Pisa – Italy Adventures

Following our trip to Pompeii via Naples, we headed back to Rome late in the evening, and had an “early night”, if you can call midnight early? Ultimately we were heading to Florence, or Firenze (I’m down with the Italian language now), but we knew Pisa was relatively close, so we decided to catch a train to Pisa first, and stay there for a night.

The train system in Italy, Trenitalia, is pretty great – super efficient, quick, reasonably priced, and easy to get tickets. The UK need to take a leaf out these guys book. So if you’re looking to travel within Italy, I definitely recommend using them, we never experienced any bad journeys or issues with them.

We had made sure we’d screens hotted directions from the train station to our hotel this time around, so arriving in Pisa, we headed to the Grand Hotel Duomo, definitely one of the nicest hotels we stayed in, probably due to the fact that the rooftop bar had an amazing view of the Leaning Tower, Cathedral and Baptistry.

View from the roof top bar of Grand Duomo Hotel.

As with every new place you go, or maybe it’s just us, you’ve got to go explore so that’s what we did. We knew Pisa wasn’t as big as Rome, but on the way to the hotel from the train station, we had walked over a nice bridge at the river and spotted some areas we wanted to check out. And of course, we had to go check out the Leaning Tower.

We only had a couple hours wandering planned, as we arrived late afternoon, and we had booked to go up the Leaning Tower of Pisa for sunset, hoping to get some nice sky and some even better views.

Around the area where the Leaning Tower of Pisa is, known as , there are a number of things that you can visit, with the main ones being the tower itself, the cathedral, the monumental cemetery, and the baptistry. Most of them you need to pay to visit, but the cathedral is free to visit as far as I’m aware, but it was on our ticket for the Leaning Tower, so this was our first stop.

The cathedral is spectacular with it’s grey marble and white stone, and building commenced in 1064. The interior of the cathedral is even better, and even houses Galileo’s Lamp, which you can see in some of the pictures below.

Our time was shortly approaching to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa, so we made our way round to the entrance as you have to be there around 15 minutes before or so. It is 18e to climb to the top of the tower, and please, if you want to do this, book it via the official site, the link can be found here, and not via some third party who will charge you a lot more.

The site can be quite hard to navigate in all honesty, even once you switch to the English language option, but have a little patience and you will get there. It is necessary to do this a little in advance as they have time slots and only let a specific number of people up at a time. The climb itself only takes about 20 minutes, and is relatively easy, but is well worth doing.

We were most surprised about how ‘boring’ the interior of the tower is actually, but the view makes up for it, so we’ll let that slide.

As it was bang smack in the middle of sunset, and we knew we had that rooftop bar at the hotel with spectacular views, we made the mad dash back down the tower, and across the road to our hotel so we could catch the tail end of the sunset.

Piazza dei Miracoli

An amazing sunset, I’m sure you’ll agree!

The street you can see in the above image which leads all the way to the Piazza dei Miracoli, and goes past the front of our hotel, has countless places to eat, and is probably one of the busiest places in Pisa, if not the busiest, so make sure you check it out and grab some food.

A wander down to the river at night to grab a couple of shots only resulted in one sadly.

We were heading off the next afternoon to Florence, so we had planned to visit the Baptistry, and the Monumental Cemetery in the morning. I think we maybe paid 5e each to visit both things from the ticket office which is near the Leaning Tower.

We visited the Baptistry first, but to be honest, it’s a little underwhelming inside, I think we spent all of 10 minutes in there, and that was just climbing one level up to get a good view of the Cathedral.

The Piazza dei Miracoli is quite a wide walled area, and just to the right of the Baptistry if you’re looking at it from the front, you can head over the grass and check out some of the wall remains. Through one of the closed off gates is a graveyard, but I think you may be able to get to this if you exit out the walled area.

The next place we checked out was the Monumental Cemetery, or Camposanto Monumentale, and is a walled cemetery which is believed to be the most beautiful cemetery in the world. The cemetery was completed in the 15th century, after being started in the 13th century, and it is extremely impressive.

There is an amazing fresco named The Triumph of Death, and you really most spend some time admiring it.

Sadly our time was up in Pisa, so we grabbed our cases and headed to the train station to catch the train to Florence! I fully recommend checking out Pisa if you’re ever near, beautiful place.