Pisa travel guide

Top 10 sights in Pisa

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Leaning Tower of Pisa

   The cathedral bell tower, begun in 1173 and leaning before the third storey was finished because the ground beneath one side is soft clay. Work stopped for nearly a century, resumed with the upper floors built at an angle to compensate, and an engineering campaign between 1990 and 2001 pulled about forty-five centimetres back out of it.

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2. 

   2© Arne Müseler · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

   Piazza del Duomo, Pisa

   Nearly nine hectares of walled lawn holding the cathedral, the baptistery, the tower and the cemetery, laid out at the edge of the medieval city rather than its centre. The four buildings were begun over two centuries and read as one composition, which is why the square got its nickname.

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3. 

   3© Saffron Blaze · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Pisa Cathedral

   A cathedral begun in 1063 with the spoils of a raid on Muslim Palermo, and the building that invented Pisan Romanesque — striped marble, blind arcading, columns looted from across the Mediterranean. The bronze lamp hanging in the nave is the one Galileo is said to have watched swing.

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4. 

   4© Myrabella · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Lucca Cathedral

   The cathedral of Lucca, whose asymmetrical front had to be squeezed against an existing bell tower. Inside are the Volto Santo, a wooden crucifix that medieval Europe believed carved by Nicodemus, and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, with a dog at her feet.

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5. 

   5© PaestumPaestum · CC BY 4.0

   Baptistry of San Giovanni

   The largest baptistery in Italy, begun in 1152, with a double dome that produces an echo of remarkable length — the custodians sing three notes and let them overlap into a chord. Nicola Pisano's pulpit of 1260 inside it is the beginning of Italian sculpture as an art with a name attached.

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6. 

   6© Luca Aless · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Campo santo

   A cloistered cemetery begun in 1278, said to be built around earth brought back from Golgotha. Its walls were covered in frescoes until July 1944, when an incendiary shell melted the lead roof over them; the salvaged fragments are now redisplayed, along with the sinopia underdrawings found beneath.

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   Basilica of San Frediano

   A Romanesque church in Lucca whose upper facade carries a thirteenth-century gold mosaic of the Ascension, so that the whole front glows when the sun is on it. Inside is a Romanesque font carved with the story of Moses.

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8. 

   8© Sailko · CC BY 3.0

   Pisa Botanic Garden and Museum

   Founded in 1544 under Cosimo I and the first university botanical garden in Europe — Pisa taught medicine, and doctors needed to know plants. It moved twice and has been on this site since 1591, with magnolias and ginkgos among the oldest in Italy.

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9. 

   9© Photo2023 · CC BY 4.0

   San Michele in Foro

   A church built over the Roman forum of Lucca, with a facade of stacked arcades every column of which is carved differently, and an enormous statue of the archangel Michael on the gable. The city's chief council met in it until 1370.

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10. 

    10© everyone's idle · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Torre del Lago

    A village between a lake and the sea where Puccini lived and wrote most of his operas, in a villa now kept as a museum with his piano and his guns. He is buried in a chapel inside it, and an open-air festival performs his work here each summer.

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   Guinigi Tower

   A brick tower of forty-five metres in the middle of Lucca with seven holm oaks growing out of a garden on its roof, planted by the merchant family that built it. It is the only one of the town's medieval towers open to climb.

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2. 

   2© No machine-readable author provided. JoJan assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

   City walls of Lucca

   The walls of stone, brick and earth ringing the centre of Lucca in Tuscany. At 4,223 metres round they are among the best preserved Renaissance fortifications in Europe, and Lucca is the second largest fully walled city after Nicosia; the rampart is now a public promenade.

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3. 

   3© Kasa Fue · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Piazza dell'Anfiteatro

   A square inside the walls of Lucca whose closed ellipse is the footprint of the second-century Roman amphitheatre — houses were built into the arcades over the centuries and the arena became a market. Four passages under the buildings are the original entrances.

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4. 

   4© Joanbanjo · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Santa Maria della Spina

   Gothic church on the Arno in Pisa, built from 1230 to house a thorn from the crown of Christ. Rising damp forced its dismantling and rebuilding a metre higher in 1871.

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5. 

   5© Sailko · CC BY 3.0

   Knights' Square

   The political centre of medieval Pisa, remade in the 1560s by Vasari for the Knights of St Stephen — he refaced the old town hall with sgraffito decoration and it is now the Scuola Normale, the university that has produced three Nobel laureates.

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   6© Sailko · CC BY 3.0

   Old Fortress

   A fortress at Livorno in Italy. It took over the medieval Pisan fort raised on the site of a watchtower built by Countess Matilda of Tuscany in the eleventh century, and that eleventh-century tower is embedded inside it.

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7. 

   7© Zairon · CC BY 4.0

   Palazzo della Carovana

   A palace on the Piazza dei Cavalieri in Pisa in Italy, now the main building of the Scuola Normale Superiore. Vasari designed its sgraffito front.

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8. 

   8© TeKappa · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Torre delle Ore

   A clock tower on Via Fillungo in the middle of Lucca in Italy. A wooden stair inside climbs to the bell chamber.

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9. 

   9© Luca Aless · CC BY-SA 4.0

   San Sisto

   A church in Pisa in Italy, consecrated in 1133 though important notarial acts of the Pisan commune were carried out on the site before that. It is built in stone in the Pisan Romanesque manner.

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10. 

    10© sailko · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Palazzo Mansi National Museum

    A baroque palace in Lucca kept as a museum with its rooms intact — silk-hung walls, a painted bridal chamber and a run of Flemish tapestries — along with a picture collection of mainly later Italian work.

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