The history of Pisa

Soft clay shaped the cathedral and its tower

You are standing on Via Santa Maria, close to where it meets the cluster of streets around Piazza del Duomo. A short walk north, the ground opens onto the Piazza del Duomo, where Pisa's cathedral has stood since it was consecrated in Pisa Cathedral in 1118. Its bell tower, the one everyone comes to see, leans nearly four degrees off true because the soil beneath it could never hold the weight the builders piled onto it.

Closer to where you stand, just sixty-five metres off, is San Giorgio ai Tedeschi, a small brick church built after 1316. It was raised in memory of German soldiers who died fighting at the Battle of Montecatini. The single-room church later passed to a hospital for foundlings, then to another Pisan hospital, quietly changing hands for centuries while the grand square nearby drew the crowds.

Forty-two metres from you stands the Fontana dei Putti, a fountain built in 1765, decorated with cherubs and set among the cluster of churches, colleges and old streets that make up this corner of Pisa. The whole neighborhood sits low, on soft clay laid down by rivers and seas millions of years before anyone thought to build a tower here — the same ground that later betrayed the cathedral's foundations and gave Pisa its most famous flaw.

A nobleman starved while bombers later killed hundreds

A short walk south, past Piazza dei Cavalieri, stands the Torre dei Gualandi — once known as the Muda Tower, now folded into the Palazzo dell'Orologio. In the 13th century a Pisan nobleman, Ugolino della Gherardesca, was locked inside it with his sons and grandsons and left to starve. Dante wrote the story into the Divine Comedy, and it has followed the tower ever since. The building the reader can see today wears that history quietly, its walls absorbed into a later façade.

Two kilometres south, in the Porta a Mare district, the sky did the killing. On 31 August 1943, 152 American bombers dropped 408 tons of bombs on the rail yards there. The raid killed 952 civilians and tore into the medieval fabric of the whole city, cracking buildings far from the yards themselves two kilometres south. It is the single worst day Pisa has recorded, and it happened while the cathedral and its leaning tower, close enough to touch from where the reader stands, came through largely intact.

A cemetery holds soil said to rot bodies fast

North of the cathedral, the Pisa Baptistery took over two centuries to finish, started in 1152 and only completed in 1363. Just past it sits the Camposanto Monumentale, a walled cemetery said to hold soil shipped back from Golgotha by a crusading archbishop. Legend has it a body buried in that ground rots away in a single day — a story the guides still tell, though nobody has tested it.

South toward the Arno, a scatter of small churches marks how densely this quarter was once packed with parish life: San Sisto, consecrated in 1133 and once the meeting hall for Pisa's ruling council, and San Ranierino, Pisa, rebuilt on a new site in the 1860s when the city cleared the old square for redevelopment. Piazza dei Cavalieri, once the political heart of medieval Pisa, later became home to the Knights of St. Stephen and now houses the Scuola Normale Superiore, a university founded by Napoleon's decree in 1810.

Just past the Baptistery, near the city's northern gate, lie the Baths of Nero — the only standing Roman ruin left in Pisa, sunk now below street level, from when this was the Roman colony of Colonia Pisana.

Old gates and a bronze general mark the riverbank

Pisa's old walls still ring much of the historic centre, punctuated by gates like Porta Nuova, cut through the fortifications in 1562, and the 12th-century Porta di San Ranieri. Along the Arno, the Ponte di Mezzo carries traffic across the river that made Pisa a port and a maritime power before its harbour silted up.

Further along the riverbank stands a bronze monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, raised in 1892, not far from the spot where the wounded general's boat came ashore in 1862 after Aspromonte. The stone plaque marking that landing still stands by the old coal wharf.

Underneath all of it, Pisa sits on Pliocene clay, laid down by rivers and seas over two million years ago. That soft ground shaped the whole city — it is why builders here have spent eight centuries fighting a losing argument with gravity, the cathedral's tower being only the most famous case.