Duomo di Pisa (Cattedrale Primaziale di Santa Maria Assunta)

The cathedral came first. Before the tower leaned, before the baptistery grew its galleries, Buscheto's cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta proclaimed the wealth of Pisa's maritime republic in striped marble and blind arcades. Consecrated in 1118 and richly restored after a catastrophic fire in 1595, it remains the artistic heart of the piazza.

Why it matters

Pisa Cathedral is the building that set the style the whole square follows. Founded in 1064 by the architect Buscheto, it fused a five-aisled basilican body with a three-aisled transept and a dome over the crossing, an arrangement that gave the church the plan of a cross seen from above and a profile no Tuscan rival could match. The so-called Pisan Romanesque, with its bands of white and grey marble, arabesque blind loggias and spolia from Roman monuments, was invented here and exported across the sea lanes of the republic. The primatial title the church carries, its role as the burial church of the archbishops, and the sculptural and mosaic workshops it fed all confirm the same point: the cathedral is not the backdrop to the Leaning Tower, but the reason the tower, baptistery and cemetery exist at all.

What to notice

Work around the building systematically. On the facade, extended by the architect Rainaldo in the early twelfth century, count the tiers of little loggias and the Islamic-influenced marble inlay, and look up at the roofline, where an Islamic bronze griffin of the eleventh century with Cufic inscriptions once stood; the original is now in the Opera museum. Step inside and the granite monoliths, carted from Elba, hold the space like a forest; the coffered wooden ceiling dates from the seventeenth century, replacing open trusses after the fire. In the crossing stands Giovanni Pisano's pulpit of 1302 to 1310, among the last and greatest of his carved ensembles. In the apse, the mosaic of Saint John the Evangelist by Cimabue, from about 1302, survives as a treasure of late medieval painting in glass and tesserae. Look for the funerary monument of the emperor Henry VII, carved from 1315 and now dismembered across the interior, and for the bronze lamp that tradition ties to Galileo's meditations on the pendulum. On the south transept, Bonanno's San Ranieri bronze doors, cast around 1179, are among the earliest narrative door ensembles in Italy.

Context and history

The chronology is unusually well documented by the Opera della Primaziale. Buscheto laid out the church from 1064; the solemn consecration followed on 26 September 1118; Rainaldo lengthened the nave and gave the facade its final rhythm, and the works were complete by the last quarter of the twelfth century. Fire swept through the building in 1595, destroying the central bronze doors and much of the furnishing, and the subsequent campaign recast the interior's upper register, including the painted dome by Orazio and Antonio Riminaldi. Modern conservation has been equally consequential: a restoration of the dome and interior facade begun in September 2015 was presented in May 2018 for the nine hundredth anniversary of the consecration, with the Riminaldi frescoes cleaned to their original palette. The cathedral remains a functioning primatial church, its liturgy continuous, and every element of the square's later history — tower, baptistery, cemetery — begins from this footprint.