The Leaning Tower, supreme symbol of tourist Italy, began to tilt while under construction 1173-78. When the campanile was added the Tower was already 1.5 m off-centre. It is now 4.14 m off, the rate of tilt is accelerating (2 mm per annum) and at ground level you descend 2.5 m in walking from one side to the other. The Tower was last closed in 1992. It is now again possible to stand on the seventh gallery and look down vertically and vertiginously to the ground – as Galileo, a native of Pisa, did when he demonstrated the laws governing falling bodies.

Without this curiosity, the assemblage of Pisan-Romanesque buildings – Tower, baptistery, cathedral and camposanto (cemetery) on the socalled ‘Meadow of Miracles’ – would still be a marvel. The cemetery especially overpowers the senses with its paintings, monumental sculptures and Roman tombs. Earth around the graves was brought from Golgotha in the Holy Land. Nor should you neglect the 11th and 12thC churches on half a dozen roomy piazzas, all loaded with works of art.

Pisa was a club of small trades and a river port which suddenly grew rich on Crusader loot. Its 15thC university and the dim streets and flamboyant palaces of its borghi Sant’Andrea, San Martino, Borgo Stretto and Borgo Largo – should be sought out. They are witnesses to the Maritime Republic’s glorious past.

The city is now a great tourist centre, chiefly of the ‘Rome-in-a-day-including-the-Pope’ brigade, and also a place of ironworks, glass and chemical factories. Industry is mercifully detached from the historic centre. Beyond the suburbs, villas and scattered hamlets put flecks of geranium colour into the greens of vineyard, cornfield and cypress. At Calci on the hillside 12 km east you find an ornate monastery, the Charterhouse of Pisa.

Seaward the landscape shelves to the small Pisan riviera of open sands, juniper scrub and pine. At the Marina you can hire boats, swim and water-ski and eat in fish restaurants. You can even get a boat-trip upriver into town, an 11-km trip on the cloudy, canal-like Arno, past wrought-iron balconies of orange and lemon palazzi which throw out along your course hints of the vivacity, dignity and piety of this once-great Mediterranean power.