THE valley of the Arno, as the river flows through the heart of Tuscany from its source high in the hills just south of Monte Falterona, is the most romantic region in all Italy. It is the borderland between the south and the north, and, as it was a battle-ground between Guelph and Ghibellines, so too is it the common ground where the blood of the northerner and southerner mingles to-day.
As great rivers go, the Arno is neither grand nor magnificent, but, though its proportions are not great, its banks are lined with historic and artistic ruins, from the old fortress at Marina di Pisa to Poppi, the ancient capital of the Casentino, perched so quaintly upon its river-washed rock.
Pisa, Leghorn and Lucca are a triumvirate of Tuscan towns which should be viewed and considered collectively. One should not be included in an itinerary without the others, though indeed they have little in common, save the memories of the past.
Pisa is another of these dead cities of Europe, like Bruges, Leyden, and Rothenburg. Once ardent and lively in every activity of life, its population now has sunk into a state of lethargy. Industry and commerce, and the men who should busy themselves therewith, are in the background, hidden behind a barrier of bureaucracy. Pisa, a town of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, has a tribunal of nine civil judges, a criminal court presided over by sixty-three more, and a “roll” of more than half a hundred notaries. Then there is a service of Domains, of Registry and of Public Debt; besides an array of functionaries in charge of seminaries, orphan asylums, schools and colleges. All these belong to the state.
Pisa, sitting distant and proud on the banks of the Arno, enjoys a softer climate than most of the coast cities or interior towns of central Italy. The Tyrrhenian Sea is but a gulf of the Mediterranean, but just where it bathes the shore about the mouth of the Arno, it has a higher temperature than most northern Mediterranean waters.
Pisa is more of a sanitarium than it is a gay watering place however. The city is, in fact, like its celebrated leaning tower, half tottering on the brink of its grave. Commerce and industry are far from active and its streets are half deserted; many of them are literally grass-grown and all the others are paved with great flat clean-swept flags, a delight for the automobilist, whose chief experience of pavements has been in France and Belgium.