Italy Guide
Tuscany
The Duomo
Opening time: daily: March 10am–6pm; April– Sept Mon– Sat 10am–8pm; Oct 10am–7pm; Nov– Feb 10am–1pm & 2–5pm
Address: Campo dei Miracoli
Price: €2; free from Nov 1 to March 1
Pisa's breathtaking Duomo (d) was begun in 1064 and completed around a century later. With its four levels of variegated colonnades and its subtle interplay of dark-grey marble and white stone, the building is the archetype of Pisan-Romanesque, a model often imitated in buildings across Tuscany, but never surpassed.
The vast interior is defined by the crisp black-and-white marble of the long arcades, which are suggestive of Moorish architecture. Much of the interior was redecorated, and some of the chapels remodelled, after a fire in 1595, but a notable survivor is the apse mosaic Christ in Majesty, completed by Cimabue in 1302. And don't miss the pulpit, which Giovanni Pisano began to sculpt in the same year. The last of the great series of three pulpits created in Tuscany by Giovanni and his father Nicola (the others are in Siena and Pistoia), it is a work of amazing virtuosity, its whole surface animated by figures almost wholly freed from the stone.