October 2014

Pisa is famous for one thing, and one thing only, it’s leaning tower. If you could see the hordes of tourists, the buses, the cameras and gift kiosks, you’d run the other way. But you shouldn’t. The Campo dei Miracoli, that’s “Field of Miracles”, is a splendid Unesco sight. Its one of a kind architecture was started in 1064, the bell tower over 100 years later, when Pisa was at the height of power.

According to Wikipedia Pisa has been in a state of decline since August 6, 1284. You could hardly tell from looking at it, today. Pisa is home to 3 of Italy’s best schools of higher education. It is vibrant, youthful. And historic.

I have probably spent more time in Pisa than most Americans. It is the stopping off point for the regular trips I make to the Island of Elba (see the following posts). I have grown to love Pisa, think of it as a home in a way. Though I always do a tour of the Campo dei Miracoli—usually very early in the morning when no one is around, or late at night when it seems almost ghostly(Samuel Taylor Coleridge visiting the site in1806 recommended viewing it in moon light when it appeared “savage”).

I have also sought out every green space I can find.

Pisa is a city of walls.

There are parts of the city where you feel like you are in shadowy canyons.

Often alleys can be damp and grotto like, sprouting moss and ferns.

Even the Arno River, which begins in the Apennines and runs through Florence, is walled into a channel in Pisa as it approaches the Tyrrhenian Sea just 6 miles west. The pines that frame one of Pisa’s best green spaces, Giardino Scotto, can be seen to the right. Though it is a public park it is enclosed, like most of Pisa’s gardens, by walls.

The walled garden, or hortus conclusus, is a medieval phenomenon. It served both practical and symbolic purposes. Certainly the walls kept out wild animals, and wild people, most of them being attached to palaces and monasteries. They were gardens for edible and medicinal plants primarily, and stood as symbols of Eden. It wasn’t until the renaissance that what many of us think of as the Italianate garden was born. The walls came down and the gardens opened to the landscape. These gardens also became much more formalized. Geometrical plantings of clipped evergreens dominate this style. It is almost zen in reductionist principles, eschewing color and flowers over form. This style pervaded Italian garden making since that time. Actually many famous renaissance Italianate gardens date from only a century ago.

But it is not this aspect of Italian gardens I want to address in the next five posts. But Italy and it relationship to plants: whether a weedy park, (I’m still not sure if this is a deliberate attempt at wildness, or just more Italian “ease of living”, a garden equivalent to slow-food), a true natural forest, or what might be easily acknowledge as a true garden.

I start with Pisa because I land there, it is always my first stop in this variable land, that I must admit I have seen very little of. But what I have seen I have seen frequently and each time with more depth.

Pisa is not a big city, only 88,000 inhabitants. One must shrink one’s mind to medieval proportions to enjoy it charms. It is an ordered universe unto itself. The gardens and parks are often weedy and chaotic, and walled. Really the great and uncharacteristically well-mown and watered lawns of the Campo dei Miracoli are they only open green spaces, save for some piazze with a few benches and trees for shade.

One must enter and exit these green spaces like any of the walled and windowed rooms of the palazzi one would visit as a tourist. You must buy a ticket to enter the Orto Botanico, arguably one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world.

Inside one finds the ordered world of research.

But many enter to escape the city and enjoy a nap in this quiet setting. It is rare to see a tourist here, or any people for that matter, which is always a great pleasure for me.

This is not the chaos of the Olympic Rainforest. But it is a wildness none-the-less. As I wander Pisa I wondered more and more about these enclosed gardens, what are they keeping out, or in?         I also longed to enter one these walled enclaves to be “inside”. And it seems the gardens are trying just as hard to get out. One sees the splendid verdant overflowing of gardens everywhere in the city. Certainly when left to its own devices nature not only would bound over these walls but would devour them. Rules are made to be broken, walls to be leapt.

I often take a short cut through the garden of the Uffizzo dei fiumi e fossi. The office of rivers and canals is on the Arno, it halls are elaborately frescoed, but it’s garden is basically a parking lot with weeds. It comes as no surprise with the Arno just across the street an embankment of weeds.

There is s lovely statue, which I assume is Flora, in the courtyard, this embodiment of the green world some how makes all the weeds, and motorini, make sense. Or at least looked after, symbolically.

Pisa is an ancient city; even the Romans two millennia ago considered Pisa an ancient city. Its origins are shrouded in myth and speculation. Yet there is WiFi on every corner. It is not a behemoth of importance like Rome, nor is it haughty like Florence, nor haunted like Venice. Yet there is something about the pace of this place beyond it tourist attractions and buzz of higher learning that allows one to slow down, absorb detail. A precious commodity in this modern world