Hidden Tuscany by John Keahey

Author:John Keahey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250024329
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

EIGHT

Far from the Madding Crowd

Pisa became a refuge, an exotic setting, in Shelley’s words, a “Paradise of Exiles.” In truth, it is hard to point to anything particularly paradisiacal about Pisa in the early nineteenth century.… Pisa was not a principal stop on the Grand Tour, something that Byron and Teresa Gamba appreciated because it enabled them to avoid, in the poet’s words, the “gossip-loving” English who flocked to Florence, Venice, and Rome.

—Nicholas Shrady, Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa (2003)

VISITING PISA never appealed to me. Visions of stopping there just to see the Leaning Tower in the midst of massive numbers of tourists and overwhelmed by T-shirt and trinket stands lined up for a quarter mile along the square, the Campo dei Miracoli, or Field of Miracles, kept me, over the years, on trains passing through while en route to somewhere else.

But while living for several months just twenty minutes north by train, I reconsidered, and ended up going to the city three times. I saw the crowd-infested area around the Leaning Tower—begun in the twelfth century and completed in the thirteenth. I knew that preservation officials had determined that if the tower was left untended, it surely would come crashing down on their watch. Such a disaster happened to the bell tower in St. Mark’s Square in Venice in the early twentieth century, and Pisans did not want their best tourist draw to suffer the same fate. While Venice’s bell tower was rebuilt much sturdier than its twelfth-century predecessor, it is unlikely a fall-proof “leaning” tower could be raised from rubble to match its predecessor in such heroic fashion. Therefore officials spent the $30 million or so necessary to fix it, working through much of the 1990s to correct about sixteen inches of tilt. It was reopened in 2001. Work to clean and restore its stone was finished in 2010.

For my inaugural journey, I boarded a southbound train at Pietrasanta, and twenty minutes later disembarked with several hundred young people who commute daily to their classes at the University of Pisa. These students swarmed across the tracks at Pisa’s San Rossore station, not bothering with the pedestrian tunnel underneath them. Over the loudspeaker, a recorded female voice was reminding them it is illegal to cross the tracks and please, stand behind the yellow line. The students paid no heed; I am sure this is a daily ritual for them, and it would be futile indeed for authorities to stand there to stop the hordes that get off each train early in the morning. I brazenly joined the masses, jumped the tracks, and headed for the Field of Miracles.

It was early, about eight o’clock on a weekday morning, and the square, thankfully, was nearly empty. Vendors’ stalls along one long side were shuttered, except for one or two stands selling caffè e cornetti. The Duomo, the Baptistery, and the cemetery/cloister from the Middle Ages, Campo Santo, or sacred ground, were closed and not opening until ten o’clock.

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