Best Things to Do in Pisa (2026 Guide)

Away from the tourist-dense axis of the Leaning Tower and the Cathedral, the Piazza dei Cavalieri occupies the heart of medieval Pisa with a very different character. This was the political centre of the independent commune before Pisa’s subjugation by Florence in the sixteenth century, and the square’s current appearance reflects the deliberate reimagining carried out by Giorgio Vasari under the Medici, who converted it into the headquarters of the Knights of Saint Stephen, a military order founded by Cosimo I.

The buildings surrounding the square are among the finest examples of Mannerist civic architecture in Tuscany. The Palazzo della Carovana, its facade decorated with sgraffito reliefs depicting the zodiac and trophies of war, now houses the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore, one of Italy’s most selective universities. The church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri contains captured Ottoman banners and other naval trophies from the Knights’ campaigns in the Mediterranean. The Torre della Fame, incorporated into a corner of the square, is associated with the medieval story of Count Ugolino, whom Dante placed in the lowest circle of Hell.

The square is quieter than the Campo dei Miracoli and rarely crowded, even during peak tourist season. It is best visited in the morning or early evening, when the light catches the sgraffito decorations on the palace facades. The surrounding streets of central Pisa offer additional medieval and Renaissance buildings worth exploring at an unhurried pace.

The Piazza dei Cavalieri reveals a Pisa that existed before and after its most famous monument — a city with a complex political history and an architectural legacy that extends well beyond the tilting tower that draws most visitors to Tuscany’s western coast.

On the south bank of the Arno in Pisa, the Church of Santa Maria della Spina occupies an improbably small footprint for a building of such elaborate ambition. Its Gothic tabernacles, pinnacles, and carved reliefs crowd every surface of the exterior, turning a modest oratory into one of the most decoratively intense Gothic structures in Tuscany — all of it executed in white marble that catches and releases light across the day in shifting ways.

The church was built in the early fourteenth century to house a relic — a thorn said to be from the crown worn at the Crucifixion — which accounts for its name. The relic itself has been moved to a larger church, but the building remains. The exterior sculpture includes figures attributed to members of the Pisano workshop, the same family responsible for the celebrated pulpits in the Cathedral and Baptistery on the other side of the Arno. The interior is small and generally used for temporary exhibitions rather than regular religious services.

The church is at its most photogenic in the early morning when the riverfront is quiet and the low light catches the marble carvings from an oblique angle. It sits along the Lungarno Gambacorti, which is pleasant to walk in either direction. Visits are brief — the scale of the building does not demand more than twenty to thirty minutes — making it a natural addition to any walk along the southern bank.

Santa Maria della Spina represents a strand of Gothic architecture specific to the Pisan tradition, which drew on commercial connections to France and northern Europe while retaining a distinctly Italian sense of marble decoration. In a city where the Campo dei Miracoli dominates most itineraries, this riverside oratory offers a quieter and no less refined expression of the same artistic culture.

On a small piazza a short walk from Pisa’s famous monumental complex, the Church of San Sisto presents a Romanesque façade that has remained largely unchanged since the twelfth century. Its stripped stone exterior, with blind arcading and the restrained ornament characteristic of Pisan Romanesque, belongs to the same architectural moment as the cathedral and baptistery on the nearby Campo dei Miracoli, though it has escaped the tourist attention that those monuments inevitably attract.

San Sisto is one of Pisa’s older parish churches, and its interior preserves the proportions and atmosphere of a medieval city church functioning at a neighbourhood scale rather than as a civic monument. The building contains fragments of earlier decorative work and offers the kind of direct encounter with Romanesque space that the more heavily visited and restored buildings in the city do not always permit. Its very ordinariness within the context of Pisan religious architecture is part of what makes it worth seeking out — a church built for regular use rather than for display.

The church is generally accessible during morning hours; afternoon closures are common, and it is worth checking locally before making a special visit. It is most rewarding in combination with a walk through the neighbourhood streets south of the Arno, away from the Campo dei Miracoli crowds. The surrounding area retains a residential character that gives a sense of the medieval city’s texture.

Within Pisa’s architectural heritage, San Sisto represents the working fabric of the city rather than its showpiece. The same Romanesque sensibility that shaped the cathedral here finds expression at a more intimate scale, and the church’s continued role as an active parish connects it to a continuity of use that the major monuments, managed primarily as tourist sites, cannot quite maintain.