Dove il Pendante Torre?

“Quick! Ask him!”

I quickly pulled the car over, and K stuck her head out, startling the poor gentleman with her one sentence in Italian: “Dove il Pendante Torre?”

I’m not sure that even qualifies as a sentence. I’m sure somewhere along the line, we missed syntax, grammar and vocabulary. The accosted gentleman looked at us in shock and amazement and gesticulated somewhere to the left of the direction we were headed in.

A little history here. K and I had agreed to meet up in Italy for a vacation in the Tuscan countryside. I flew in from Seoul, she flew in from DC. We rented an apartment, a car, and were ready for our Big Italian Adventure.

We made our headquarters outside the tiny town of Montescudaio. Don’t blink, you might miss it. While most people head for bright lights and big cities, staying in a small town gave us a chance to absorb life in rural Italy. We shopped at the local deli/market and for fifteen Euros, brought home enough Italian goodies to fill half of DeLaurenti’s! [Editor’s note: DeLaurenti’s is a fancy supermarket at Pike Place Market in Seattle.] Double bonus: four Euros more bought the most quaff-able, luscious, yummy bottle of wine! We wandered narrow streets that shut down in the afternoon, dusty and forlorn, only to spring back to life at sunset. We sneaked peaks into dining rooms at dusk, catching people sitting down to dinner. We watched kids play in the schoolyard, and wandered down farm lanes to find an unmarked cemetery. We were Tuscans, well, at least for a week!

Well, one does not go to Tuscany without going to Pisa, that ancient city that once rivaled Florence for trade, riches and fame. Today, it is best known for one thing, il Pendante Torre, which is what K and I set out to see. Being March, the days were short, and what started out as an adventure in the early spring sun was rapidly turning into a scavenger hunt by candlelight.

Il Pendante Torre has quite the colorful history. It started leaning after the first three floors were constructed. But they didn’t leave things well enough alone, oh no. Four more floors were built onto the bottom three, and then the bell tower was added! Galileo also proved that gravity acts the same no matter what the mass by dropping two cannon balls of different sizes from this tower.

I knew that the Tower would be in the center of town, the oldest part. So we drove in circles, in rings, in doosie-dos. It was kinda like square dancing in the Fiat: up and down, round and round, flip your partner upside down! Things looked familiar, but only because we had driven by them about twenty times!

After three hours (do we get points for persistence) and several startled Pisans, we decided to stop at what looked like a school. We were in dire straits, for directions, and for bathrooms. As we walked back to the car, we stopped in the office and asked the woman there, “Dove il Pendante Torre?”

She looked at us in amazement, and amusement, and literally took K by the hand. She pulled us out to the parking lot, spun us around in the OTHER direction and said “there” (in English, no less). And lo and behold, there it was! The Leaning Tower of Pisa, leaning in all its glory! After K and I picked up our jaws off the ground, we sped off towards the tower and reveled in our successful expedition. You know the expression, so close but so far? Repeat here please.

The Tower is beautiful and leans in a weird way that makes you almost want to push it straight. Its stones and lines don’t tell you the stories and dramas behind it, how people have tried in vain to keep it from leaning, how it was almost destroyed by the Allied forces. Everything looks smooth, and slanted, like it has been for centuries. No matter how hard you try to listen, it never whispers it secrets to you.

What gets overlooked is the Duomo, which is a shame, as it is a thing of beauty in its own right. It looks like a wedding cake with curlicues and icing all over. So if you go to the Leaning Tower, take a good look at the Duomo. It is like the stately governess who silently watches over a mischievous child acting up to get attention.

As K and I sat and ate bad pizza (yes, they have crappy pizza in Italy, too) at the Torre Pizzeria, of course, we laughed and marveled at our day. Two reasonably intelligent women with worldly travel experience, and yet we failed to find a tower!

Moral of the story? Sometimes, things are right in front of you, you just have to open your eyes! And don’t miss the other stuff (like the Duomo) because of the stars in your eyes.

Lisa K. Nakamura believes in cooking with joy.