Santa Maria della Spina
A tiny Gothic church on the bank of the Arno, all pinnacles and statues, once home to a thorn from Christ’s crown.
Photo: John Samuel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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The little oratory on Lungarno Gambacorti was built around 1230 and made over in the 14th century into the spiky Gothic church you see now, covered with pinnacles, tabernacles and statues by the workshop of the Pisanos. It takes its name from a thorn of Christ’s crown of thorns, which was brought to it in 1333.
The church stood right at the water’s edge and the Arno kept flooding it, so in 1871 the city took it apart stone by stone and built it up again a little higher, on the same bank. Visit it in 3D ›
More in Pisa
Leaning Tower of PisaThe cathedral’s bell tower, which started to lean before its third floor was finished and has leaned ever since, some four degrees today.
Duomo di PisaThe marble cathedral of 1064, paid for with the spoils of a raid on Palermo, the first great building of the Pisan Romanesque.
BaptisteryThe largest baptistery in Italy, round and domed, where a guard sings a few notes every half hour to let you hear its echo.
CamposantoThe marble cloister of a cemetery on the north side of the square, said to stand on earth brought back from Golgotha.
Piazza dei CavalieriThe square of the Knights of Saint Stephen, with Vasari’s painted palace, now the Scuola Normale, and the tower where Count Ugolino starved.
Borgo StrettoPisa’s old shopping street under the arcades, from the Ponte di Mezzo north into the medieval town.
The LungarniThe streets along both banks of the Arno, lined with palazzi in ochre and pink, lit with thousands of candles every 16 June.
Ponte di MezzoThe middle bridge, where the city has crossed the Arno since Roman times, and where the north and the south of Pisa fight every June.
Logge di BanchiThe open loggia at the south end of the Ponte di Mezzo, built around 1605 for the silk and wool traders.
TuttomondoKeith Haring’s last big mural, painted in 1989 on the back wall of the convent of Sant’Antonio, near the station.
Gioco del PonteOn the last Saturday of June the north and the south of Pisa push a cart across the Ponte di Mezzo, after a parade in Renaissance costume.
CecinaA thin, golden flatbread of chickpea flour, water and olive oil, baked in a copper pan in a wood oven and eaten hot with pepper.