Pisa

The following day we went by train to Pisa.  Pisa is on the Arno down stream from Florence and in the middle ages was an important strategic port. 

The Arno at Pisa

Pisa is the birthplace of Galileo Galilei (b 1564) who studied medicine at the University of Pisa and subsequently held the Chair of Mathematics here. This is probably Pisa's greatest claim to fame as most historians trace the scientific revolution back to Galileo's doorstep.

It is often said that he used the Cathedral's belltower, the famous Leaning Tower, to demonstrate uniform acceleration due to gravity by dropping two balls of different mass to show that they reached the ground at the same time.  But this may be apocryphal. 

However it is documented that while in the Cathedral he noticed that chandeliers of the same length swing with the same period no matter how widely they swing. You can see the same thing in any children's' playground. On swings of the same length adults and children swing at the same speed and except at very high speeds, where air resistance becomes a factor, each swing takes the same time no matter how far you swing.  Using this simple observation Galileo was able to deduce the gravitational law and realise that in a vacuum all matter must fall towards the centre of the earth uniformly, contrary to everyday experience in which a feather or a balloon takes longer to fall than a golf ball. 

Suddenly a lot of other things that seemed like commonsense, like the Sun going around the Earth, were called into question. 

Unfortunately, many of these misunderstandings had become religious truths.  So when Galileo showed that Jupiter has moons, and because Venus has phases like our Moon it must be orbiting the Sun, an Earth centred Universe can't be true, Pope Urban VIII called in the Inquisition. In 1633 Galileo was charged with heresy and having been shown the instruments of torture recanted and agreed to house arrest.  He was right to take them seriously, thirty three years earlier the Inquisition had burned Giordano Bruno alive at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori for this same heresy, in addition to a list of others like denying the Trinity.

But it was to no avail, the scientific cat was out of the bag.

From the station we crossed the Arno and headed to the cathedral where along with all the other tourists we pretended to hold up the Leaning Tower - a terrible anti-climax as it's so small. So we had lunch in an outdoor restaurant just when the sky opened and we all had to dash indoors. When the storm was over and we had eaten we went to look at the other sights the town has to offer and discovered there is not a lot.  Another coffee in the shop with free WiFi  was called for before catching the train home to Florence.

Holding up the tower

But this was when Pisa became interesting. There was a train strike and the train schedules and platform indicators were wrong and changed randomly.  After swapping platforms several times as indicators changed, we eventually identified the train back to Firenze and confirmed it from the indicator in the train itself.  Then somehow we became the rail gurus, in various languages, to other would be passengers similarly bemused.  Eventually the train departed, about an hour late, and fortunately it actually went to Florence.