Pisa-Lucca

September 29:

Today I got up at 5 to join the group going to Pisa and Lucca at 7. I wasn’t sure I would be able to go because I was on the waiting list and would have to see if there was extra room on the bus from someone not showing up. Well, too bad for whoever didn’t come because I got to go! Our bus was actually a bit late too, so people had plenty of time to make it to the meeting point.
It was another beautiful morning to start out in: cool temperatures, mist in the valleys, pink clouds and a yellow horizon. Our drive to Pisa only took about an hour, as opposed to the three hours it took to gain Ravenna. But Pisa is still within the province of Tuscany, a few kilometers from the Mediterranean. We passed the Pisa airport, Galileo Galilei, which was of interest to me because I am thinking of leaving from there for my visit to Germany since I can probably get a better deal. I just have to figure out how to get there from the train station.
Apparently there is nowhere for buses of any sort to park within Pisa (or at least its historical center) and we were obliged to drive around its outskirts following an avenue completely lined with big umbrella pines. By then, of course, the sky was a perfect blue and the sun had no competition from the clouds. We got to our bus parking lot and started walking to the cathedral complex. It wasn’t long before we were going through the gates of the old city wall and getting our first looks at the Piazza dei Miracoli and its baptistery, cathedral, camposanto, and Leaning Tower of Pisa. We then took a coffee break and I went with a couple of people into a local bar to find some breakfast. Bars in Italy are not like bars in the States: while they probably do serve alcohol it is not their lone trade. They are more like cafes or coffee houses at home with the addition of some alcoholic beverages. If you want an American sort of bar, you have to go to a pub. You usually just stand at the counter too, or risk paying an extra fee for a table. At this bar there wasn’t even a place to sit down, anyway. I had a pastry called a “pisanina pasta di mandorle” and a cappuccino. The pisanina was something baked like a pie and cut into wedges. I don’t really have anything to compare it to at home but it was very good.
We then met by a standing pillar topped with a vase that was located near the leaning tower and listened to a long historical background about Pisa which I am sure I would have found fascinating had I not already read all of the art history instructor’s information in short essays she passed out while we were on the bus. As it was, I took the opportunity to examine the cathedral’s façade and to take pictures. The façade is imbedded with a large number of recycled Roman reliefs and inscriptions, some placed sideways and upside down. We then circled around to the front of the cathedral in order to view its doors and then turn and go to our first real stop: the baptistery.
The baptistery is a lovely building, a bit unusual for several reasons. Firstly, it is completely round when, I guess, most baptisteries of this time were poly-sided. Secondly, it has a very unusual two-shelled dome in which the outer shell describes a hemisphere but the inner shell looks like it has been draped over a pole. The inner shell comes through the outer shell making the profile of the dome really quite odd. It is roofed with both lead and tile, the tile being a later addition. Its third oddity is its acoustical miracle: a person can stand in the middle, sing a few notes, and the building is filled with reverberations that sound more like an organ. No one knows if this was an engineered feature or a happy accident. It also has an upper gallery which we did not have time to visit.
We went into the baptistery and I immediately made my way over to the pulpit by Nicola Pisano. I took an intense early renaissance class about a year and a half ago called “The World of Giotto and Dante” in which we spent a very significant amount of time discussing the architects and sculptors of the proto-renaissance. Nicola Pisano was certainly not to be missed in such a discussion, nor was he: we spent so much time talking about him! I was very excited to see this work of art of which I had spent so much time in Iowa looking at slides. I won’t spend time describing it here: you can look at my pictures of it and draw your own conclusions. I will say that there is a figure of Daniel that is thought to have at least partially inspired Michelangelo’s David, who was a great admirer of Nicola. While we were looking at the altar, the staff gave their half-hourly acoustical demonstration so we got the opportunity to experience that amazing feature!
