Pizza in Pisa

Today we went to the fabulous town of Pisa.
I had planned on spending the day by myself in
Florence, but Kate wanted me to come along,
and I'm sure glad I did! Pisa is a glorious and
fabulous town, and the cathedral there (with
the trademark leaning tower) is about the
nicest example of a cathedral I've ever seen.

Inside, the art is a combination of renaissance
and later works, with a strong eastern influence.
The painting of Christ the King behind the altar
is stunning. And the black/white marble stripes in the
layout are just gorgeous. The baptistry across the yard
is similarly amazing. They have someone who sings in
there and the acoustics are such that she'll sing two
long notes and before the echoes are done, you can
hear a third note created by the harmonics!

Pisa is a small town, so you don't have to walk far
for lunch and shopping. Apart from the 50,000
or so Nigerian guys walking around offering to sell
you a cheap "Rolex" every 2 minutes, it's great.

I think someone needs to give the Pisan and Florentine
street vendors a quick primer on "market saturation" -
I mean, if the vendors of fake rolexes equal the number
of tourists (and it's a pretty close number) and each
hundredth tourist *might* buy a watch, that's a lot
of watches chasing each interested tourist. Not a
great way to make a living, I think.

We had a fabulous lunch (I know, I'm saying that a
lot) and Kate had ricotta and spinach ravioli in
bolognese sauce, while I had Gnocchi quattroformaggio.
Topped that off with limonata and gelato. Yum!

Dinner back in Florence was Italian style pot roast
with mashed potatoes so creamy I thought it was
polenta until I tasted it. Yummy again!

Now we're posting in an internet cafe with soccer
on the TV. It's hot as a sauna in here - apparently
all of Italy is in one of those nasty heat waves where
they tell the elderly to stay inside. One member of our
tour group has stayed in the hotel the last two days
after being overcome by the heat. We're drinking
gallons of water and sweating it all back out again.

Hopefully it'll be cooler in Venice - but we've had a
small change in plans. Because the trip to Venice won't
take all day, but we'd arrive too late to head into the
city center, we've decided to make an unplanned stop
in Padua for most of the day - I'm all for it, as seeing
another great northern Italian city is just icing on the
cake for me.

(Note from Kate: During tonight's dinner, dad said that if we didn't stop in Padua, he'd wear a thong bathing suit in Venice. The mental images are too horrible to describe!)

We'll close the post with several shots from our tour group:

Megan Schucht

Alexa Rodriguez



Alison Hackelman

Aubrey Brown