Greetings from Pisa. Everybody I spoke to while I was planning this trip wrinkled their noses when they heard I was stopping in Pisa for three days. "Pisa is a hole," one of my friends put it bluntly, "there's nothing there but the tower and that takes fifteen minutes." With all of the negative press that Pisa had gotten I was not exactly excited to spend a large amount of time here, and probably would have skipped it entirely having no real interest in towers leaning or otherwise, but I was meeting a friend in Italy, and the cheapest airfare she could find was from London to Pisa, so Pisa it was. And after all of the dread, I'm really glad I came.

Pisa is a university town and, according to my faithful guidebook, the university here is one of the best in Italy. The "tourist sights," which include the Tower, the Duoma, a Bapitistry that looks like a wedding cake, and the "camposato" are all contained in a grassy piazza to the north of town, which means that most of the tourists are also confined to the same grassy piazza leaving the rest of the city free of interlopers. The rest of the city is lovely, the streets are narrow and winding in a way that is beginning to become familiar to me, and there are plenty of cheap cafes, restaurants and museums that the university students frequent. The river Arno runs through the center of town, and it's great to stand on a bridge in the evening light with gelato in one hand and watch the sunset.

And there are tourist sights beyond the single grassy piazza. I learned that the tower in the Palazzo dell'Oraglio is the infamous "Tower of famine," mentioned by both Dante and Shelley. According to my hazy recolections of my medieval literature class, the story goes that Ugolino della Gherardesca was locked in the tower with his young sons and left to starve. I forget exactly why he was condemned to such a fate, but I think he was a traitor of some sort. Left to starve the young sons died first, and were then eaten by his father and older brothers. I'll take that over a leaning tower any day.

The other thing that has been great about Pisa is meeting my friend, Lindsay, here. Lindsay has spent her semester abroad in Mali, and it's been wonderful to hear her stories about life in Africa. Her experience has been the polar opposite of mine, she was on a home stay for one thing, and I like to hear her talk about her Malian family. She said she had an unusal amount of crazy people staying in her house. Thinking she was speaking figuratively i asked what she meant, and she went on to describe the various states of mental imbalance of the members of her Malean family. My favorite is an elderly boarder who thinks he's running for President of Mali, and takes any opprotunity he can get to talk about his platform. He's perfectly okay otherwise, she said, but he really believes he's running for president. The whole thing reminds me of Arsnic and Old Lace, where the crazy cousin thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, but is perfectly harmless otherwise.

Today we did the "tourist sights," which only took the moring. We didn't go up the tower because it cost fifteen euros, and we didn't take one of the photos that everybody seemed to be taking where you stand a certain distance away and hold your arms out so that it looks like you're supporting the tower, but we did go into the Baptistry, the Duomo and the Campisato. The Baptistry was kind of dull, and more fun to look at from the outside than the inside. It did feature an amazing echo, though, which an Italian singer demonstrated for us once we were inside. The Duomo was great, however, according to the guide book it is "one of the most important romanesque churches in existence," and features some amazing carvings and paintings. Before leaving for Italy my friend in London told me that she had heard somebody say Europe's art is in her churches. I took the statement to mean that Europe's churches are works of art, but after touring Italy I've come to realize that that statement should be taken literally. I will duck into a church just to cool down (churches are always several degrees cooler than the outside, I'm not really sure why,) and notice that the fairly anonomous looking building is filled with gorgeous paintings and sculpture. Aside from the amazing carvings and mosaics, the Duomo here also featured several relics, including the entire body of a Saint whose name i forget, but it began with an R.

By far my favorite sight, though, was the Camposato. It is a long building with ornate arches that houses frescos and carved sarcaphogi. It is said to be built on earth taken from Golgotha, and once rivalled the Leaning Tower as Pisa's most popular tourist destination (in about the nineteenth century, I think,) Badly damaged in World War Two, it has been well restored. The sarcaphogi were interesting, but Lindsay and I really liked the frescos. There was one cycle that was designed by an artist known only as the "Master of the Triumph of Death," which you have to admit is a great name. The frescos tell the story of the plague in Florence, and there was one passage I loved that showed the souls escaping from the dead bodies being fought over by devils and angels. There were also frescos depicting judgement and Hell, and one that neither Lindsay nor I could figure out.

Tomorrow we move on to Florence, which I'm told is as over run with tourists and the like as Venice was. Not that I should complain, being a tourist myself, but it was nice to have a stop in Pisa and take a break from all of that. Here we could cook our own food, and shop in a supermarket and spend large parts of the day stopping to chat and catch up with our various semesters in Europe and Africa. Perhaps the plains fly here for a reason.