Back outside, we headed over to the camposanto which is a rectangular, open building with a courtyard. In the “porch” areas are located sarcophagi. So, it is basically a very strange cemetery. The legend is that it was built around soil taken from Jerusalem. In fact, many pilgrims, too poor for a journey to the holy land, came to the camposanto as a sort of substitute since it was said to have this soil there. One of the interesting things about the camposanto is that it is generally agreed that Nicola Pisano’s main artistic influence was from Roman sarcophagi which he would have had easy access to in the cemetery. This is because it was considered fashionable to, basically, exhume Roman remains from their original tombs and have your own remains placed inside so the camposanto is/was filled with lots of great examples of Roman relief sculpture. In fact, one of the Madonna panels from Nicola’s altar has a Madonna directly lifted from one of the sarcophagi in the camposanto. Another interesting thing about the cemetery is that after it was very unfortunately bombed in WWII, restorers/preservers took down the many frescos in its porch to move them to a safer place. Underneath, they found all kinds of drawings in preparation for frescos, many of which have nothing to do with the frescos that went over them and seem to just be a sort of sketchbook-on-the-walls. These in turn have been removed and are now in their own museum just on the opposite side of the piazza from the camposanto. And in fact, after visiting a few of the frescos (The Triumph of Death and The Last Judgment and some fresco about the daily lives of monks), it was to that museum, Il Museo delle Sinopie di Pisa, that we went next.
It was a very little museum but also very nicely done. It was interesting to see all of the things the artists were working out before executing their final works. I actually liked them quite a lot more than the frescos themselves because of their wonderful spontaneity.
After leaving le sinopie, we went to the cathedral itself, Il Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta dedicated to the Assumed Virgin (for us protestants, it is believed that Mary was assumed into heaven at her death after which she was crowned the Queen of Heaven). I can’t recall if it is believed that she was assumed before or after her death meaning, I can’t remember if she is supposed to have died at all. In any case, I also made quickly for the pulpit here because it is equally as famous as the one carved by Nicola in the baptistery. It is, in fact, by Nicola’s son, Giovanni Pisano, who even out-did his father, achieving much more human drama in his relief program. At some point in its history it was dismantled and later put back up but without some of it original parts (the stairs, to be specific). The actual pulpit seems to be whole and it pretty much has to be set up in the right panel order since it is arranged chronologically and it is unlikely that it would fit so well together in any other arrangement.
Our last stop in Pisa was Il Museo dell’Opera del Duomo which houses a number of things which have been removed from the cathedral to guard against the weather and have been replaced with copies. There is also a very unusual crucifix there of which I took a couple of pictures. I believe that it was done by a French gothic artist. I also took a picture of a model of what some historians believe the original pulpit by Giovanni Pisano looked like. There were quite a lot of badly weathered sculptures done by Giovanni or his workshop.
We broke for lunch and, if anyone wanted to pay the 15 euros (which I thought was far too steep, being approximately 22 dollars) and make an appointment, for a climb up the Leaning Tower. I ate at a pizzeria with my friend Katie and her mom, Toni, who was visiting for the weekend and had been able to join us on the field trip. I had pizza margherita and helped Toni eat some calamari. Instead of going up the tower, I went and stood next to it the way country-raised kids in Iowa get city-raised kids to go and stand right next to a silo and look up. The effect of the clouds sweeping by is supposed to make the silo look as if it’s starting to fall over on you. This was much more effective since it was already leaning over and I went ahead and took some pictures from this angle for good measure.
We then walked back to the bus and headed to Lucca, which has a view of the Carrara Mountains where Michelangelo went to pick out marble for his statues. It still has its medieval city walls intact which have become something of a city park. Whether they have been built up in thickness in recent times or were always this way I’m not sure, but there are trees and grass and a bike path the run on top of the entire wall. We were told that occasionally people fall off the wall on their bikes and are killed. I think I would stick to walking it! However, we didn’t get the opportunity to do either as we had quite a busy schedule within the city.
Unfortunately, as we had traveled to Lucca (about a half-hour from Pisa), it had clouded up and was not quite as pretty a day as it had been in Pisa. The bad news kept coming as, at our first stop, the church of San Francesco (or Frediano? I can’t remember), we found that a funeral was taking place and we would not be able to enter. So we headed to the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro. It is an ovular piazza built around the Roman Amphitheater that used to be there. It was somewhat interesting and we could still see some of the foundations for the amphitheater. We then walked to an old palazzo that has a tower with a very interesting feature that was, apparently, the norm at one point in Lucca but is now the only surviving example. It has a sort of “hanging garden” complete with trees growing, I would guess, 50 ft above the ground. It was pretty weird! Then we headed back to the amphitheater and had a quick and very welcome break in which I took the opportunity to have a coke! We then tried our luck again at San Francesco and were this time able to gain entrance.
