Pisa, Pisa!

You know you’re taking an awesome class when you take a field trip to a famous place like Pisa. Famous only for its leaning bell tower, Pisa had a beautiful Cathedral complex, but nothing else. If planning a trip to Italy I’d stay away from Pisa and just look at pictures online (like the ones here!), but don’t go unless you’d like to kill some time. Everything in Pisa can be done in less than 3 hours.

The entire Cathedral complex can be seen in this picture—The short and long building that you can only see a section of is the Camposanto (cemetery). The most prominent building in the picture is the Baptistery, which was my favorite here because of it’s beautiful simplicity and conical inner dome that made for awesome acoustics (they demonstrated!). Immediately behind the Baptistery is the Cathedral. Beautiful, but we’ve seen so many gorgeous churches already that unfortunately they’re becoming commonplace and no longer awe-inspiring. Finally, all the way to the right is the bell tower and the main attraction at Pisa. It was pretty cool to see up close, but it looks the same in pictures.

I think you already know what this is…

inside the Camposanto—The people are buried in sarcophagi lining the walls inside and under the floors. The people of Pisa were eager to be buried in this Church structure, especially since the dirt inside was taken directly from Jerusalem!

This relief is on the pulpit in the Baptistery and is thought to be inspiration for Michelangelo’s famous David sculpture because of their similar body positions (just swap the positioning of the arms). Michelangelo is known to have spent a great amount of time in Pisa and he would have seen this many times before he sculpted his David.

This picture is pointless but I just thought the “leaning” mugs that they were selling at the souvenir kiosks were so funny.

But I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to come to Pisa… who doesn’t want to take cheesy tourist pictures?? (oh yeah, and see the architecture…)