Pisa. Here is some
good company, and even a few men of taste and learning. The people in
general are counted sociable and polite; and there is great plenty of
provisions, at a very reasonable rate. At some distance from the more
frequented parts of the city, a man may hire a large house for thirty
crowns a year: but near the center, you cannot have good lodgings,
ready furnished, for less than a scudo (about five shillings) a day.
The air in summer is reckoned unwholesome by the exhalations arising
from stagnant water in the neighbourhood of the city, which stands in
the midst of a fertile plain, low and marshy: yet these marshes have
been considerably drained, and the air is much meliorated. As for the
Arno, it is no longer navigated by vessels of any burthen. The
university of Pisa is very much decayed; and except the little business
occasioned by the emperor's gallies, which are built in this town,
[This is a mistake. No gallies have been built here for a great many
years, and the dock is now converted into stables for the Grand Duke's
Horse Guards.] I know of no commerce it carried on: perhaps the
inhabitants live on the produce of the country, which consists of corn,
wine, and cattle. They are supplied with excellent water for drinking,
by an aqueduct consisting of above five thousand arches, begun by
Cosmo, and finished by Ferdinand I. Grand-dukes of Tuscany; it conveys
the water from the mountains at the distance of five miles. This noble
city, formerly the capital of a flourishing and powerful republic,
which contained above one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants,
within its walls, is now so desolate that grass grows in the open
streets; and the number of its people do not exceed sixteen thousand.

You need not doubt but I visited the Campanile, or hanging-tower, which
is a beautiful cylinder of eight stories, each adorned with a round of
columns, rising one above another. It stands by the cathedral, and
inclines so far on one side from the perpendicular, that in dropping a
plummet from the top, which is one hundred and eighty-eight feet high,
it falls sixteen feet from the base. For my part, I should never have
dreamed that this inclination proceeded from any other cause, than an
accidental subsidence of the foundation on this side, if some
connoisseurs had not taken great pains to prove it was done on purpose
by the architect. Any person who has eyes may see that the pillars on
that side are considerably s