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Pisa is the ultimate Tuscan day trip. Millions of people descend annually on the Leaning Tower and its neighboring architectural miracles on Campo dei Miracoli square. Few visitors, however, venture beyond this monumental grassy square into the rest of the city.

The city began as a seaside settlement around 1000 B.C. and was expanded into a naval trading port by the Romans in the 2nd century B.C. By the 11th century, Pisa had grown into one of the peninsula's most powerful maritime republics, along with Venice, Amalfi, and Genoa. Its extensive trading in the Middle East helped import advanced Arabic ideas (decorative and scientific), and its wars with the Saracens led it to create an offshore empire of Corsica, Sardegna, and the Balearics.
Pisa's main claim to fame since the end of its naval power has been its university, one of Italy's top schools, established in 1343. Pisa was also the birthplace of one of Western history's greatest physicists and astronomers, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), a man prone to dropping uneven weights from the Leaning Tower and making blasphemous statements about Earth revolving around the sun.

The Leaning Tower & Other Pisan Miracles
On a grassy lawn wedged into the northwest corner of the city walls, medieval Pisans created one of the most beautiful squares in the world. Historically dubbed the Campo dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles), Piazza del Duomo contains an array of elegant buildings that heralded the Pisan Romanesque style. But Piazza del Duomo isn't the central plaza in town as in most Tuscan cities. When it was built between the 11th and 13th centuries, the square was against the city walls, surrounded by farmland. But this peripheral location also somehow plays a role in the piazza's uniqueness. A very large but hidden part of its appeal, aside from the beauty of the buildings, is its spatial geometry. The piazza's medieval engineers knew what they were doing. If you take an aerial photo of the square and draw connect-the-dot lines between the centers, doors, and other focal points of the buildings and the spots where streets enter the piazza, you'll come up with all sorts of perfect triangles, tangential lines of mathematical grace, and other unfathomable hypotenuses.

Pisa's Perpendicularly Challenged Tower
Most medieval towers still standing in Italy haven't been able to keep perpendicular over the centuries. But it's the Leaning Tower of Pisa that has become international shorthand for Italy itself.
The tower's problem that which has been the bane of Pisan engineers trying to overcome it for more than 800 years is that you can't stack that much heavy marble on top of a shifting subsoil foundation and keep it all on the up and up. It was started in 1173 They got as far as the third level in 1185 when they noticed the lean, at that point only about 3.8 centimeters (1 1/2 in.), but enough to worry them. Everyone was at a loss as to what to do, so work stopped for almost a century and wasn't resumed again until 1275. They then tried to correct the tilt by intentionally curving the structure back toward the perpendicular, giving the tower its slight banana shape.

The only major blip in the tower's long career as a world-famous, bizarre Italian attraction came in 1590, when a hometown scientist named Galileo Galilei dropped some mismatched wooden balls off the leaning side to prove to an incredulous world his theory that gravity exerted the same force on two falling objects no matter what their relative weights. In the early 19th century, someone got it into his head to dig out around the base of the tower in order to see how the foundations were laid and perhaps find a way to correct the slipping lean, but all he accomplished was to remove what little stability the tower had acquired over the centuries, and it started falling faster than ever before (not that it was all that fast: about 1mm/.04 in. a year).
For several decades, a series of complicated and delicate projects have been directed at stabilizing the alluvial subsoil. In 1989, more than a million people climbed the tower, but by 1990 the lean was at about 4.6m (15 ft.) out of plumb and the tower was closed to the public. In 1992, steel cables were belted around the base to prevent shear forces from ripping apart the masonry. In 1993, even the bells and their dangerous vibrations were silenced, and the same year a series of lead weights was rather unaesthetically stacked on the high side to try to correct the list. In 1997, engineers took a chance on excavating around the base again this time carefully removing more than 70 tons of soil from the foundation of the high side so the tower could gradually tip back.

In December 2001, righted to its more stable lean of 1838 (when it was a mere 4m/13 ft. off its center), the tower reopened to the public. Now, however, the number of visitors is strictly controlled via compulsory 35- to 40-minute guided tours and a massive admission charge. It's wise to book well ahead; if you show up in Pisa without reservations in the height of the tourist season, you will not be able to get into the tower.
The campanile, by the way, isn't the only edifice out of whack on the piazza. The same water-saturated and unsteady sandy soil under the Field of Miracles that causes the bell tower's poor posture has taken its toll on the other buildings as well. The baptistery leans toward the north, and if you catch the Duomo's facade at the correct angle, you'll see it, too, is a few feet shy of straight. The nature of Pisa's alluvial plain has caused many of its older buildings to shift and settle in this manner, and a couple of other campanile about town have been nicknamed Pisa's "other leaning towers" (San Michele degli Scalzi is, if anything, even more weirdly askew than its more famous cousin.

Pisa's Sunken Treasure: Back in Hiding
The old Medici Arsenale, Lungarno Simonelli, houses the finds of the remarkable ongoing excavation of the 10 ancient Roman wooden ships spanning the 1st century B.C. to the Imperial Age, from riverboats to seafaring vessels stumbled upon by workers expanding the San Rossore train station in 1998. After just 2 years open to the public, however, the museum closed its doors for restoration. Buried by silt in the 12th century (which has since moved the shoreline 8km/5 miles west), these docks where the Arno met the sea were probably half marshy flatlands, half lagoon much like modern-day Venice. Alas, this sort of harbor is prone to flash flooding during storms, a recurrent event that probably sank these ships at various times over the centuries.

Fortunately, their sudden demise also meant that much of their contents have survived, from holds filled with clay amphorae (whose seals have preserved shipments of olives, cherries, walnuts, and wine for 2,000 years) to sailor's quarters still containing their belongings: leather sandals, sewing kits, even a wax writing board. In the half-decade since the discovery, maritime archaeologists had uncovered two more vessels, including what may be the only Roman warship ever recovered intact. When the museum reopens, as Museo Navi Antiche di Pisa, it will display the ships' contents (including a sailor's skeleton) and will let you watch the arduous restoration of the vessels.