Visiting Pisa (Italy)
with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Plan A the next day involved a train ride to Pisa. All of the city’s most famous monuments are conveniently located together for tourists.
Laurent
had to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa to get a panoramic view of the
town. (It was still open to tourists at
that time.) I did not want to huff and
puff up the narrow, Medieval stairways in the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I
spent my time watching tourists taking pictures with the Leaning Tower of Pisa
behind them. I do not think they knew
they could go up in the Tower, because they could not read Italian.
When
Laurent reappeared, we visited the Duomo (Cathedral). I was happy to see the little Hercules on the
Baptistery Font that heralded the Renaissance due to its use of ancient Greek
ideals of beauty to sculpt it. This
little Hercules was sculpted by Nicola Pisano ushered in the Renaissance in the
13th century.
Small
pieces of fresco paintings lay in orderly piles on the floor. Bombs from World War II had shattered the
frescoes that were lying on the floor.
The
love and devotion that went into tedious work like that amazes me, but
preserving the patrimony must have been a real motivator for the restorers I
thought and maybe good pay or job perks.
The
cemetery was full of Roman sarcophogae that were reused during the
Renaissance. Many professors from the
University of Pisa had graves there. I
wondered if the tradition in Italy was the same as that in France where graves
were recycled every 30 years unless the family keeps up a grave payment.
Even
though Pisa lies to the west of Florence, we still had to enter Florence on the
east side using the train. There were
gardens everywhere, but the east side of town was poorer than the west side.
There
was a large area of small houses made of corrugated siding that did not make it
into the tourist guides to visit. Poor
people in Italy seemed much poorer than those in the United States; they had
gardens and ramshackle homes, but were borderline homeless.
I
was beginning to become somewhat acclimated to the heat and had good things to
say about the food, particularly my lunch that day. My appetite was returning.
I
tried a menu item called ribollita. This
item is a Tuscan soup made with bread, beans, vegetables, and whatever
vegetable leftovers may be in the house.
It
is served hot and comes topped off with a generous helping of olive oil. I loved it, but almost melted in the heat
like a chocolate bar when I ate it for lunch.
Another
food item that Laurent and I liked was the bread with the dried fruit in it and
the lush Tuscan peaches. I even
developed a liking for fizzy water.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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