A Quick Stop At The Leaning Tower Of Pisa

Our Hannibal Lecter themed trip to Florence started with a quick stop in Pisa, a home to one particularly famous askew tower.

Me and my excellent Welsh friend Karl wanted to travel quite cheap, so we flew from London to Pisa with Ryanair and took the train to Florence from there. Since we arrived early in the day, we figured we couldn’t miss the chance to spend a few hours in Pisa and visit the famous leaning tower.

Pisa train station, a 20 minute walk from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

From the airport to The Leaning Tower of Pisa by bus and foot

We took a short bus ride from Galileo Galilei Airport to Pisa train station, left our luggage to a friendly left luggage keeper and headed towards the tower on foot. At this point, I was already amazed by practically everything.

Even the most ordinary Italian streets of Pisa looked like fairytale paintings to me.

Pisa Cathedral right next to the famous tower.

The tower itself really wasn’t a disappointment. It’s a massive piece of art, there’s no other word for it. The details, the whole square, it’s just all very, very beautiful.

The history of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is also quite fascinating. The builders broke ground in 1173, and it took almost 200 years to finish it. After just 5 years of construction, the tower started to lean due to unstable soil and some drastic measures had to be taken to correct it.

There’s a whole lot of interesting facts about it on Wikipedia, which I recommend reading through if you plan to visit this magnificent thing some day.

We also witnessed tourists doing The Thing! I loved snapping candid photos of all these happy tourists.

Via Santa Maria, our path back to train station from the tower.

A quick lunch on Via Santa Maria

After spending a good while casually wandering around the tower and snapping photos of it, we took a short walk towards town in search of quick lunch. We found a nice little cafe – which wasn’t very hard, given that there were at least 20 of them along this street – and enjoyed a quick, cheap & fairly ok pasta lunch.

Karl found himself a fancy new set of wheels! 

So, our stay in Pisa wasn’t a very long one, but we certainly enjoyed all three hours of it!

Coming up next: Our massive report from Florence! Remember to check out our Hannibal sceneframes in a separate post.