Florence Day Five - Returning To Tuscany

We woke in Mestre the way we had begun so many mornings on this journey, with the soft, almost intoxicating buongiorno between us, followed by kisses and love while the rest of the world was still waking.

Our things were already packed. After breakfast, we carried everything to the motorcycle and prepared for another departure. Venice had given us two extraordinary days, but the road was calling again. We said goodbye to Mestre, crossed away from the lagoon, and turned west, towards Pisa.

There is something about travelling through Italy by motorcycle that makes the country feel less like a collection of destinations and more like one continuous landscape. The road carries you through it all. Towns appear and disappear. Hills open into fields. Cypress trees stand against the sky. Small villages seem to have been placed there centuries ago and simply forgotten by time.

We stopped along the way for something to eat and, naturally, ice cream. Then we continued through the warm Tuscan countryside, watching the landscape change around us.

Eventually Florence appeared again.

By now Florence was no longer a city we had to discover. We knew it. We had slept there, loved there, walked its streets, listened to music there, and begun this journey together there. Passing it now felt almost like passing the house of an old friend. We looked towards it and continued west.

Pisa was waiting.

By the time we arrived, the afternoon had already begun. Our room was in a beautiful villa, quiet and shaded, exactly what we needed after the heat and the long ride. The coolness of the room felt wonderful against our skin.

We showered.

We kissed.

We made love.

Then, slowly, we got ready to go out again.

The Piazza dei Miracoli was only a few minutes away on foot. The little streets leading towards it were beautiful in the late afternoon light, lined with houses, flowers and trees. The sky was intensely blue, the kind of blue that seems almost exaggerated in an Italian summer, and the golden light softened everything it touched.

Then we saw the entrance to the square.

And there they were.

The Battistero.

The Duomo.

And the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I had known the tower long before I knew Pisa. I had seen it in photographs and, most vividly, in a book I had as a child about the great wonders of the world. Even then, I found something fascinating about it. A tower that leaned so visibly, so impossibly, and yet refused to fall.

Later came the physics lessons, the explanations of balance, foundations and gravity, the remarkable story of how such a structure could survive centuries of movement.

But none of that mattered quite as much as standing there.

The grass around the monuments was impossibly green. The white marble seemed almost luminous beneath the sun. The whole square had the quality of something imagined rather than constructed.

We entered the Duomo, but unfortunately a Mass and another event meant that we could not properly explore it. So we crossed over to the Battistero.

Inside, the temperature dropped immediately. The marble held the coolness of the shade, and after the heat outside it felt almost luxurious.

We walked around the great circular building, looking at the details, the stone, the architecture. Then we climbed to the upper level.

Through the small windows, Pisa appeared again.

The Duomo.

The rooftops.

The trees.

The town spreading beyond us.

The city seemed quieter from there, reduced to shapes and colours beneath the afternoon sky.

Then came the tower.

We began to climb.

The staircase was narrow, and the strange inclination of the building became more noticeable with every step. At certain points, the marble seemed to tilt beneath us in a way that made the body instinctively compensate. People were coming down while we were going up, everyone moving carefully through the peculiar geometry of the tower.

And yet there was something wonderful about it.

We were climbing inside a mistake that had become a miracle.

A building that had been trying to fall for centuries and had somehow turned its instability into immortality.

Step by step, we continued upwards.

And then we reached the top.

The timing could not have been better.

The golden hour had begun.

Pisa spread beneath us in every direction, transformed by the lowering sun. The rooftops were warm and ochre. The Duomo and Battistero seemed to glow against the surrounding green. The bells stood above the city. Trees stretched into the distance, so dense in places that they looked almost like a forest.

From that height, the city seemed both enormous and strangely intimate.

We took photographs.

So many photographs.

And we laughed at the people below who had been sitting for what seemed like an eternity trying to create the perfect Leaning Tower photograph, carefully positioning themselves, waiting for the right angle, refusing to move just when we wanted to take our own picture.

We laughed because sometimes the most beautiful moments are the ones in which nobody gets the perfect photograph.

You simply stand there.

Together.

Looking.

Remembering.

Eventually we climbed back down and returned to the streets of Pisa, carrying with us photographs and little memories of the place.

By then, dinner was calling.

We found a restaurant from which we could still see the tower, and we sat down beneath the evening sky. We ate wonderful pasta with wild mushrooms and Italian sausage, the kind of meal that makes you stop speaking for a moment because there is nothing to say except that it is very, very good.

Later came tartufo, which I was trying for the first time, followed by espresso.

Another first.

Another Italian taste that would forever belong to this journey.

When we finished, we walked again.

Pisa at night was a different city from the one we had met that afternoon. The crowds had thinned. The streets had quieted. We wandered without needing to arrive anywhere in particular, letting the city unfold around us.

And eventually, inevitably, we found ourselves back at the Piazza dei Miracoli.

The moon was high.

The stars were scattered across a dark blue sky, almost black but never completely black. The monuments were illuminated against it, their white marble taking on a different character beneath the night.

There is something strange about returning to a place after seeing it in daylight.

You realize that you have not really seen it yet.

The tower that had seemed almost playful in the afternoon now looked ancient and solemn. The Duomo rose quietly beneath the stars. The grass was dark, the air softer, and the entire square seemed to belong to another century.

I stood beside him and looked at it all.

And then, as it often happened during those days, I looked at him.

The city was beautiful.

But I did not need to ask myself which was more beautiful.

There are moments when the answer is simply there, in his deep green eyes  

We were tired by then. Tired from the motorcycle, the heat, the walking, the climbing, the food, the photographs, the endless succession of beautiful things that Italy had been placing in front of us.

We returned to the villa.

The next morning would take us back to Florence for two more days, where the summer heat would meet us again and the city would open another chapter of our journey.

But that night belonged to Pisa.

The villa was quiet. Outside, the flowers were barely visible in the darkness. Above us was the deep blue of the Italian night, with the moon and stars shining through it.

And once again, we found each other.

There is something deeply sensual about making love in these ancient places.

Perhaps it is because the walls around us have witnessed so much life. Centuries of people being born, growing old, falling in love, losing each other, finding each other again. The stones remain while generations pass through them.

And there we were, two people passing through for one night, leaving nothing behind except a memory.

But for me, there was something else happening.

Every time we made love in another Italian city, I felt that peculiar sensation of returning.

Not arriving.

Returning.

As though the motorcycle had carried us across hundreds of kilometres only to bring me back to the same place each time.

To him.

To the quiet certainty of his arms around me.

To that feeling I had begun to recognise without needing to name it.

I am back.

Back to this place.

Back to you.

And perhaps that is what these journeys were becoming.

Not a search for beautiful places, because Italy had more beauty than we could possibly contain.

They were a way of discovering how many different landscapes could hold the same two people.

Florence.

Tuscany.

Venice.

Pisa.

Different cities. Different skies. Different rooms. Different roads.

And somehow, the same love moving through all of them.

The next morning we would leave again.

There would be another road, another city, another story.

But that night, beneath the moon over Pisa, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

Ti amo sempre, Ammore mio.

Sempre e per sempre.