With the spirit of adventure strong within me I decided to find the campanile and the cathedral for myself. I had seen it up the railroad track, and, ignoring appealing guides with urgent, melancholy eyes, I struck up walled streets of brown and gray and green with solid, tight-closed, wooden shutters, cobble pavements and noiseless, empty sidewalks. They were not exactly narrow, which astonished me a little, for I had not learned that only the older portions of growing Italian cities have narrow streets. All the newer sections which surround such modern things as depots are wide and supposedly up to date. There was a handsome trolley-car just leaving as I came out, a wide-windowed shiny thing which illustrated just how fine trolley-cars can be, even in Italy. I had learned from my Baedeker that Pisa was on the Arno. I wanted to see the Arno because of Florence and Dante. Coming from Ventimiglia I had read the short history of Pisa given in Baedeker--its wars with Genoa, the building of its cathedral. It was interesting to learn that the Pisans had expelled the Saracens from Sardinia in 1025, and destroyed their fleet in 1063 near Palermo, that once they were the most powerful adherents of the Ghibellines, and how terribly they were defeated by the Genoese near Leghorn in 1284. I pumped up a vast desire to read endless volumes concerning the history of Italy, now that I was here on the ground, and when it could not be done on the instant. My book told me that the great cathedral was erected after the naval victory of the Pisans at Palermo and that the ancient bronze gates were very wonderful. I knew of the Campo Santo with its sacred earth brought from Palestine, and of the residence here of Niccolò Pisano. His famous hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery is a commonplace--almost as much so as the Leaning Tower. I did not know that Galileo had availed himself of the oblique position of the tower to make his experiments regarding the laws of gravitation until I read it in my precious Baedeker, but it was a fact none the less delightful for encountering it there.