Pisa Strikes Back

So yesterday, you saw the Duomo (which is a fancy name for a dome) and the Baptistry. In today’s episode, the Museum of the Sinopias, the Cemetery and the ride home.

We kind of accidentally stumbled into the Museum of the Sinopias. We were actually looking for a toilet. No toilets but plenty of stuff on the wall. It wasn’t urgent yet, so we decided to stay and look around. (Plus our tickets covered this museum, so dammit, we’re getting our money’s worth.)

A warning here: The next two paragraphs have a lot of information. You might learn something. Feel free to skip.

What is a sinopia you ask? Good question. You know all those paintings on the walls of old churches and stuff? (They’re called frescos.) They are actually painted on the wall, not on canvases. I didn’t realize this. I honestly thought that they were done on wood or canvas and moved into place. I’ve been wondering how some of the really big paintings were moved into place. The doors aren’t big enough in some of these places!

First, the “maestro” paints the basic picture on the wall in red. This is a sinopia. He can check the composition and the basic details of the picture. Then the apprentices and workers in his shop come along and transfer it all to paper. The original outline is then covered in plaster. The copy is transfered onto the wet plaster and quickly painted. The sinopia is never meant to be seen. However, in WWII, there was a bunch of damage to these structures and during the restoration, the sinopias were uncovered. SOMEHOW (I didn’t get this part so you’ll just have to live with the mystery), the sinopias were moved and the frescos put back on the wall. Amazing.

(OK, now to some pictures.) The Museum of the Sinopias is basically the outlines for all of the frescos in the cemetery. Kind of boring, but we were going to get our money’s worth, remember. Below is one that I thought was kind of interesting.

Sinopia:

Fresco:

OK, so not that interesting. We didn’t really stay there that long. Later on, you’ll see another example.

On to the Cemetery. The cemetery was pretty cool. It’s a big rectangle with an open air courtyard in the middle. All of the people are buried on the inside and not in the ground in the middle. Originally, the inside wall of the structure was covered with frescos. However, during WWII and all of the bombing, the fresco were moved to museums and safer places for restoration. I’m still not really sure how the moved just the fresco without moving the entire wall. Did it peel off like a sunburn?

You can see the Duomo and the tower peeking over its shoulder. All along the inside walls are Roman sarcophogi (empty now). A couple of interesting things:

The chains on the wall are the original chains that were strung across the Arno River to protect Pisa. When Genoa whupped Pisa back in the old days, they carted them off as a trophy. Trying to impress the Medici’s, Genoa gave them to Florence. After a couple of hundred years, Florence started feeling guilty, and gave them back to Pisa. By this point, Pisa was pretty much a backwater and so they were like “What do we do with these? I know, let’s hang them on a wall!!”

Some famous people are buried here. One of them is Fibonacci, of the Fibonacci sequence. They are used in math for some cool things.

Here’s another example of a sinopia and the resulting fresco. This one is Jim’s favvie.

(Some drunken sailor must have taken the second picture.) By the way, this is supposed to be the universe.

We went to another museum but we were getting pretty tired of looking at stuff and didn’t take any pictures. It was more museum-y stuff.

When we left Pisa, it was still raining. However, about 5 minutes out of Pisa, it stopped. Of course. On the train home, I finally learned how to turn the flash off on the camera and got some shots of the landscape.

If anyone can give me any tips on how to make these turn out better, I would be happy to get them!! It was very pretty and a nice ride home.

This is Jim’s “put the damn camera away” face:

Despite the rain, we really enjoyed Pisa. The tower didn’t fall down while we were there so we consider the trip a success.

Pisa Wars

Jim and I finally went to Pisa last Friday. We’ve been planning on going for awhile but for one reason or another (weather, papers, landlady coming over), we’ve been putting it off. Last Monday, we decided that hell-or-high-water we were going to go. We ordered some chemicals at the lab and they weren’t in yet so we were taking Friday off and going sightseeing.

The weather forecast was conflicting. Weather.com warned of rain, but the TV forecast just said overcast in Pisa. We didn’t really trust weather.com because the forecast changes from day to day there. We’ll check the 10 day prediction one day and it says 60s and sunny for the next ten day. Check it the next day, and there is rain for the first five days, then sun. Check it again, and the rain is moved to the last 5 days. So our confidence in the ability of the weather.com people was low. We decided to trust the TV forecast.

