I got up early and headed off to catch a train to Pisa. I actually missed it because I misread the sign and ended up waiting on the wrong platform, but there was another one about 20 minutes later. My ticket wasn't really valid for this train and I think I was supposed to pay some sort of fee to change it over, but I didn't bother and nobody checked. I was in Pisa for the obvious reason, and walked over to the Tower's complex about 15 minutes from the station. Immediately, I was astonished that the thing hasn't fallen over yet. I've of course seen a million pictures of it before, but they don't begin to do it justice. It really looks impossible, and having spent the past few years working to prevent exactly this sort of thing occurring, I was struck with a sense of anxiety that they even continued with construction. The main cathedral was pretty impressive too, but I didn't want to pay to go inside and contented myself with roaming around the campus for a while.

Afterward, I headed out to poke around the fringes of the city. There wasn't that much that I really wanted to see in Pisa aside from the Tower, but I had a while before my train back to Florence and I didn't want to push my luck by trying to take a different train again. Pisa is remarkably poor looking outside the immediate tourist arteries. Lots of dirt lots and run down buildings that make it seem as if you're somewhere entirely different. There are a few sections of excavation that expose Roman ruins, and there are still a pretty well preserved system of walls around the city from back when every settlement in Italy was at war with one another. It's amazing how modern people can simply coexist with these relics of the past as if they aren't immensely significant. After exploring a little more, I headed back to the train station to make an afternoon appointment at the Uffizi.

The Uffizi is regarded as one of the finest Renaissance museums in the world, and it's understandable why - that's very much their specialty. They have a pretty extensive collection of some very famous works from the period, but I think my favorite pieces were the Roman era sculptures. It was really interesting to see how these sculptures were modified over the years and often mixed and matched with different body parts. Often, a statue depicting one person would be altered to show someone else entirely 1500 years after its original creation. They did their best to assemble a chronological collection of the Roman emperors, which apparently was a thing that nobility used to do. You could tell which emperors were more highly regarded - they had a ton of highly detailed Trajan and Marcus Aurelius busts, but barely any from the late first century or after Septimius Severus's reign in the crisis of the 3rd century, and those that they did have of these figures were usually rougher and much less flattering.

While this stuff was cool, I will say that I was somewhat less impressed by the variety of the Renaissance stuff they had. The art from the late middle ages was my least favorite - that art style with the very flat Biblical characters who always have halos around their heads - in part because I don't find it very aesthetically pleasing, but also because it seems to have been illegal in this era to paint anything other than Jesus and Mary. Basically every painting is of a handful of Bible passages and nothing else. The art from the following few centuries was much better, but still I found myself wishing for more stylistic or thematic variety. In this era they seem to have been allowed to do more Greco-Roman stuff again, hence "The Birth of Venus" (one of the marquee pieces on display), but even still the vast majority of the works were very centered on a few individuals. Even if their was a background to the piece, it usually wasn't the focus and rarely had much detail that drew me. I found myself yearning for the impressionism and landscapes of Tate Britain, which was a style I found vastly more interesting. I think even a more historical connection would have kept me much more engaged than I was.

It was a rainy one today, so it's just as well I was inside all afternoon. Unfortunately, it seems like it's going to be rainy for much of the coming week, which may dampen my enthusiasm to roam the streets. Oh well, not much to be done about it I suppose. I've also noticed, for the first time since being in Europe, a frustrating number of mosquitos. I guess the warmer weather means they don't die off in the winter as they would in a colder climate.