April 7: Pisa

We’d had strong thunderstorms overnight but the clouds pushed out not long after sunrise and it turned into another beautiful day.  Judy and Liz had looked up train schedules to Pisa and it turns out that it’s pretty darn easy to get there from Monterosso.  A number of longer-haul trains follow the coast and connect Genova to Pisa with stops at either end of Cinque Terre – Riomaggiore and Monterosso.  So we caught a train, though we didn’t know how to read the tickets.  As a result, we didn’t know that we had specific reserved seats on a specific car of the train.  The guy taking tickets tried to help us – we had happened to get on car 6, but needed to be on car 5 – but he took us the wrong way to car 7 instead.  We stayed confused there until the next stop, when some more folks got on and had the correct tickets for that car… fortunately, they were able to tell us where we needed to go and we eventually found our actual seats. 

I’m pretty much convinced that trains are the way to get around Italy.  The cars are comfortable, the prices reasonable, and at least our trains ran on time.

From the Pisa train station, it’s a straight shot to the Piazza dei Miracoli, which includes the Duomo, Battistero, and the Leaning Tower.  To be honest, I was kind of expecting this to be pretty cheesy, but these are truly magnificent edifices, and in the bright sunshine we were blessed with, the marble absolutely sparkles.

That is not to say that we were not above being cheesy.  We took a dozen photos of us holding up the Leaning tower (along with every other tourist there).  And it doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of cheesiness around the area.  If you want a plastic leaning tower made in China or a Pinocchio marionette – or for that matter, a t-shirt of Pinocchio propping up the Leaning Tower – Pisa is the place to get it.

We caught a late lunch/early dinner at a Pizzeria/Trattoria just off the Piazza, then wandered around awhile before heading for a grocery store.  Because the next day was Easter, we assumed that nothing would be open in the morning – and we would be arriving in Monterossa after their grocery stores had closed – so we stocked up on stuff to make meals for the day.

We then returned to Pisa station to catch our train… fortunately, a little early, because the woman who sold us our return trick at the terminal in Pisa had us originating in Monterosso and arriving (again) in Pisa.  How that was going to happen, I don’t know, but by the time we had it straightened out it was about time for our train to arrive.  This time we expertly got on the right train and headed for the right seats, only to find 2 older gentlemen who had gotten on at a previous spot and had overindulged somewhere along the way were trying to sleep it off.  But the got up and moved and after we aired out the car it was all good.

We had to change trains in La Spezia, a larger town just east of Cinque Terre.  A very helpful young man assured us that we were getting on the right train and in no time we were back at the Monterosso train station.