Pisa

This past Saturday, our whole class took the train for a short excursion to Pisa and Lucca. Why don't we ever hear about the beautiful cathedral and baptistery right behind the Leaning Tower? Sheesh. The Tower was more of a mind bender than anything, since it's leaning towards you as you walk up to it, so the perspective lines look wrong, like an incorrect drawing. But other than that, it's not so special. 

The cathedral, on the other hand, was absolutely gorgeous.

 The inside was amazing too. The gilded ceiling? Stop.

There were also these huge, gorgeous paintings all along the walls of the nave. Photos don't even begin to do them justice.

And then there were the statues. Check out those abs!

Testing out the zoom on my camera. Not half bad.

Notice that middle-aged mom holding a lion by the hind leg like it's no big deal.

After gaping at everything in the cathedral for a while, we also hopped over to the baptistery, which is also an architectural delight. No pictures of the interior, but we did get to hear one of the guards create these awesome double harmonics by singing a few notes under the dome. Something about the "music of the celestial spheres", if I remember the director's lecture correctly.

Last stop in Pisa was the cemetary. More sumptious gothic arches.

And look at this - a fresco of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, with a little picture of Saint Augustine (I think?) in the lower right corner.

Unfortnately, much of the fine detail was worn away, but you can still sort of see some of it.

This fresco was huge, covering the entire wall for many yards. I didn't even try to get it all on my camera. It was exploring what happens to humans after we die. Apparently they used to think that the soul, in the shape of a baby, was pulled out of the corpse's mouth by either an angel or a demon.

The colors were faded, but you can tell they must have been incredibly bright when they were new.

Oh hello, life-size statue of Fibonnaci. 

There were so many exquisite statues in the cemetary, I wanted pictures of all of them. They had such personality.

Trying out the zoom again.

I was going to try to put pictures from Lucca in this post too, but I didn't take that many, and since we also visited the Boboli gardens this weekend, I figured I could combine those two in the next post.

Thanks for reading!

- Kasha