There were two pretty interesting thing located there: first was the body of St. Zita, a local saint who was a bread-baking servant for local artistocracy. Apparently, when there was extra bread she would give it to the poor. On day she had her apron filled with unwanted bread when her employer saw her and asked what she had in her apron. She is to have responded, “Nothing but flowers,” and when she opened her apron that is, indeed, all that was inside. Another story associated with her is that she was in such deep prayer one morning at church that she missed her bread-baking hour. When she returned to her employer’s house, however, there were all of her loaves of bread ready to be baked yet none of the other servants had lifted a finger. So, St. Zita knew that angels had made the bread for her. The Lucchese really like her a lot and every year in April there is a week long festival for her: The Festival of Flowers and Cake. The amphitheater is filled with flowers and a special cake the recipe of which supposedly originated with her is celebrated. Anyway, when she died her body didn’t really decompose: it is totally mummified for some reason and is on display at this church. There is also a very interesting well/fountain that no one knows who carved but of which art historians say that several sufficiently different sculptors can be detected.
We then made our way to the church of San Michele, dedicated to the archangel Michael. It has a very strange façade which does not match the functional structure of the building and incorporates a number of arcades with columns that are extremely different from one another. On top of the whole thing is a statue of Michael. Inside, on some of the side-aisle columns, there is an amount of medieval graffiti. I got a picture of an elephant.
We then went to the church of Santa Reparata which is interesting because of the archeological dig underneath it. It was apparently built on top of an earlier church which was built on top of a Roman bath. Also in it basement are the foundations of the brick-making kilns used by workers to erect the church! That was pretty interesting but also very confusing as there were so many layers of things to try to make sense of. When we left, we walked to a nearby bakery apparently patronized by the likes of Prince Charles himself to order our own St. Zita cake. We were to have it cut and ready for us upon our return.
It was now time to go to the museum for the main cathedral, San Martino. Photographs were absolutely forbidden here as in the cathedral which is just as well since I was so physically and mentally tired that I’m not sure I could have expended the energy to choose something to snap a picture of. There were illuminated manuscripts, reliquaries with bones of such saints as St. Sebastion, examples of Lucchese silks (Lucca was a big silk center), and a number of ornaments that had been fashioned for the miraculous crucifix in the cathedral during the days when it was processed in the streets.
We then went into the cathedral itself which had a façade very much like that of San Michele. Inside was the Volto Santo, a crucifix which is said to have been carved by one of the men who took Jesus down from the cross and is therefore a highly accurate portrayal of him. It is miraculous because it was apparently but on a ship in the holy land, by itself, which made it to the port of Lucca where it was placed in an ox cart, by itself, that apparently made it to Lucca. It was extremely famous in the Middle Ages and was one of the things a pilgrim to Italy could not miss. Also in the cathedral was a Tinoretto painting that, due to the always-dim light of the cathedral, is one of the few works by Tintoretto that has not lost the vibrancy of its reds and greens.
It was now time to eat our St. Zita cake! It is only found in Lucca because I guess they must be the only ones with the recipe. I didn’t think it was much like a cake at all: more like a pie with a very soft and flexible crust. The filling was made from vegetables and had a texture akin to pumpkin pie but was green in color and had visible pieces of vegetables in it. I decided that it was good and would have liked a bigger piece! Maybe I can go back to Lucca before I leave Italy; I’d like to walk the city walls!
It was time to go home and, after waiting for some separated and lost members of our group to find our bus, we set off and made it back in perhaps 40 minutes or so? I didn’t time it but it didn’t seem very long. It was nice to see lights here and there in the mountains. I was so tired when I got back that, after instant messaging with my mom for a bit, I fell asleep with my contacts still in!