PISA – Colors and Craft

Like I mentioned in my previous post, we hadn’t planned on visiting the Leaning Tower of Pisa but realized we were only about an hour away. We jumped on a train from La Spezia to Pisa to spend a few hours there.

We saw this mountain range while on the train to Pisa. We were wondering why it was white because it was too warm to be snow we Googled it and found out that is where Michelangelo came to get stone for his statues. We took the Pisa S. Rossore stop on the train as opposed to the centro-where we were told to take by someone. We looked it up on a map and the leaning tower was just a 5 or so minute walk from the train stop.

You can climb up in to the tower but we were so exhausted from a long day of hiking that we just walked around. We went inside the church in the square and also watched a movie in the visitor’s center about why the leaning tower is leaning. And all the work they have done to preserve it. It was pretty interesting. It started leaning by the time they were done with the fourth level because the ground used to be covered by the sea many years ago, so the ground was very sandy and soft. Eventually, people kept building it despite the fact that it was leaning.

{there were so many people taking pictures like this man-so that it looks like he is holding up the leaning tower. It was so funny to see all of these people, many of whom got yelled at by the guards for going on the grass}

Then we got some pizza at Ristorante Pizzeria Duomo with the leaning tower as our backdrop.

And some gelato for the train ride back to La Spezia.

{waiting at the train station}

We bought tickets for another sleeper train (before we left) from La Spezia to Naples. It was a long train ride so we figured it would be best as an overnight ride. Just like our experience taking an overnight train to Venice, we felt like it would have been better for us to just take an evening bullet train from Pisa to Naples and get to Naples really late at night. Because our train didn’t leave La Spezia until about 11 pm. Then we found out it was delayed so it really left at like 11:30 pm. In the meantime, we were there in a closed train station just waiting with about 15 other people. Kind of creepy, kind of boring.

It had been a really long day for us so we were pretty tired. Luckily, this sleeper train was a private room, so just Danny and I shared it. I slept pretty well but Danny kept thinking we were going to run off the tracks-we didn’t 🙂

See other stops on our trip to Europe: Copenhagen, Brussels, Vatican City, Rome, Venice, Murano/Burano, Cinque Terre