Borgo Stretto

This guide to Borgo Stretto in Pisa traces how a scrappy medieval borgo of taverns outside the city walls became the arcade Pisans still call their living room. It follows the merchant families who crowded in during the thirteen hundreds, building wooden loggias over their stalls, and points out Casa Vanni's trefoil-arched window as one of the best-preserved survivors of that era. You'll hear how the Medici dukes Cosimo the First and Ferdinando the First later tore out the timber columns for the marble colonnade underfoot today. Walk it slowly in the evening, when the crowd it was built for finally arrives.