Was it Mel Brooks who proposed putting a clock on the leaning Tower of Pisa on
the grounds that “if you had the inclination, you might as well have the
time”?
Started in 1173, the tower was under construction for almost two centuries,
without anyone electing to start again on firmer ground. Perhaps the Pisans
were well advised: leaning four metres out of true, it attracts more
visitors than any vertical tower anywhere.
I find myself smiling as soon as I walk onto the Camposanto. Here it all is
again, architectural confectionery at its grandest: the tilted tower, the
100-metre-long, multi-decker, marble-laced cathedral, the domed hatbox of
the baptistry. Even the cemetery, brightly hedged with white marble, looks
welcoming. Its surviving, anonymous, masterly frescoes — many more were
destroyed in the war — remind you of Triumph of Death, Last Judgment and
Hell, but the arcaded decor still leavens the spirit. Crusaders brought
earth from the site of Golgotha to lend sanctity to the original burial
ground.
In the competition for top city in Tuscany, Pisa peaked early. In the 11th and
12th centuries — that happy time before the plague brought morbidity to
Europe — the Pisan fleet fought off the Saracens and brought back rich
booty, which was lavished on the nobles’ palazzi and on
Rainaldo’s cathedral. Renaissance sculpture started here: the Florentine
masters were taught by men like Giovanni Pisano, whose carved pulpit in the
baptistry is a pious 3-D strip cartoon of the life of Jesus.
The striped facades and banded interiors you find all over Tuscany (and, in
Pisa’s one-time possession, Sardinia) are the result of fashion tips picked
up from Muslim architecture by Pisan raiders and traders in Egypt and
southern Spain. Cordoba’s Mezquita, now its cathedral, has a marvellous
two-tone interior.
Pisa was relegated from the first division of Tuscan cities when her fleet was
annihilated by Genoa at the battle of Meloria in 1284. If you walk into the
tourist-free centre of Pisa, you can find Vasari’s Palazzo Gherardesca,
which once sported a tower as sinister as the leaning tower is larky: Count
Ugolini, accused of treason at Meloria, was walled up in the so-called Torre
della Fame, with his children and grandchildren. All were left to die of
starvation (fame).
In better times, Ugolini had commanded the Pisans when they besieged Genoa. He
fired silver arrows over the walls, to prove that he could afford it. Dante
pictures the traitor trapped in ice in the Inferno’s deepest circle — frozen
food for thought.
On Pisa’s Lungarno, the leisurely bend of the river that has wound its way
from Florence, is the Casa Lanfranchi, where, in autumn 1821, Byron — in
sumptuous flight from the Austrian authorities in Venice and Ravenna — set
himself up, in typically immodest style. Byron — never too busy writing Don
Juan to parade his famous person — and the Shelleys attracted raffish
company, none more charming or scoundrelly than Edward John Trelawny, an
ex-sailor who had modelled himself on Byron’s Corsair.
Trelawny encouraged Shelley to acquire Ariel, the top-heavy sailing boat
which, in July 1822, foundered in the Bay of Spezia. If your imagination has
keen ears, you may hear Mary Shelley’s anguished cry to passers-by, “ Sapete
alcuna cosa di Shelley?” (“Do you know anything about Shelley?”), as she
ran frantically through the streets in the hours before the drowned poet was
washed to shore.
AND SO to Florence, where few people smile. The querulous Florentines have
never tried to please either strangers or each other. What treasure house of
art offers a less welcoming face to the world? We splashed around in the
rain from the Duomo, with its green-grey-and-white lozenged facade (does
anyone really long to see it?), to the baptistry doors, where the crowd
scanned Ghiberti’s reliefs — even Michelangelo spoke well of them — as if
they were stills from next week’s main attraction.
Having queued for the Duomo, we found a tape across the nave made it
impossible to walk under Brunelleschi’s dome. When he submitted the design,
he was told it could never be built without the traditional supports. He
then asked the panel if they knew how to stand an egg on end. They didn’t;
he showed them: by knocking in one end. They all then said that, oh, they
could have done that. Then they all knew how to build his dome, didn’t they?
He got his deal.
With its roasting summers and cruel winters, Florence has year-round appeal
for masochists.
Is that why Brits were never rare under the Tuscan sun (and rain, which
stopped traffic on the autostrada during our recent stay)? Edward III
borrowed so much money from the Florentine banks of the Peruzzi and the
Bardi that his bankruptcy almost ruined the city. Time and money went
together: the Florentines invented double-entry bookkeeping and also
decreed, in the 14th century, that clocks should strike throughout the
twenty-four hours.
Florence was a home from home for Victorians (the queen herself did
watercolours in the hills at Vincigliata) from Robert and Elizabeth Browning
to George Eliot, who did rather brief research for the unreadable Romola.
Brian Glanville’s precocious novel, Along the Arno, offers a vivid account
of cosmopolitan expat life in the 1950s, when that sage old charlatan
Bernard Berenson was telling Mary McCarthy, “No one comes here any more”. If
only it were still so!
