Everyone arrives in Pisa for one tilted bell tower, and almost everyone leaves surprised by the rest. This was once a maritime republic that traded with the Levant and fought Genoa for the western Mediterranean, and the wealth of those years is still standing in white marble on the lawn of the Piazza dei Miracoli. Behind it lies a lived-in university town of arcaded streets, pastel palaces along the Arno, and students who have kept the place young since the Middle Ages.
Pisa rewards a slow visit with an audio guide in your ear. The Tower of Pisa is the obvious first stop: begun in 1173 and finished two centuries later, it started leaning on its marshy foundations before the third storey was up, and its guide tells the story of the engineers who spent the 1990s pulling it back from collapse, and of the GI who, in 1944, chose not to shell it. Then the guides lead you away from the crowds, to the streets where the city actually lives.
Start on the Field of Miracles
The Piazza del Duomo — the Field of Miracles, in the phrase borrowed from Gabriele d'Annunzio — is one of the great architectural set pieces of Europe, and it makes more sense once you know the buildings came before the tower. The Cattedrale di Pisa was begun in 1064 with plunder from a Pisan raid on Sicily, consecrated in 1118, and gave its name to the Pisan Romanesque style; inside, Cimabue's apse mosaic and Giovanni Pisano's carved pulpit reward a slow circuit. Across the lawn the Battistero di San Giovanni, begun in 1154, is the largest baptistery in Italy and famous for an echo that the custodians still demonstrate for visitors. Each has its own guide, so you can take the square one monument at a time.
The Camposanto and the museums of the square
The long marble wall on the north side of the lawn is the Monumental Cemetery of Pisa, begun in 1278 around earth said to have been shipped back from Golgotha after the Crusades. Its cloister once held the finest fresco cycle in Tuscany; an incendiary shell in July 1944 melted the lead roof onto them, and Buffalmacco's Triumph of Death only returned to the wall in 2018 after decades of restoration. The preparatory underdrawings that the bombing exposed now hang in the Sinopie Museum in the former medieval hospital opposite, and the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo keeps the original sculptures and treasury pieces moved indoors from the monuments. Together they explain what you have just seen outside.
Piazza dei Cavalieri and the university city
A five-minute walk south brings you to the Piazza dei Cavalieri, laid out on the site of the Roman forum and rebuilt in the 1560s by Cosimo I de' Medici for his new crusading order, the Knights of Santo Stefano. Giorgio Vasari's Palazzo della Carovana, its facade covered in sgraffito, was the knights' headquarters and now houses the Scuola Normale Superiore, founded under Napoleon and still Italy's most selective university. The Palazzo dell'Orologio - Torre della Muda o della Fame beside it hides the tower where Count Ugolino della Gherardesca was starved to death with his sons in 1289 — the episode Dante placed in the lowest circle of the Inferno.
Borgo Stretto to the Lungarni
Borgo Stretto is the medieval spine of the old town: a narrow, porticoed street of cafés and bookshops that runs down to the river at Piazza Garibaldi. Cross the Ponte di Mezzo and the curved embankments, the Lungarni, open up on both banks — the best evening walk in Pisa, and the setting for the Luminara on 16 June, when tens of thousands of candles outline every window and cornice for the feast of San Ranieri. On the south bank the tiny Gothic Church of Saint Mary of the Thorn, a lacework of pinnacles built to hold a thorn from Christ's crown, sits almost on the water, a few doors from the sapphire-fronted Palazzo Blu, whose exhibitions bring major names to a city better known for the Middle Ages.
Roman ships, Keith Haring and the city's other stories
Pisa's harbour silted up centuries ago, but in 1998 railway works uncovered it: the Museum of Ancient Ships of Pisa, in the old Medici arsenal, displays intact Roman vessels from the 3rd century BCE to the 7th century CE along with their cargoes. Near the station, Keith Haring's Tuttomondo (Keith Haring) covers 180 square metres of the rear wall of Sant'Antonio Abate with thirty interlocking figures — painted in 1989, it was his last public work, born of a chance meeting with a Pisan student in New York. And the National Museum of San Matteo, in a riverside Benedictine convent, holds the painted crosses and Pisano sculptures that show how much of Tuscan art began here before Florence took the credit.
Getting there and beyond the walls
Pisa is an easy day from Florence — regional trains take about an hour to Pisa Centrale — but it deserves a night, when the tour groups leave and the Lungarni fill with students. The centre is flat and compact; everything above is within twenty minutes on foot, and the guides are designed to be played as you walk between them. With a bike or the Trammino cycle path you can follow the Arno to the sea at Marina di Pisa, or cross into the Parco Naturale Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli, the old royal estate of pinewoods and dunes that stands between the city and the coast.