Pisa: Cemetery and Tower

Edward Hutton completed his tour of Pisa's Campo Santo with descriptions of the cemetery and the famous leaning tower.

 

Out of the dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty in which the butterflies flitter from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful….

 

For, indeed, in what other land than this could a cemetery be so beautiful, and where else in the world do frescoes like these stain the walls out of doors amid a litter of antique statues, graves, and flowers over the heroic or holy dead? Here you may see life at its sanest and most splendid moments. In the long hot days of the vintage, for instance, when the young men tread the wine-press, the girls bear the grapes in great baskets, and boy and girl together pluck the purple fruit. Call it, if you will, the Drunkenness of Noah, you will forget the subject altogether in your delight in the sun and the joy of the vintage itself, where the girls dance among the vines under the burden of the grapes, and the little children play with the dogs, and the goodman tastes the wine….Thus alone in this place of death Pisa lives, ah! Not in the desolate streets of the modern city, but fading on the walls of her Campo Santo, a ghost among ghosts, immortalized by an alien hand.

 

Coming last of all to the greatest wonder of the Piazza, it is really with surprise you find the Campanile so beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful tower of Italy. It is like a lily leaning in the wind, it is like the slanting horn of a unicorn, it is like an ivory Madonna that the artist has not had the heart to carve since the ivory was so fair. Begun in 1174, it was designed by Bonannus. He made it all of white marble, which has faded now to the colour of old ivory. Far away at the top of the tower live the great bells, and especially La Pasquarecchia, founded in 1262, stamped with a relief of the Annunciation, for it used to ring the Ave. I think there can be no reasonable doubt that the lean of the Tower is due to some terrible accident which befell it after the third gallery had been built, for the fourth gallery, added in 1204 by Benenabo, begins to rectify the sinking; the rest built in 1260, continues to throw the weight from the lower to the higher side….It is strange that a northerner, William of Innspruck, finished the Tower from the fifth story in 1260; and it may well be that this Teuton brought to the work something of a natural delight in such a thing as this, and contrived to finish it, instead of beginning again. It seems necessary to add that the tower would be more beautiful if it were perfectly upright. (115-117)…

 

Ah, do not be in a hurry to leave Pisa for any other city. It may be that we shall never see that line of hills again—Monte Pisani; it were better to look at them a little carefully. A little while before today the most precious of our dreams was not so lovely as that spur of the Appennines. (128)

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908.