Piazza del Duomo, Pisa

Pisa's cathedral square is less a square than a lawn: a walled field on which four white marble buildings stand apart from one another like pieces set on a green cloth. The writer Gabriele D'Annunzio called it the meadow of miracles in a 1910 novel, and the name Piazza dei Miracoli has stuck. The buildings were paid for by the maritime wealth of the Pisan republic and together created the style known as Pisan Romanesque; UNESCO inscribed the whole ensemble in 1987.

The cathedral came first, begun in 1064 to designs by the architect Buscheto, whose tomb is set into the facade. Its front is layered with open arcaded galleries, and worshippers have traditionally entered not through the main doors but through the Porta di San Ranieri facing the tower, whose bronze panels Bonanno Pisano made around 1180. Inside, beneath a gilded ceiling bearing the Medici arms, stand striped marble arcades, granite columns taken from Palermo in 1063, an apse mosaic of Christ in Majesty in which Cimabue worked the head of St John in 1302, and Giovanni Pisano's carved pulpit of 1302–1310. The incense lamp that tradition says set Galileo thinking about the pendulum is not the one hanging today; the earlier lamp is kept in the Camposanto.

Opposite the facade stands the Baptistery, begun in 1153 by an architect known as Diotisalvi and finished in Gothic style by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. It is the largest baptistery in Italy, over 107 m round, and with the statue on its dome it is fractionally taller than the tower. Inside is Nicola Pisano's pulpit of 1260, whose classical nude figures are often taken as the starting point of Renaissance sculpture; the acoustics are famous too. Behind the cathedral rises the campanile, begun in 1173. Five years in, with three storeys built, the soft ground gave way and it began to sink on its south side; building resumed a century later with the upper floors made taller on one side to compensate, and the bell chamber was not added until 1372. After engineering work to stabilise it, it now leans at about four degrees. Its 296 steps can be climbed.

Along the north side runs the Camposanto, a long Gothic cloister begun in 1278 around soil said to have been brought from Golgotha after the Third Crusade. Its fresco cycles, including the Triumph of Death, were all but destroyed when Allied incendiary bombs set the roof on fire in July 1944, and restoration has continued since 1945. The preparatory drawings revealed in the process are shown in the Sinopie Museum in the old hospital on the south side of the square.

Getting there

The square lies within Pisa's historic centre; Pisa Centrale is the main railway station, with trains from Florence and along the coast. Pisa International Airport (PSA) is only about 4 km away; the PisaMover shuttle links it with Pisa Centrale in about five minutes.