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.