Unfortunately, we had to contend with the whole “high-water” part. Friday was the worst day of weather that we have had the entire time we’ve been in Italy. When we left Florence, it was overcast. That’s OK. It won’t be too hot. By the time the train pulled into Pisa, it was sprinkling. When we got off the train, it was raining and rained steadily for the entire day.

It’s a pretty typical Tuscan city. The buildings are all pink or yellow. The streets are narrow and the sidewalks covered in dog poop.

That didn’t stop us from walking up to the Field of Miracles, where all of the touristy stuff is. You can see the infamous tower behind us.

The Tower has just been opened again so people can go up, but we decided against it. It’s 15 euros each to climb it and our book warned that it was slippery in the rain. So we just stood at the base and looked up:

Yup. It’s a tower. Lots of cool engineering to try to get it stabilized. You can read about it on the web.

It was actually a pretty day to go to Pisa though. The rain kept the sane people at home. It was just the people on a schedule and idiots like us that came out in the rain. I really felt sorry for the people who were there on a schedule. We saw lots of people dragging their suitcases around in the rain. I almost pulled out the camera, but thought better of it. Some of them were kind of touchy and yelling at each other. I didn’t want to get punched.

The Tower was the least interesting part of Pisa though. We bought a combo ticket to get into all of the sights at the Field of Miracles. In this installment, the Duomo and the Baptistry. Tune in tomorrow for the Cemetery, the Sinopias museum and pictures from the train.

I didn’t realize that Duomo just means dome. There are duomos on the churches in a lot of the cities around here. Here is a dork outside the Pisa Duomo:

Someone should tell that idiot to use her umbrellas. I was hoping that if I stopped using the umbrella that Nature would get the point and stop raining. Didn’t work. I should have appealed to a different power. (The tower looks like it is trying to look over the shoulder of the church. “Hi, whatcha doing? Can I be in the picture?”)

The inside is really amazing. It was the longest nave in Europe for many years.

The picture is entirely in mosaic. There is definitely a middle eastern feel to the decorations in the church.

For Christmas, I got myself… I mean Jim, a tripod for the camera. This was so we could have pictures of the two of us when we go on vacation. For some reason, Jim just laughs and shakes his head when I want a picture of the two of us in front of a dead guy in a glass box. He’s the patron saint of Pisa (the dead guy in the box, not Jim). He’s wearing a shirt made of hair in that box. Itchy. Well, not for him. He’s dead. At least I hope so.

The pulpit in the Duomo. Absolutely amazing! Every inch is covered in carvings. In the day, the marble was actually covered in gold and colored paste. It must have been lurid and loud and stunning. My guidebook says that most of the marble statues were colored when they were completed. I’ve always wondering who thought that the white looked better.

Somewhere in the church is the lantern that inspired Galileo. I looked for it, but it was like hunting a needle in a haystack. There were lanterns hanging from the ceiling everywhere. So just imagine it.

On to the baptistry. Through the rain. (Appeals to a higher power didn’t result in anything.)

Another dork not using his umbrella. This time, in front of the Baptistry.

I had to stop and take a picture of the carved door posts:

I thought it looked cool. Then we went inside to get out of the rain. And to see the sights. But mostly to get out of the rain.

Another pulpit by the same guys who did the one in the Duomo. This is an earlier version. Not nearly as ornate. Jim is once again humoring me.

You can go to the second level in the baptistry and look down. This is a view of the Duomo and Tower from the stairs. Again, I can just imagine the Tower saying “Hi! Can you see me OK in the picture?” (Jim often thinks I should be committed.)

View from above:

You can see the middle eastern influence in the mosaics on the floor. The building was designed so that there is a 10 second echo. On the hour and half hour, a guard calls for silence and demonstrates the acoustics of the building. That was the coolest thing. He could sing chords all by himself just taking advantage of the echo. After that, there wasn’t much else to see there. It is pretty much a big round room with a baptismal font in the middle.

Some of the city walls still exist:

The grass was amazingly green. But it was still raining. Coming tomorrow to a computer near you – “Pisa, the Sequel”.