Page 16 - PBCJuly2012

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine. Volume 9 No.2 July 2012
16

the years - and right back to Charles Dickens: I was shown the appreciation he had written in a
hotel visitor's book, in Pisa.

It was at what is now called
The Royal Hotel Victoria, a true
Tuscan of a place which
Pasquale Piegaja had turned
from an inn into an hotel, after
he took over a big tower and
other buildings on the banks of
the Arno river. He had done that
in 1837, just ten years before
Charles Dickens arrived to stay, and then - like so many other visitors to Hotel Royal de la Victoire
- to remark in the register of the quality of the lodgings and the service he had received.

It's a building, an hotel, with so much to see that it can't be by accident that Charles Dickens
stayed there. In the 10th century the Winemakers' Guild had erected the oldest tower in a building
which served both as an inn and as their headquarters, the "Università de' Vinajoli" that eventually
became the University of Pisa. In the 16th century the tavern became known as the "Locanda
della Vittoria", which translates Inn of the Victory. Yes, Charles Dickens knew where he was at,
for sure! If he didn't - and will we ever know - then what a lucky man to find such a haven. The
high vaulted ceilings and a timeless layout that includes a writing room, where the desk top
opposite you separates your pen time with a lattice-worked screen. No cribbing opportunity for
scholar or letter writer!

My first stay at The Royal Hotel Victoria came by accident
of the internet, when I was looking for a room. That the hotel
stands almost at the main street bridge which arches over
the Arno, I was not aware. Nor did I realise that through the
lanes it's just a short distance to the leaning Tower; and then
the opposite way across the river are more streets that lead
to the many platformed railway station. Get into an open
space not hemmed by buildings and you can see distanced
blue-toned hills, but Pisa is all flat, once a flood plain that
silted and sanded - and where someone had built a Tower
they thought would remain firmly upright. It didn't!

The leaning had to stop or the Tower would crumble. I
remember the photographer Kevin O'Donovan describing
his dream commission as "sitting with my camera on a tripod,
waiting for the Tower to fall down right in front of me." With
that terrible prospect in mind, in February 1964 the
government of Italy brought together historians, mathematicians and engineers to work out how
to stabilise the Tower and save from toppling - as surely it was doomed - this icon of their tourism
industry. Not taking too many chances of being hit by any flying masonry the Government called
their meeting a long way off - even as far away as the Azores, in fact - although they didn't admit
it was just another jolly for officialdom to grab a free holiday.

Charles Dickens had continued his own jolly of residence in a Genoa he described as a place
"that grows on you" and writing that there was "always something to find out in it". The local views