The Leaning Tower of Pisa was actually intended to be the bell tower for the cathedral of Pisa, and is part of a complex of buildings, all of which have better foundations
Thus, they are all much less famous, but in a lot of ways much more worthwhile to see. The cathedral particularly had tons and tons of tile work that was spectacular. I swear, I've spent so much time taking pictures of floors on this trip, but I suppose that was the point, so I can't complain. A piece of this particular floor:
And an idea of how extensive the floor mosaics are:
The outsides of the church was equally as decorated, as I've found is most often the case. One of my favorites, on the outside of the cathedral:
After much wandering around and time killing, it was finally our time to climb the Leaning Tower:
Which turned out to be much, much freakier than either one of us expected. At this point we had been up several towers, hills, etc overlooking various cities and countryside landscapes, but this was something altogether different. The way up was a spiral staircase with a fairly large radius, so that it only wrapped around the tower a total of about six times getting up to the first landing. Even from the first loop, though, you could easily feel the lean. Walking up the tower was weird in and of itself because what you felt wasn't so much the actual lean of the tower as it was your body pitching forward, back or side to side to compensate for the slant in the stairs.
When we got to the top of that staircase if was nerve wracking enough, with a fairly substantial railing around the rim and solid stone at our backs, but then we were directed to this tiny little staircase that wound up to the very top of the tower, with a thin little railing around the edge. If you're looking at the picture, it's that little black bit at the very top. We got up there, very carefully walked around it once, took a picture or two and then got the heck out of Dodge. Definitely one of those instances when we way underestimated how unsettling it would be.
At the bottom of the tower we noticed this sign that we hadn't seen on the way up.
I can't read the smaller print, but the yellow print says “Attention: Beware” in five languages, and the picture speak to me says: “Attention: Beware, you might fall off the tower.” I don't know that we would have made it all the way up the tower had we seen that to begin with. But who knows, maybe we would have been braver than I give us credit for.
After the tower we started meandering our way back to the train station to head back to Florence, and on the way we saw this interesting building next to the river. I'm guessing it's either some kind of chapel or a memorial. Whatever it is, it had lovely panels on the doors:
Winding down our trip, we head on to Rome next, for the better part of a week.
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