Pisa Cathedral

Pisa Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

Everything on the Piazza dei Miracoli is sold through one office, and the pricing is unusual: the cathedral is free, but you still need a ticket to enter, and the cheapest way to get one is to buy any other monument on the square. In practice you choose a combination. The baptistery, the Camposanto burial ground, the Opera del Duomo museum and the Sinopie museum come in packages of one, two or all four, and the cathedral entry is thrown in.

The leaning tower is separate, dearer than everything else put together, timed to the quarter hour and limited by numbers, so book it ahead in summer; children under eight are not allowed and bags must be left in the lockers. Guided tours combine tower and cathedral for two or three times the ticket price. If you have an hour, take the cathedral and the baptistery. If you have three, add the Camposanto, which most day trippers skip and which holds the strangest art on the square.

Visiting Pisa Cathedral: what to see

Building started in 1064, funded by the spoils of Pisan campaigns against Muslim fleets, and the result gave its name to a whole style: Pisan Romanesque, with tier upon tier of blind arcading in white and grey marble. Inside, the scale is basilican and the ceiling is a gilded coffered lid installed after a fire in 1595. Two things demand time. The pulpit by Giovanni Pisano, carved between 1302 and 1310, is a drum of crowded narrative held up by figures and lions, and it was dismantled after the fire and only reassembled in the twentieth century.

Above the high altar, the apse mosaic of Christ Pantocrator was finished by Cimabue in 1302; the head of St John is his. The bronze door on the south side, the Porta di San Ranieri, is twelfth century and worth a look before you go in. The cathedral, baptistery and tower were all built on the same soft ground, and all three lean, though only one does so famously.

Pisa Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

The square opens early and the monuments keep seasonal hours, with the shortest days from November to February. Pisa is a day-trip town and the coaches arrive between ten and four; before nine and after five the lawn is nearly empty and the light is better in both directions. The cathedral closes to visitors during services. Summer heat on the open grass is fierce and there is no shade.

Dress code is enforced for the cathedral and the baptistery: shoulders and knees covered. The baptistery has an acoustic demonstration every half hour, when a custodian sings two notes and the dome holds them for ten seconds; it is worth timing your visit to catch one. Allow two hours for the square without the tower, three with it. The station is a twenty-minute walk away and the airport is closer than that, which makes this an easy stop between Florence and the coast.