We avoided standing in line for the Uffizi by heading for the Medicean
chapels, where Michelangelo’s funerary statues give death heroic and — when
it comes to the female — voluptuous allure. The great artist was not
pampered by the Florentines: he had to sleep four in a bed with his workmen
and called his patrons “ungrateful and arrogant”. That’s showbiz.
WE WERE relieved to drive south towards Grosseto and the flat, eerily empty
coast near Castiglione della Pescaia, in the once-malarial Maremma. Elba and
Giglio lie invisible offshore.
Sometimes you happen on an area you would as soon keep to yourself. There are
no easily beaten tracks in the rock-littered, earthquake-rumpled landscape
around Pitigliano. The River Lente — slow but sure — has cheesed great rifts
out of the limestone from which the steep town suddenly leaps as if from a
dun-coloured ambush. It has nothing but its remote serenity to detain you,
unless you’re interested in the ghetto where the Medicis, unlike the
pitiless Pope, allowed a few Jews to huddle in pinched peace.
A few streets away, the tiny restaurant of Il Tufo Allegro passes judgment on
gastronomic pretensions elsewhere. The grey-bearded padrone, in
white-and-black checkered trousers, like a Picasso harlequin, is not to be
hurried; but pazienza pays a delicious dividend in homemade pasta.
You can then drive on down the road between boulders sliced like gigantic
Parmesan cheeses to Sorano, with its surging bastion, the Fortezza Orsini,
now a tall hotel.
Back towards Grosseto, we turned off in search of the Etruscan city of
Roselle. Only a couple of kilometres from the modern town of that name, the
ancient ruins are so badly signposted that I told the custodian we had
nearly given up. “ Lo so,” she said. She knew, but... The happy
consequence was that we walked alone round the high walls (almost three
kilometres long), made of massive boulders in what my old friend Prof
Knowall would call the “Cyclopean style”. Myth says that the walls of
ancient Tiryns, near Mycenae, were built similarly by the Cyclops.
Roselle, an Etruscan city much less famous than Tarquinia or Cerveteri with
its domed tombs, was conquered by the bully-boy Romans, whose domestic
architecture — not least the impluvium that gathers rainwater
in an indoor pool — was cadged from the natives. They built the neat
amphitheatre where you can imagine some mute, inglorious Russell Crowe
bracing his gladiatorial nostrils and hoping that the ranks of Tuscany will
cheer.
Grosseto is the kind of provincial town one is tempted to bypass. Wrongly: the
recently refurbished municipal museum is crammed with Roman, Etruscan and
Greek remains, from Roselle, including one of the finest 8th-century (it
said) Attic vases I have ever seen. Local drivers are so little stressed, it
seems, that they stopped to let us cross, and the pizza (at Big Pizza) was
better than di Michele in Naples. With its sugar-candy cathedral (with
another Moorishly striped chocolate-and-vanilla interior), unassuming
Grosseto is another place to smile at in Tuscany.
Frederic Raphael travelled as a guest of Italian Expressions
Tour operators: Italian Expressions (020 7433 2675, www.expressionsholidays.co.uk
=) has four nights, half-board, at the Bagni di Pisa, 10 minutes outside
Pisa, and three nights, B&B, at L’Andana, in Maremma, 90 minutes from
Pisa, near the coast, from £1,021pp, including British Airways flights to
Pisa and car hire.
Italian Journeys (020 7373 8058, www.italianjourneys.com)
has seven nights at Bagni di Pisa from £1,879, half-board, including BA
flights to Pisa, car hire and six days of spa treatments. Or try Abercrombie &
Kent (0845 070 0612, www.abercrombiekent.co.uk).
Going it alone: Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com)
flies to Pisa from Stansted, Bournemouth, Doncaster/Sheffield, East
Midlands, Glasgow, Liverpool and Dublin; EasyJet (www.easyjet.com)
from Gatwick and Bristol; British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com
) from Gatwick and Manchester; Jet2 (0871 226 1737, www.jet2.com)
from Leeds/ Bradford, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast and Newcastle; and
Thomsonfly (0870 190 0737, www.thomsonfly.com)
from Doncaster/Sheffield and Coventry.
By train, Rail Bookers (0870 458 9080, www.railbookers.com)
has Waterloo-Paris on Eurostar, then an overnighter to Florence, where there
is a 1hr 20min train connection to Pisa, from £325 return. Or try Rail
Europe (0870 830 4862, www.raileurope.co.uk).
Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk)
has a week’s car hire from £140. Or try Europcar (0870 607 5000, www.europcar.co.uk)
or Hertz (0870 844 8844, www.hertz.co.uk).
Bagni di Pisa (00 39-050 88501, www.bagnidipisa.
com) has doubles from £153, half-board; L’Andana (0564 944321, www.andana.it)
has doubles from £220, B&B. Best guidebook: Tuscany, Umbria and the
Marches (Cadogan £14.99).
