summertime goes south

15th - 19th July
Really enjoying Pisa. The leaning tower is a wonderful building, gleaming white and grey marble. It leans at an improbable and rather alarming angle, so ridiculous it makes you want to smile. The adjacent Duomo, Baptistry and Camposanto Monumentale make a truly impressive set of buildings set in the Piazza Dei Miracoli, monuments to the wealth of the Republic of Pisa from the 11th to 13th centuries. There is much more with churches, palaces and civic buildings scattered around the compact central area. The dominant colour scheme of white and grey marble gleams in the sunlight making these buildings stand out against the darker ochres and browns of more workaday buildings. Central Pisa is sufficiently compact to walk around comfortably and full of narrow streets and alleys with squares dotted here and there. Most pleasing is the fact that it is lived in, the local life make the evenings a pleasure as the local children play and the local resident debating societies abound. Tourists are plentiful but do not dominate.
There is more than enough to keep us fully entertained with all the Renaissance architecture anyone could wish for.
Linda went to Mass in the Duomo on Sunday, what a fantastic setting with a brilliant choir, as I heard from outside.