it looked like was different.
The first thing that struck me, and it should have struck you, walking up the Via Santa Maria toward the cathedral with almost no one around, was that the Campo dei Miracoli is not in the center of Pisa. It sits at the northwest edge of the old city, against the wall, which was once the gate. Northerners coming down from Lucca or Genoa or further would arrive here, and the city of Pisa, then at the peak of its power as a maritime republic, would show them a wall and a cathedral and a tower and a baptistery, all four together, all four big, all four white, all four arranged exactly to be the first thing the foreigner saw. The Campo is not the heart of the city. It was the city’s front lobby. The actual city lay behind it and below it, threading down to the river and beyond.
You can tell this is still true by watching what the tourists do now, eight centuries later. They arrive on coaches that park in the lots immediately outside the old wall. They walk through the same gate the medieval traders did. They go straight to the tower, take the photograph, walk into none of the buildings, not the cathedral, not the baptistery, not the small chapel, not the museum, and they walk back out the way they came. The Campo is still the lobby. They are doing exactly what eight hundred years of design intended them to do.
Behind the lobby, the city begins.
We walked it that afternoon for the first time in any real sense. Down Via Santa Maria. Past Piazza dei Cavalieri, the old Pisan civic square framed by the Palazzo della Carovana. The piazza is grand in the slightly austere Pisan way, frescoed facades, no flourishes, and on the afternoon we walked through it there was an antique market spread across the cobbles, and we paused at every stall, and bought nothing, and thought we had stumbled across something rare and Pisan, which I now know is the same rolling antique market that runs through Viareggio and Pietrasanta and half the towns of this part of Tuscany on rotation. We were new then.
The river was a five-minute walk away. We crossed the Ponte di Mezzo, the central bridge, and at the moment we stepped onto the south bank, the city changed.
There are cities where the two banks of the river are continuous. Florence is one of them. The Oltrarno is quieter than the Duomo side, but the rhythm is the same. Pisa is not such a city. The Arno here is the line between two Pisas. On the north side are the tower, the Campo, the route the buses take, and the famous cecìna place, Il Montino, in a vicolo off Borgo Stretto, where the queue is always out the door, and the customers speak every language except Italian.
The Pisani are on the south side. The streets narrow. The shops shift from souvenirs to bookshops and bars. The tables outside the cafes have people at them, talking. The signs in the windows are in Italian. We walked the south bank for an hour that afternoon, and I do not think we passed a single English voice.
The reason for this, I have come to understand, is the same reason the Campo is a front lobby. The University of Pisa, founded in 1343, sits mostly on the south bank, around Piazza Dante and the streets that run off it. Sant’Anna, the engineering and social sciences sister school of the Normale, is there too. Between them and the Normale and the regular Università, the city of ninety thousand has about fifty thousand students, which is a ratio that does something specific to a place. It makes the streets young. It makes the cafes cheap. It makes the bars open late. It makes the bookshops survive. It makes the bars, trattorie, and tavola calda places concentrate on the kinds of food students can afford to eat regularly, which is the kind of food that is most worth eating in Italy, which is the food made by people without pretensions for people without money. Pisa is a college town that happens to have a tower attached to it.
We came back, after that January Tuesday, often. We came back enough to develop a routine, which is the routine I now recommend to anyone who asks. Park at the train station, which is on the south side of the river, almost equidistant from everything that matters. Walk north up Corso Italia. Cross the Ponte di Mezzo. Walk the Lungarno on the north side for half an hour. Cross back. Spend the rest of the day on the south bank, in the streets behind the university, in whichever bar or trattoria or panini place catches you. If the weather is good, sit on the parapet along the south bank of the Arno for an hour with the students. They sit on the wall like pigeons, all in a row, in pairs and in threes, talking and kissing and reading and smoking, and the river slides past them brown and slow, and the bells from somewhere ring the hour, and you can sit there too with a coffee from a paper cup, and nobody will ask you anything.
