Pisa, Italy

Our first day on the cruise was a total surprise as we were almost not on the cruise. I had read the instructions to the cruise wrong and thought that we could not get on until 5 pm. Luckily Tita had read the notes carefully and saw that we needed to be on the cruise 4 hours before departure which was at 5 pm. Instead of taking the bus to the airport to the train station to Rome then to the pier in Civitavecchia , Italy we decided to take a private car (BMW 7 series) directly to the pier.

Our ship the ms Noordam

Our itinerary was …

Day        Date                      Port

0               27 July 2012       Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

1              28 July 2012        Livorno (Florence/Pisa), Italy

2              29 July 2012        Monte Carlo, Monaco

3              30 July 2012        Barcelona, Spain ON

4              31 July 2012        Barcelona, Spain

5              1 Aug 2012          Palma de Mallorca, Spain

6              2 Aug 2012          At Sea

7              3 Aug 2012          La Goulette (Tunis), Tunisia

8              4 Aug 2012          Palermo, Sicily, Italy

9              5 Aug 2012          Naples, Italy

10           6 Aug 2012          Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

I will hopefully post something for each day. I will post pictures of each day on my Facebook Account ( https://www.facebook.com/david.rumptz) if you want to see more than the few I send with the e-mail.

As you can see from the itinerary we do not actually land in Pisa, as it is not on the cost. We landed in Livorno then took a bus / train ride up to Pisa. This was actually very easy and very cheap. I was surprised how well they cratered to the tourist and how easy they made it to transit thought Livorno on your way up to wither Pisa or Florence. Not all cities were as easy to get around.

Once we got into Pisa itself we had to hike about 20 minutes up the Leaning tower area, which contains several structures in its walled area described below.

Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo) is the area that houses the most well-known structures in Pisa including the leaning tower itself. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the bell tower for the Cathedral  that lies behind it in my picture. The cathedral itself is quite impressive outside and in but after a while you get a bit of cathedral overload and just do not want to see another magnificent cathedral. But props to my Gesu friends and after a while I came to realize what a beautiful church we had growing up and think that its majesty could hold it place to some of the cathedrals in Europe, some.

Well back to the other structures in Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo), I was smart enough to ask the person selling tickets which would be the best places to visit and she mentioned that the small museum south of the leaning tower would be best. And she was right though the museum itself and collection were pretty lacking the private courtyard it had just in front of the leaning tower made up for it in spades. We were allowed to have a private view of the leaning tower with no crowds to contend with and let me tell you there were crowds in the main area in front of the tower.

Although the leaning tower is the most well know part of Pisa it is really a city of wonderful small plazas that we discovered on our way back to the train station. Like this one the Piazza Dei Cavalieri truly a cool place to see sadly the pictures cannot capture all the beauty of such a small plaza. Granted this is the same plaza that holds the University of Pisa. “Pisa is also known for its excellent university, which was established in 1343 and has become one of Italy's top schools.”

For those of you that want to know more about the area a quick look at this web site gives you an idea http://www.pisa.world-guides.com/