VI.iv. Shadows and Sunlight

"Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;
When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,
I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory."
- Lord Byron

It was grey and lonely when I arrived in Pisa. Still relatively early in the morning, the droves of tourists that are usually present here, even in February, had not yet arrived, and the Camposanto, the storied field of miracles, was deserted. I had taken the Nacht Zug from Bologna, switched trains in Prato, and disembarked at the little-known station of Pisa-San Rossore, closer to the historic centre and more convenient than the central station built on the fascist era outskirts that ring many an Italian city. Groggy as I had been all week and a little dazed from sleeping on the train, before beginning the day's explorations I had a coffee served to me by an old curmudgeon of a barman, unsteady as his hometown icon. He leaned against the bar and looked me in the eye severely as I quickly drank up.
    Most remarkable about Pisa perhaps is its quietness. Unlike Venice, Genoa, or other faded maritime powers, Pisa is silent, and the Arno, which flows languidly through the city centre, is totally devoid of traffic. A thousand years ago the banks were thronged with merchants from throughout the known world, but this is no longer so. The inevitable silting up of the channel that led to the sea, and the increasingly belligerent Florentine republic only some eighty kilometers upriver, finally crushed Pisa in 1406 and relegated it to the brackish backwaters of Tyrrhenian history. For these reasons, Pisa is an unspoilt conservatory of medieval art, its chief treasure some twenty immaculate marble-encrusted Romanesque churches and the works of art contained therein.
    Pristine and empty as a painted medieval cityscape, the city is less of a Mecca for art historians than it ought to be, for it was the birthplace of important dynasties of painters and, perhaps more importantly, sculptors. Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, the father and son pair who were the first to put the Ars Nova, the modern way, to stone, set the critical example that Donatello and Michelangelo would follow. Their vision of sculpture was a totally novel one, which placed prophets, saints, virtues and sibyls in conversation with each other across vast architectural expanses, or intimate small-scale spaces. Their carved ensembles have all the rigour of scholastic thought mixed with an almost Baroque theatricality, encapsulating the dynamic concordance of the Christian and pagan worlds. Not only mere sculptors, they were hired to design cathedral façades in Siena and Florence as well, though their most famous achievements are four polygonal pulpits, two of which are in Siena. These monuments, animated by vicious lions trouncing gazelles, muscular personifications of naked fortitude, and scenes from the Passion of unequalled tenderness and humanity, leave the greatest achievements of the Roman sculptors in the dust, and show the complexity and refinement of a civilization that, by this time, had become the most complex the world had ever known. All this is encompassed by Pisa, their birthplace, where buildings are inlaid like Egyptian jewelry boxes and domes pierce the sky like proud Arabic quotations, but the Pisano's work is still supreme. Nicola, and especially his son Giovanni, knew marble as the best writers in history have known words. Andrea and Nino Pisano, another pair unrelated except through their Pisan heritage, cast the first illustrated bronze doors for Florence's baptistery, a century before Ghiberti would repeat the achievement in what Michelangelo dubbed "The Gates of Paradise," probably the most famous doors in the world. Pisa's achievements, or at least those of her artists, are at the root of Western consciousness because, as is so important in the history of mankind, they were first.
    Beyond the Camposanto and the unnerving shadow of the leaning tower, Pisa has much to offer. Most unusually for a Italian city, the religious centre is on the periphery and seated in a large, empty space. The fields around the Camposanto, long off-limits but now cautiously permitted to respectful walkers, must be the only lawns in the Mediterranean world. It is as though an East Anglian cathedral green has been transplanted and grafted to the Tuscan soil, just as the most petty English noblewomen used to bring grass from Normandy to their rocky Welsh strongholds, trying to add some southern beauty to their Gaelic crags. Pisa, though, has more flair and native refinement in its inner quarters, which became an interesting mix of sun and shadow as the sky evolved into a cloudless one. A first class museum, the Museo di San Matteo, occupies an old convent on the banks of the river, far removed from any tourists. As I entered, the three male guards were in the entrance watching television, and they let me wander in peace through the museum unencumbered. I felt the familiar sensation of being the only visitor to have set foot in the museum all day. Italy's treasure houses, useless and vital at the same time, must house thousands of idyll workers throughout the quiet winter months.
    As I left the museum and the evening fell, however, Pisa came to to life. The city benefits from a long and quite determined passegiata, something which Bologna, with its congested streets, unfortunately lacks. Thousands of citizens, seemingly the whole city, strolled through the extensive pedestrian area in the pre-dinner hours, populating, like the Pisano's vivid figures, an otherwise lonely architecture. To them, their city is still the centre of the world.


The Magnificent Camposanto at Pisa


Marble, Mosaic, Stone, and Light are the four elements here


A pensive visitor


The Baptistery


The Cemetery, more reminiscent of Islamic than Western Architecture


The Arno river in Central Pisa, with the little church of Sante Maria della Spina on the riverbank


Giovanni Pisano's pulpit, in the Cathedral of Pisa