The students are the second thing I want to tell you about, because they are what makes Pisa unlike any other Tuscan city.
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They dress, almost all of them, in 1980s clothing. I do not understand this. It is possible that the rest of European university culture also dresses this way now, and Sophia and I are simply too old to have noticed. The boys in oversized leather jackets and high-waisted jeans. The girls in turtlenecks and long wool coats, and the kind of sunglasses my mother wore in Budapest in 1987. They walk slowly. They read on the street. They read in cafes. They read on the riverbank. The volume of reading visibly happening on the south side of Pisa is the highest I have seen anywhere in Italy. The cafes still have bookshelves. The bookshops still have customers. Almost no one is on a phone. It is, in some accounting, a city that has refused to fully enter the present; the refusal is generational, and the generation is not mine, which is the part I find most interesting.
I will give you the contrast. The summer after that first January visit, a Hungarian friend came to stay. He wanted to see the tower, so we said fine, and we drove him to Pisa in early July. We could barely fit through the gate. The Campo was packed shoulder to shoulder, and there was a line, an actual queue, for the prime spot to take the holding-up-the-tower photograph. We watched maybe two hundred people in a row take the same photograph, with the same hand position, in the same direction, in front of the same tower, before walking off and being replaced by the next two hundred, and I understood at that moment something about modern tourism that I had not understood before, which is that the photograph is not the souvenir of the experience. The photograph is the experience. The tower is incidental. The line behind it is the actual structure of the visit. When we walked back out of the Campo and crossed the river to the south bank, the streets were still calmer, the bars still had locals at the counter, the river still slid past, and a small number of brave tourists had crossed too, and they looked like people who had just found something. The contrast in density between the two banks of the Arno in July is almost industrial. Five hundred meters apart, two cities.
The other thing about Pisa, which I now find I love most, is what happens at six o’clock.
Venice has this same property. After six, when the day-trippers have gone, Venice is for the Venetians, and the city becomes quieter and more beautiful and more livable, and you wonder why anyone visits at any other hour. Pisa is the same. At six, the buses leave the Campo. The day trip is over. The Pisani come out. In summer, the streets fill with students who have been hiding from the heat all afternoon, and now the air has cooled. In other seasons, the streets fill with everyone else, since the students do most of the filling year-round. The cafes that had tourist menus in the afternoon switch their boards to local prices. The trattorie open for the dinner hour with the locals’ menu, not the lunch one. You can walk through Piazza dei Cavalieri at seven in the evening in October with almost no one in it except a group of normalisti walking back from a lecture, and the great frescoed facade of the Carovana is just there, lit by streetlamps, and you can have it for as long as you want it. This is how to see Pisa. It is not how anyone you know has ever seen Pisa.
I should say something honest about the tower, because the whole publication is built on honesty, so here it is. The tower is not very interesting. There are many medieval towers like it elsewhere in Italy, in better towns, with no crowds around them. The lean is a structural failure, beautiful by accident, no different in spirit from the small askew bell tower of any number of mountain churches we have walked into in the Lunigiana. The only reason it draws three million people a year is that it leans visibly in a way that photographs well. If you have not seen it, you have not missed much. If you want to see it, do it on a Tuesday in January in the rain, when no one is there, the way we did the second time. Half an hour is plenty.
The rest of Pisa, though. The rest of Pisa is one of the most quietly alive cities in Tuscany, and it is alive in a way that the other Tuscan cities are not. Lucca is alive in the way of a city that has paid for its peace for hundreds of years and still has the receipts. We have written about that. Florence is alive in the way of a museum that closes its eyes once a year and pretends. Siena is alive for one afternoon in July, and a film set the rest of the time. Pisa is alive because it is full of twenty-year-olds reading on a wall, and because the wall is the parapet of a river that once carried the Pisan navy to the Levant, and because behind them are streets that have housed students for nearly seven hundred years, and because the city has, mercifully, been left to the people who actually live in it, by tourists who only ever wanted the picture and never thought to look at what stood behind them when they took it.
