Italy Day 5: Cinque Terre/Pisa/Florence

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Our train to Pisa didn't leave until late morning, so Mark and I took a walk through the town of Riomaggiore first thing in the morning. The weather was much better - just a few occasional drops of rain. There were a bunch of tweens gathered in a courtyard near our hotel, and we learned that Riomaggiore prides itself as the only town in the Cinque Terre that has a middle school for its population. It looked like the school only had two classrooms, but I'm sure that's better than shipping your young kids off to another city for school. We hiked to the top of town and found staggering views of the town and sea. Then on our way back down to the bottom of town, we stopped at a bakery and ate a lemon-themed breakfast: lemon focaccia, a crunchy croissant with what tasted like a lemon buttercream inside, and a pie wedge of pastry filled with lemon custard (my favorite of the three). The lemon focaccia was very sharp and interesting; the taste was okay but I don't think we'd choose it again.

A fond farewell to Cinque Terre

Riomaggiore

Silenzio, Bruno!

Our next overnight destination was Florence, but we decided to make an afternoon stop in Pisa on the way there. The main train station in Pisa offered luggage storage, so we took advantage of that and then hopped on a bus over to the Field of Miracles, home to Pisa's most famous sites. I don't especially enjoy watching travel shows (Mark does enjoy them); I feel they create too many expectations for what you will experience when you travel and I'd rather have more of a surprise with only enough foreknowledge to plan adequately. So when we walked through the walls surrounding the square I was so amazed and awestruck. In all honesty I didn't know what existed on the complex other than the Leaning Tower. The cathedral and baptistery were towering and impressive. We entered both.

We got this photo of Liz, much to Mark's chagrin

And we weren't the only ones taking photos like this.

The baptistery in Pisa is the largest in Italy and inside contains a pulpit carved by Nicola Pisano considered by some to be the first Renaissance sculpture. We were hoping for an acoustics demonstration by a singing security guard, but I think the combination of Covid and some construction inside prevented that from happening. On the outside, the dome is constructed of two different materials, traditional red clay tiles on the seaward side and lead tiles (fancier but more fragile) in the shade. If we hadn't read about it, we wouldn't have noticed that the baptistery actually has a tilt on it as well, though not nearly as much of a tilt as the tower and the tilt is in the opposite direction.

Baptistry and cathedral

Next we visited the cathedral. I was most impressed by the carvings on the outer door. There are scenes in panels on the front doors and they have been carved three dimensionally. Inside the cathedral, I was surprised by just how many Renaissance-esque paintings covered the walls. I think this is the first cathedral I've been to that screams "Renaissance" on the inside. Some interesting interior features include striped arches (which reminded me of the cathedral in Cordoba, Spain), the lamp that is said to have inspired Galileo when he observed it swinging, and the final (and most exquisite) pulpit carved by the Pisanos. The pulpit includes four hundred sculpted figures and shows chronological scenes from the life of Jesus along the top as you walk around it.

Cathedral exterior

and interior

We also went inside the Camposanto Cemetery. The cemetery contains many sarcophagi; Mark and I went shopping for our favorites. There are also giant frescoes on the walls; one is over 1,000 square feet in area. The frescoes were badly damaged during WWII and some are still being restored. The most attention-grabbing fresco was definitely Inferno, depicting Satan eating the hedonists, then pooping them out in hell to be tortured by demons.😈 I don't get many opportunities to use that emoji. 

What on earth did he eat?

For lunch we headed away from the tourist trap spots and found a doner restaurant out on one of the nearby streets. Our doners were spicier than a German doner, and they also contained fresh parsley for an Italian flair. Sad news is my main credit card fell out of my pouch at some point in Pisa and had not been found when we retraced our steps. On the bright side, we were near a McDonalds so I was able to take advantage of the Wifi and immediately freeze the card. I also downloaded the app for the credit card so we can immediately unfreeze it when we need to make a purchase using Mark's card. This is a good time to add in a note that while the U.S. has finally caught on to the chip idea in credit cards that Europe was using years before, Europe has moved beyond that to the tap and go system which is still trying to catch on in the U.S. Fortunately we just received a new card that has the tap technology and saves us a lot of hassle.

After finishing in Pisa we boarded the train to our final destination for the day, Florence. We will have three nights and two full days in Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance. Our hotel is close to the main train station and not far from most of the main sites and museums. That evening we followed Rick Steve's Renaissance walk and took in the main sites. The duomo was yet again, impressive. I think I was most impressed by how colorful it is on the outside. Apparently it's pretty blah on the inside so entering will not be one of our priorities in the next couple of days. Perhaps we'll just call it the inside-out cathedral. And the dome is also massively impressive - the technology to create such a dome did not exist at the time. Brunelleschi himself created the design and built it in only 14 years. Other sites we saw include Ghiberti's doors, several piazzas, lots of statues, and the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno river, home to fancy shops (and shops in older times as well) and the Medici's special walkway. We saw an overwhelming amount of famous stuff and some of it is blurring together.

Duomo exterior

Palazzo Vecchio

Ponte Vecchio, by night

Closed jewelry shops on the Ponte Vecchio

During our Renaissance walking tour we stopped at a unique dining spot recommended in our guidebook, Self-Service Ristorante Leonardo. It's a super-cheap (and good enough) cafeteria-style restaurant. I had some lasagna and a big salad with a mozzarella ball; Mark had cotoletta again (Milanesa) with fries and green beans. Our final cost was right around 20 Euros. The best part? No charge for water! You get a nice pitcher of water and it even has ice in it! We will probably be back for another cheap dinner before leaving Florence. We finished our evening with gelato - Mark chose coconut and stracciatella flavors; I chose grapefruit (not as good as I had hoped) and "English cake" which was quite delicious.