Allan Massie

Pisa

Galleries, faded grandeur and a particularly fine Piazza Garibaldi

Say ‘Pisa’ and everyone thinks of the Leaning Tower. Fair enough; it’s a curiosity, and the tourist board must be pleased that Mussolini’s plan to straighten it came to nothing. It stands, or leans, next to the cathedral in the Piazza dei Miracoli, and beyond the cathedral is the Baptistry, one of the most beautiful buildings in Italy.

I was in Pisa for the annual book festival, which attracts an extraordinary number of independent publishers and huge audiences (25,000 over a long weekend). Each year the director, Lucia della Porta, invites a foreign delegation, and this was Scotland’s turn. We were housed in the Royal Victoria Hotel, which dates from 1839, established with foresight to cater for middle-class tourists not rich enough, or staying long enough, to take a floor in a palazzo, unlike Byron and Shelley who both spent some months in Pisa (cheaper for the Shelleys than Florence) a few years earlier. Dickens was an early guest. The Royal Victoria has a pleasingly faded grandeur, and is just the thing if you like spacious rooms with marble floors and big windows that open on a view of the elegant unspoiled Lung’arno. Across the road from the hotel is a plaque recording that the boat carrying the hero Garibaldi, wounded in Aspromonte, docked there. Pretty well every Italian city has its Piazza Garibaldi and the statue of the hero in Pisa’s is particularly fine. It’s agreeable to sit there outside the Bar Centro, drinking coffee and smoking — naturally — a Garibaldi cigar.

Walk from there along the part-colonnaded Borgo Stretto and then through a myriad of twisting streets and you reach the beautiful Piazza dei Cavalieri. Thought to be the site of Roman Pisa’s forum, its present design is mostly the work of the 16th century Florentine architect Giorgio Vasari.

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