After spending one beautiful day in the Cinque Terra, we packed up early and headed to the train station to catch our next train to Rome. The journey from La Spezia was about 6 hours so we decided to break up the trip with a quick pit stop in Pisa! If you haven’t heard of Pisa, it’s the one with the tower! We actually went through Pisa on the way from Florence to La Spezia but didn’t catch a glimpse of the tower on our way past.

After a slightly delayed train, we checked out bags into luggage storage (honestly, Bounce (luggage storage app) is so good and cheap) and made our way through the central district towards the tower. Pisa itself is relatively boring. The buildings were pretty but apart from the area around the tower, there’s not much going for it. Most visitors, like us, choose to do a half day trip. It was hot 🥵 - I felt like we were in Florence again. Coincidentally we are still in Tuscany and the river Arno which runs through Florence also runs through Pisa.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was a lot shorter than I thought! It was very crowded around the tower with everyone trying to get “that shot”.

We also walked around the Cathedral and the Baptistry, the latter being the largest Baptistry in Italy (big babies in Pisa I guess 🤣). Also, we noticed it wasn’t only the tower but all the buildings are on a lean!

While the buildings were picturesque, we decided to save our money and not pay to go in so headed out to find some lunch. We had a very cheap pasta meal and some delicious gelato. Sam chose the two most melty gelato flavours and proceeded to get gelato everywhere which was highly entertaining for me (not so for him!).

After lunch, we still had some time to kill so we got our bags and took advantage of the free wifi at McDonalds.

Pisa was nice to see but very happy we chose to do it on the way through as a pit stop! The area around the tower is lovely but extremely touristy with a lot of market stalls and street vendors.

Next (and final stop in Italy) - Rome!!