Pisa
Since 1987 Pisa is named in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The city's steady fame, which began in the early Middle Ages, depends on its famous leaning tower.

A defect that has turned into an asset in Piazza dei Miracoli: the Leaning Tower has been recently listed among the Seven Wonders of the World. It started leaning soon after construction due to the sandy soil.
Starting from this unforeseen event, the famous monument awakened the curiosity of Galileo Galilei, a native of Pisa, who made use of its steep drop to prove that different weights fall into vacuum at the same speed. Sacred and lay history soon merged and, art and science became a single thing.
Though he was not a graduate, the scientist was assigned the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Pisa.

Construction works commenced on the tower in 1173, envisaging it as a bell tower for the Cathedral, one of Italy's most beautiful Romanesque cathedrals built a century before. Elegant and unique, its cylindrical architecture decorated from the bottom numbers six orders of turrets that peak in the belfry, whose diameter is smaller than the base.

In 1944 Pisa was bombed both by allied forces and the German army. All monuments near the Tower fell like paper castles. But, the most unstable and crooked suffered no damage.
Since 1999 sophisticated engineering propping techniques have attempted to stop its natural fall. Today it is chained to counterweights with steel cable that deprives its wonderful history of nothing. To judge by calculations, the tower will remain inclined but safe at least for the next 350 years.

Piazza dei Miracoli
Piazza del Duomo with the Santa Maria Maggiore Cathedral owes its artistic name to Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose novel Chissà che sì, chissà che no published in 1910 thus renamed Romanesque Europe's largest architectural complex for its eccentricities.
The Cathedral with its lay bell tower (the leaning tower), the Baptistery and the Cemetery stand on an immense green lawn. The symbolic importance of these urban jewels is intentionally clear, since they represent man's entire historical vital cycle, from birth to death. But there is more to it. The buildings are laid out to form the constellation of Aries. However, this was not dictated by superstition; it was rather the rational instinct that led builders to raise their heads to question the skies where doctrines merged.

The Cathedral, built along the Romanesque Pisan style, became a model for all churches in Central Italy due to the unusually rich ornamental motifs and the horizontal marble strips borrowed from Arab, Byzantine and Levantine cultures - an exotic touch Tuscan art acquired elsewhere through the international presence of Pisan merchants (the Chinzica District, rich in shops and markets, was once the site of Arab and Jewish merchants). The internal dilated spatial effect also recalls that of Muslim mosques.

Inside the Cathedral you will find sculptures by the unrivalled 13th century masters and sculptors Nicola and Giovanni Pisano.
Giovanni produced the pulpit, which is famous because it is one of the richest and most extensive 14th century narrations of the life of Christ and, because for the first time panels are slightly curved to give the pulpit a new circular dimension.
The most skilled artists cooperated in the Cathedral's decorations. Cimabue's last work, an immense mosaic depicting St. John the Evangelist, was produced here. Along with the pulpit, it escaped the terrible fire that destroyed the Cathedral in 1595.

Another equally beautiful pulpit called Pergamo was made by Nicola Pisano for the Baptistery, a circular sacred building with complex external ornaments, sober internal elegance, white marble wall facing and mosaic floor. The baptistery's other artistic treasures have been placed in the neighbouring National Cathedral Museum.