Pisa

Monday, our last day in Italy, we set out to explore Pisa a bit before flying home. We thought we might catch a city bus up to the Piazza del Duomo but that turned out to be a bit difficult as we couldn't figure out how to get tickets. We tried the machine but it wasn't working and we kept seeing people just walk right up and get on the bus so we tried that. Once we got on we discovered that you had to validate your ticket in a little machine inside the bus. And since we had no tickets so we immediately hopped back off and ended up taking a taxi. We had the driver take us only as far as the center of the city because we didn't want to pay to go all the way to our destination when we were perfectly able to walk. The annoying part was that as soon as the taxi driver figured out we were "English" he bumped up the meter by a euro. Talk about discrimination.

Pisa is much smaller than I expected so the walk to the Piazza where the leaning tower is only took about 15 -20 minutes. This bell tower was built in stages over a period of 177 years, beginning in 1173. The foundation was only 3 meters deep and set in loose soil so when the third story was being built it began to lean. In 1934 Mussolini ordered that the tower be returned to it's vertical position but the efforts to do so only made it worse. During WWII the tower was spared in the bombing so it remains pretty much intact except for touch-ups to its appearance. In 1964 the Italian government requested aid in stabilizing the tower to prevent it from toppling over so in 1990 it was closed to the public (Evidently it took a long time to come up with the plan) Over 10 years later, in 2001, it was reopened after it had been straightened by 18 inches.

In the picture below you might be able to tell that the tower not only leans but also curves a bit. This is because the engineers, in an effort to compensate for the tilt, built the higher floors with one side taller than the other.Galileo Galilei, whom Einstein referred to as the father of modern science, was born (1564) in Pisa. He lived and went to school in this town as well. There is a story that Galileo tested some of his mathematical theories by dropping cannon balls of different masses from the tower to demonstrate that their descending speed was independent of their mass. There is some dispute over whether or not that actually happened though.

Mr X and I wanted to go up to the top but we balked when we discovered it would cost €15 per person.

All the tourists running around were busy taking pictures in which they were pretending to push on the tower, as you can see from the photograph below. I tried to convince Mr X to pose like that but all I got was a dirty look. (Not that I can blame him because I probably wouldn't have done it either.)After we left the tower area we headed back toward the center of town and stumbled across some (free) botanical gardens so we explored them for a while. It was stunning and I'm sure I can't even come close to capturing it in these pictures but I tried. There was a fascinating building next to the garden with a facade that was made entirely of seashells and coral and other oceanic items.
After the gardens we had some lunch at a local pizzeria where we were served the finest tasting pizzas of the entire trip. Then we walked the entire way back to the airport so we wouldn't have to pay for a bus or taxi. It worked out great (despite a few wrong turns) and we got there in plenty of time to catch our flight home to Germany.