Pisa and Grosseto, Italy

We decided next to go to Pisa and see the famous leaning tower before it fell down. Jill is convinced it will not be up much longer. It is amazing how much it leans! You may laugh but the lean has been increasing over the years and they are taking measures to prevent it from increasing even more. At the moment of our visit, the measures were huge lead counterweights on one side, wires around it to keep it from fracturing, and banning people from its interior. How well these measures are working is in debate--the last time they messed with the tower by injecting concrete to establish a larger base, they increased the rate of increase of the lean.

Jill's comment, as an engineer, was that the tower was a prime example of bad engineering. Which is true. It is also a great work of art--maybe a little bit of performance art in history if it ever does collapse. To see the leaning tower--basically the ornate bell tower for yet another catholic church and the only attraction of the former thriving port city of Pisa--is to belly-laugh at humanity, rather than the ironic sick smile at the same concept as portrayed in the poem, "Ozymandias."

From here we were at a loss. We had thought at one time to visit Venice, but our experience in Florence had almost turned us off cities, and we still had Rome to go. The other thing in our mind was the price of gasoline--roughly $5/gallon, which we thought nothing of originally, but now was starting to add up. The problem was that we didn't want to return to Rome too early, yet wanted to at least do something.

The final decision was to wind our way to Rome and explore some of Southern Tuscany--out of the way places unvisited by most tourists. From Pisa we started south, getting on the autostrada for the first 50 km, then getting off on smaller roads. As we lost light, getting onto 5-6 pm, we started looking for hotels. But we had headed for the boondocks too well--we drove through agricultural fields rather than tourist traps. We decided to head for the largest city in the area on the hope that it would have some hotels. Thus, Grosotto, a nice town, but not much to see. Although the Hotel Nessano, where we ended up staying in Grosseto was of poor quality, it was at least clean and fairly inexpensive.

For the traditional tourist, Grosseto has little to offer, but as interested as we are in how other people truly live, it was an interesting stop. After we transferred our luggage from the rental car to the room and took a short rest break, we walked downtown through the rowdy teenagers just hanging out on the square to a nice restaurant off the main plaza. The restaurant was definitely authentic Italian, which rarely saw tourists. We were somewhat rushed by the waitress and Glen ended up ordering crostini with liver pate. Glen tried to get her to tell him if it had "fegato," but she blew through the ordering process. The result, as we came to call it, was "catfood crostini"--toasted pieces of bread with what, for all intents and purposes, had the makings of canned catfood smeared on top. How we managed to order this twice was a mystery. No, we did not eat it.

They had a nice church and an odd monument in the center of the piazza (man, helping a woman and a child, the woman is holding a collapsed baby, he is standing on a snake, and there is a griffin behind him biting the snake). The man at the hotel desk said (we think) that is a monument to the city. Walking back to the hotel afterwards, we again got a glimpse of the teenage crowd again, just hanging out on a normal Saturday night.

Jill thought at this point that she had lost two traveler's checks (this turns out not to have been true) and how this happened bothered her the rest of the day. The day was cold, with a bit of rain, and the fact that we had not packed correctly for this trip became even more obvious (we had no warm coats and Jill only had a light sweater). The Grosseto hotel was marginal at best and overcharged us, since their posted rate was lower than what we paid. And, to top it all off, Jill discovered that she had left her brand new nightwear at the last hotel.