Pisa

Why go

One field, four buildings — cathedral, baptistery, campanile and cemetery, conceived as a single composition. Pisan Romanesque — a striped marble style this republic exported around the Mediterranean. A university older than most states — founded 1343, and the reason the town is young in term. The Arno without the crowds — the riverfront palaces that everyone walks past on the way to the tower.

The character

Pisa was a maritime republic with a fleet that took Palermo from the Arabs and colonies from Sardinia to the Levant, and the Field of Miracles is what that wealth looked like when spent on God rather than ships. Building began in 1063 with the cathedral, financed by loot from a raid on Palermo, and continued for nearly three centuries in a consistent language — blind arcades, striped marble, columns doubled and redoubled — that architects copied from Sardinia to Puglia.

The tower began leaning during construction, three storeys in, because the subsoil is soft silt from the Arno delta; the builders corrected by making the upper floors slightly curved, which is why the tower is banana-shaped as well as tilted. Then the harbour silted up, Genoa broke the fleet at Meloria in 1284, and Florence absorbed the city in 1406. Pisa stopped growing at exactly the moment its great project was finished, and for that reason the field stands isolated in grass at the edge of a modest town. The isolation is the whole visual effect, and it was an accident of decline.

Places of character

The baptistery interior — the largest in Italy, where a custodian sings a single note and the acoustics return it as a chord. Camposanto Monumentale — the cemetery cloister, with a fourteenth-century Triumph of Death fresco damaged by wartime fire and restored over decades. Piazza dei Cavalieri — Vasari's square for the Knights of St Stephen, now the Scuola Normale, Italy's most selective university. Santa Maria della Spina — a tiny Gothic reliquary church on the Arno embankment, all pinnacles, moved stone by stone in 1871. The Arno lungarni at dusk — palace façades in ochre and white with almost nobody on them. Borgo Stretto's arcades — the student streets, where the town lives and the tower is invisible.

The way to do it

Book the tower and the field in advance and go first thing, then leave the field entirely — most visitors never cross the town, which is where Pisa becomes a place in place of a photograph. Give the baptistery ten quiet minutes for the acoustic demonstration. Sleeping here changes the town: the day trips from Florence empty out by six.

One perfect day

The field at opening, when the marble is cold and the grass is wet: cathedral first, then the baptistery for the sung note, then the tower climb, then the Camposanto, in that order because it runs from loud to quiet. Coffee under the Borgo Stretto arcades among students. Cross to Piazza dei Cavalieri and the Scuola Normale, then down to the Arno for Santa Maria della Spina. Long lunch of Pisan chickpea farinata and a bistecca. Afternoon in the Palazzo Blu or along the lungarni with a book. Evening aperitivo at a bar in Piazza delle Vettovaglie, where the market square becomes the student square, and dinner late.

Grand hotels

n/a — Pisa's good hotels are converted palazzi on the Arno in place of legends; the architecture worth staying for is civic.

When to go

Best expression: June, for the Luminara di San Ranieri on the 16th, when the palaces are outlined in seventy thousand candles. Consider: October and November, term-time and cool, with the field nearly empty in the mornings. Avoid if possible: the middle of the day in July and August, when the field has no shade and the queues are long.

The frame

Ideal stay 1 night · Minimum half a day · Best arrival train from Florence, 1 hour · Airport PSA, 2 km — the closest airport to any Italian city centre · Walkability flat and complete on foot · Best without a car yes