Day 8: Pisa

12/27: Today we toured Pisa. We got a fairly early start out of the villa, and arrived in Pisa about 2 hours later, with some slight trouble with roundabouts. Italian signage is just terrible.
I never realized that the tower was right next to 3 other landmarks. I had always pictured it standing (leaning) by itself, but it's right behind a duomo, which is right behind a baptistry, which is right next to another building that housed some graves, including Fibonnaci's, and some beautiful frescoes. We explored that baptistry first. Another example of the ridiculous splendor of the church during that time. It was a very dark structure, but the acoustics were something else. While we were on the second floor looking down into the baptistry fount, one of the museum guides came in and chanted something in Italian or Latin and it just filled up the whole place. Hard to explain in words, but it was a neat experience.
We walked around that fresco building next while waiting for our appointment time to actually climb the tower. We also attempted to tour the duomo, but it since it was Sunday there was an actual Catholic mass going on.
It was more challenging to climb up that I had imagined, and it was a little unnerving, for me at least. I made it to the top of the bell tower section, but did not go as high as Gregg, Em, and Kyle. I did not know that the tower was a bell tower either. The view of Pisa was amazing. You could see mountains in the distance, the small Italian buildings of the town, and the massive structures of the duomo and baptistry. It was incredible.
After climbing down, which was much easier than going up, we stopped for a late lunch. I ordered a salami pizza and tripe in tomato sauce, thinking the pizza was smaller than it actually was. I ended up sharing it with the family because it was a decent size. I also had some of Gregg's veal, Emily's pasta in boar sauce, Dad's seafood pasta, and Mom's pasta in wild hare sauce. And red wine to wash it all down, of course.
After lunch we finally were able to see the duomo. More splendor of the church on full display. The pullpit was nearly identical to the one we saw in Florence, and that was because the son had done the Florence one and modeled it after his father's work on Pisa one. The Pisa one had one major difference though, it showed pagan gods in the architecture, which was both interesting and odd. The ceiling was exquisite, but too dark to really capture well in a photo.
The last thing we saw was a museum behind the tower. It was full of the priests' vestments, sculpture of Roman gods, Egyptian hieroglyphics, a collection of huge prayer and song books that we had seen in other places, and more paintings depicting saints and such. The museum courtyard is supposed to have the best view of the tower, so we checked that out as well. I tried to do the cliched picture of holding up/pushing over the tower, but Mom just couldn't find a good angle, no matter how hard we tried. Oh well.
We wrapped up the day by buying a few souvenirs then headed back to the villa. For once, we had great weather the entire day!