Pisa was a naval superpower before it was a punchline. Its 11th-century fleets sacked Palermo and Mahdia, funding a marble skyline; by 1284 Genoa broke it at Meloria. Three days trace that arc through crypts, arsenals, ghettos and university halls.
Roman ships found in 1998 during rail works at San Rossore: 30+ hulls silted into a lost harbour channel, with cargo, an intact sailor's skeleton and a dog. Housed in Cosimo I's 16th-century Medici Arsenal. Tue–Sun 10:00–19:00.
A 10th-century Benedictine convent on the Arno holding Pisa's medieval spine: Giunta Pisano's crucifixes, Simone Martini's 1319 polyptych, Donatello's reliquary bust of San Rossore, and Islamic ceramic bacini prised from church façades.
The clock-tower arch where Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, his sons and grandsons were walled in to starve in 1289 after Meloria — the episode Dante set in Inferno XXXIII. Absorbed into Vasari's Palazzo dell'Orologio in 1607.
A 1230 Gothic jewel-box on the Arno quay, named for a thorn from Christ's crown brought back by a Pisan merchant. Dismantled stone by stone in 1871 and rebuilt a metre higher after flood damage — the seams are visible.
Founded by papal bull in 1343; Galileo enrolled in medicine here in 1581 and returned as maths lecturer in 1589. The Sapienza courtyard and the rectorate's riverside Palazzo alla Giornata anchor Europe's oldest continuous botanical-teaching city.
One of Italy's oldest continuously used synagogues, on this site since 1595 and remodelled by Marco Treves in 1863. Pisa's Jews were never confined to a walled ghetto — a Medici concession that made the community unusually integrated.
A 14th-century tower-house turned cobalt-blue 19th-century palazzo, now Pisa's art and city-history museum: period rooms, Fondazione Pisa collections and the historical view-paintings that show the Arno before its 20th-century embankments.
Rebuilt in 1950 after German demolition in 1944, this is the fulcrum of the Gioco del Ponte, contested since 1568: Tramontana (north bank) versus Mezzogiorno (south) shoving a 7-tonne carriage on rails each last Saturday of June.
San Francesco (1211, rebuilt 1265) holds the Gherardesca family tomb — Ugolino's remains, exhumed and DNA-tested in 2002. Across the river, Palazzo Lanfranchi's print collection occupies Byron's 1821–22 Pisan residence.
The 1155 city walls, begun under Consul Cocco Griffi, run 3 km and reopened as an elevated walkway in 2018. From the parapet the Piazza dei Miracoli reads as what it was — a walled ceremonial precinct at the city's edge.
Six km south-west on the old shoreline, an 11th-century basilica marking where tradition says St Peter landed in 44 AD. Inside, a 14th-century Deodato Orlandi fresco cycle lists every pope to John XVII above Roman-spolia columns.
The medieval arcaded high street and the 16th-century colonnaded market square behind it — Pisa's provisioning quarter for 450 years, still a produce market by morning and a student drinking ground by night.