Get a Pisa the Action

After the hectic strip of land crammed with all manner of buildings that was Genoa, today we explored the significantly more calm city of Pisa. Full of historical buildings from the last two millennium, Pisa has absolutely made it into our top 3 cities so far

Starting the day with a trip to some Roman buildings we wandered along the walls built in the 12th century. Unfortunately, laden with bikes (which did break later in the day again) we were unable to walk the walls themselves so we just followed the base to the baths of Nero. The baths, actually built after Nero's death by decades, good job medieval historians on that one, paled in comparison to that at Trier, still our top Roman history destination.

A glimpse of the efforts Rob will go to get a photo for the blog. Although the photo of the Etruscan tomb in question, which was super cool and did provide evidence for a pre-roman Etruscan presence, did not make the cut to the final blog.

The leaning tower of Pisa, unsurprisingly, really was leaning. More amusing than taking the embarrassing touristy photos ourselves was the crowds of people, literally hundreds, with their hands in the air, doing their best to pretend to lean on the tower too.

After a wander through some extremely cheap markets, a cycle where Danni's bike seat fell off, and an unimpressive salad, we made it to the highlight for me of the trip to Pisa: the roman naval museum! Adorned with room after room of pottery, ship components, and maps this museum took a novel take on Roman history from the waves rather than the land as is usually told. I imagine it's quite hard to make a straight line in the water...

Much of the evidence from the museum came from the old harbour, now near the train station and what became a massive open air dig in the 2000's. The changing position of the Arno, the river in question, representing the wider trend of changing water patterns that saw Roman era Pisa move from being on the coast to the coast retreating to now over 8km away. This open air dig unearthed a huge amount of Roman vessels, both commercial and leisure although not military, which had sunk and been covered in silt in successive floods of the region. Alongside the wealth of material evidence from the vessels themselves we have an absolute trove of artefacts from the boats demonstrating the extent of Mediterranean trade over the hundreds of years of the port's existence.

Away from the larger exhibits of the boats the museum also had an absolute wealth of artefacts like this enormous wooden anchor that had survived the c.1700 years since its creation. Ft. a very interested Rob.

Finally dragged away from the museum we made our way through the early modern fortress-turned park by the fascists in the 1930's and back to Moira.

A hours drive in land and along the Arno we made it to the destination for the next two days: Florence. We've tried two cities in a day before, lets now see if two days in a city works with our style. We can only pray that next week's anticipated storm doesn't come to pass!

Rob's favourite fact of the day: The Leaning tower of Pisa was actually leaning more in the 1990s at 5.5 degrees and now, after extensive modifications, only leans about 3.7 degrees

Danni's favourite fact of the day: When transporting timber on boats the Romans and other ancient peoples would just tie them to the boat and let them bob in the water in it's wake