CHAPTER 33
It turns out that 2am in Pisa is not exactly rush hour, and not surprisingly, there is actually literally nothing open at that hour. The next train back west to our original destination, the Cinque Terre, wasn’t scheduled for another few hours. We were about to plop down along the outside wall of the train station (they kicked us out once the train we had arrived on departed) and just accept our upcoming three hours of boredom, when someone posed the idea of seeing the sights, which in Pisa could only mean one thing… This, of course was long before the days of cell phones and google maps, but we never the less found a tourist map in short order on the train station door, and realized it was only a mere statute mile to the famous Leaning Tower.
Seeing the tower for the first time, at two thirty in the morning, under the light of a full moon, with not another soul in sight, was nothing less than magical. It being closed, we couldn’t climb the celebrated spiral steps of course, and the classic “holding up the tower” shots weren’t really a possibility with our 90’s era point-and-shoot 35mm cameras at that time of night, but just seeing it there, glowing white in the moon light, defying the inevitable pull of gravity, was inspirational, and stood almost as a monument to our own defiance of the hum-drum workaday existence of the xenophobic automatons schlepping along back home.
I have to say I was very pleased indeed to see the tower again so many years later, when I was able to get the classic photos, and climb the spiral stairs, and appreciate the whole situation from the stand point of our continued defiance of the status quo and societal expectations.
Note: Photos with a “VS” suffix are credited to Val and Steve
Prev Chapter Next Chapter
