The Carovana front
Vasari's drawn ornament — a palace wearing its tattoo.
Sailko — CC BY 3.0 · Nikolai Karaneschev — CC BY 3.0 · Nikolai Karaneschev — CC BY 3.0 · Nikolai Karaneschev — CC BY 3.0
A count and naval commander accused of betraying Pisa after its defeat by Genoa, locked with two sons and two grandsons in the tower, the key thrown to the river — starving to death (1289). Dante set him in Hell's depth gnawing his enemy's skull eternally and hinted worse — making the verse Italian literature's most famous ambiguity, the tower its shrine.
Napoleon's institute (1810) forging the elite by merciless exam and full scholarship — Fermi, Nobel laureates and presidents from its rolls: Italy's Harvard at three hundred students. Its presence keeps central Pisa young in cafés and life — the opposite of embalmed monument towns.
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The Knights' Square is the second Pisa the tower crowds miss: the city's Roman forum and its medieval republic's heart, reshaped — after Florence subdued Pisa — by Vasari for the naval Knights of St Stephen: producing the Palazzo della Carovana with its painted sgraffito front of ornament and zodiac, a living masterpiece housing one of Europe's elite academies — the Scuola Normale, nursery of Italy's brilliant and three Nobels. Its neighbour, the Clock Palace, hides Dante's famous horror: the Hunger Tower where Count Ugolino and his sons were starved to death (1289) — immortalised in the Inferno's harshest canto, the tower merged into the building and read from a plaque. Five minutes from the white field reaches it — and a quarter hour here returns Pisa its depth: a university city and sea republic, not a leaning tower alone.
Vasari's drawn ornament — a palace wearing its tattoo.
Dante's hunger tragedy fused into the wall.
Rome to republic to knights to prodigies — a square in strata.
Piazza dei Cavalieri, 56126 Pisa