Pisa, Italy

Seymour and I got our train tickets for Assisi and Lucca and then hopped on the train to Pisa. It was a bargain at less than 2 euro each way: but it was only one stop away, also.

I loved Pisa. All of the pictures I've ever seen of the leaning tower were of it by itself. I was expecting it to be somewhere alone outside of the city. Instead it is right beside the beautiful Duomo and other buildings in a complex inside the walls of the city. Here are some of the many pictures I took of it. I just couldn't take my eyes off of it.





So beautiful!






I didn't realize that this is one of the Seven Wonders Of The World.

This is the front of the Duomo



This is the building behind the Duomo and the leaning tower.


This is a statue on the top of a building in the same complex.




So of course I had to take Seymour in front of the leaning tower. Not a great picture and somehow I seemed to make the leaning tower not lean!



A little history I read on a postcard - the tower was started in 1173 and finished 99 years later. It leans 14.9 ft. Galileo performed his famous trial about gravitation.

The downtown area of Pisa is shaped in a crescent and has little shops everywhere. There is a horse race track in town but I didn't see it. Here are a few pictures I took around Pisa.










I decided to take a city bus from the train station in Pisa and back to check out the area. The bus went pretty far into the country and into another city - and broke down. There were only 3 of us on the bus and no one else spoke English. Now that I am writing this, I think I had a dream similar to this. Anyway, once the bus driver knew I couldn't understand anything he was saying, I saw the "oh crap" expression cross his face. I finally realized that the bus was broken and they were calling in help. After about 20 minutes another bus arrived and there were only 2 of us that got on the bus. I kept saying I was going to the "stazzione" but unfortunately, he wasn't. He dropped me off in Pisa ( thank goodness) and I made a few wrong turns but found my way back to the train station.

The rest of the day was uneventful; we made it to our train, made it home without getting lost, talked to the hotel owner for a long time and settled in for the night. Seymour got bored waiting for me to quit talking to Dai so he started digging through my bag, found one of his chew sticks and ate it. I thought that was pretty funny - he just made his own entertainment.

Tomorrow I am going to find where I can buy the Livorno pass so I can ride the buses here for 3 days and visit some museums, etc.

One interesting thing I heard about the hotel I am staying in is that it was used as a hiding place during the Holocaust. There is supposed to be a beautiful synagogue in town I hope to find over the next few days. I will probably wait until Monday or Tuesday to go to Lucca.