Pisa is for Tourists, and look at this lardo!

One thing you may not be aware of is that the vast majority of my travels in Italia have been only in the Veneto regione, which includes Vicenza, Venice, Verona, and Padova and is in the northeast of Italy.  Yesterday I took an autobus through another regione, Emilia Romagna (where Bologna is), to Toscana (Tuscany), in the northwest, where I visited Pisa, a marble place, and a lardo place.


Gene drove me to Post for 5:30 and the bus left before 6.  We arrived in Pisa around 10ish and I had a biglietto to go into the torre (tower) by 11.  Pisa is a convenient little place--all the things a tourist would want to visit are all in one location.  Here's a foto to illustrate (sorry about the crazy perspective):

From sinistra to destra: old city wall, Battistero (Baptistry), Camposanto Monumentale
(cemetery), Cattedrale (Cathedral), and La Torre Pendente di Pisa.

Here is more of the wall:

Here's the Battistero.  Apparently they're working on the roof:
 

I went into the cattedrale.  It was pretty impressive and tasteful:

Here are more foto of the torre, which currently leans 3.97 degrees to the southwest:

The torre is actually pretty unique looking outside of the fact that it leans.  It looks like a torta (cake)!

Here are some foto at the base:

Supposedly (probably apocryphally) Galileo did an experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa in which he dropped objects of different mass from the top of the tower, and concluded that Aristotle's previous conclusion, that more massive objects fall faster than less massive objects, was false (all objects fall with the same acceleration, approximately 9.81 m/s^2 on Earth). 

Naturalmente, I climbed to the top of the torre (for fifteen Euro).  There is no elevator, children under eight are not allowed, and children between eight and twelve must be held by the hand at all times (that didn't happen though).  To get to the top, you had to climb this narrow spiral staircase:

Some viste from the top:

There's the wall!

The cattedrale is in the shape of a Latin croce (cross).

In case you didn't know, the torre happens to be a campanile (bell tower).  Here are a few campane:

Pisa is a little tacky, but on the other hand they really know how to capitalize on their most famoso attraction, La Torre Pendente di Pisa:

One cosa that every visitor to Pisa has to do is try to prop up the torre.  This means that Pisa is the capital of having to be careful of where you walk, because someone is probably trying to take a picture of the tower from some odd angolo no matter where you are.

Of course I tried to straighten the tower out.

I just couldn't get it exactly right...

...even though I tried really hard!

But then I realized that it's all a matter of perspective, which solved the problem completely:

After Pisa, the autobus took us to an area of cave di marmo (marble quarries) outside Carrara, which is THE place to go for white marble.  It's also where Michelangelo Buonarroti got all his favorite marmo, like the piece he used in his David.  Some quarry foto:

Here are some foto di marble shopping:

After that, the bus brought us to a larderia...

...a place that specializes in lardo di Colonnata, which is pig fat stuck in a marble box...

with salt rosemary and cinnamon and some other stuff for six to twelve months, and then sliced and put on things and EATEN.  Here is a picture:

They wanted us to TRY it:

I took a tiny nibble to be polite and hid the rest in my napkin.  It tasted like baloney/bologna.  Just because something is a centuries-old tradition doesn't mean it's not disgusting.

I met this cane nearby:

He says, "I would like some lardo di Colonnata, please."

Then I hopped on the bus and went back to Gene and Tara's.  Buona giornata from me, Bridget!

Ed. Note:  Please see this post and this post, which are also from today.  Grazie from me, Bridget!