Gain access to the buildings

The group will meet inside Palazzo della Carovana, in front of the Porter’s Lodge, 5 minutes before the agreed time.
In an itinerary on four levels, the traces of the building’s medieval past will be pointed out and the sixteenth-century transformations will be described that were undertaken to host the Order of Saint Stephen. You will be able to access study rooms and conference halls such as the Sala Azzurra and the Sala Stemmi, so as to find out more about the institutional life and teaching areas of the ‘Normalisti’. You will also have the opportunity, with the help of the views from the Palazzo, to retrace Piazza dei Cavalieri’s evolution over the centuries. The visit ends in the Palazzo’s inner courtyard, which underwent important transformations at the start of the twentieth century.

The visits inside Palazzo della Carovana usually take place every weekend. Occasionally meetings can also be arranged for the evening hours. Please check the availability in the timetable.

Since 2012, on the initiative of its then Director, Fabio Beltram, the Scuola Normale Superiore has been collaborating with the Centro Pecci of Prato in the exhibition project Contemporary art at Palazzo della Carovana, which, in the span of just over a decade, has enabled the exhibiting in rotation of around forty artworks coming from the above mentioned art gallery In an original dialogue with the spaces of this medieval building renovated by Giorgio Vasari, beneath the coats of arms of the Knights of the Order of Saint Stephen, the contemporary artworks currently displayed within the Palazzo bear witness in retracing the main Italian artistic research projects from the late twentieth century to the present day.

The visit is in collaboration with Prof. Flavio Fergonzi and the Laboratorio di Documentazione Storico Artistica of the Normale, of which he is the director. The itinerary ranges from the first to the third floors of Palazzo della Carovana. The group will meet inside the Palazzo, in front of the Porter’s Lodge, 5 minutes before the arranged time.

The visits for getting to know the artworks of the Centro Pecci at the Carovana usually take place on the afternoon of the second Friday of each month. Please check the availability in the timetable.

The group will meet inside Palazzo dell’Orologio (main door on the right) 5 minutes before the arranged time. The description will revolve around the fascinating history of the Tower of Famine, including not only the tragic events leading to the death of Count Ugolino and his sons, masterfully immortalised by Dante, but also the concealment of the building at the end of the sixteenth century and its complex rediscovery in the twentieth century. There will also be an opportunity for an overview of the political and artistic history of the piazza: from the communes of the magistratures to the rule of the Medici family, up to the presence of Napoleon and the vicissitudes of the contemporary age.

The Tower of Famine is usually open on the fourth Friday of each month and, when possible, in co-ordination with the Library itineraries. Please check the availability in the timetable.

The group will meet at the entrance to Palazzo dell’Orologio (main door on the left) in Piazza dei Cavalieri 5 minutes before the arranged time.
The visit will take place in Palazzo dell’Orologio and Palazzo della Carovana (connected to each other by an underground tunnel), two of the most important historical buildings of Pisa housing the collections of the Library of the Scuola Normale Superiore, under the supervision of the buildings’ qualified personnel. The meetings will thus provide an opportunity not only to access some of the most prestigious spaces of the Library (such as the Sala della Colonna, so called because of the presence in its centre of a medieval column) and to admire its famous views onto Piazza dei Cavalieri and the Tower of Pisa, but above all to get to know the services and the characteristics that make it one of the most important academic libraries in Italy.

The visit to the Library, on several levels, usually takes place once a month on Wednesday. Please check the availability in the timetable.

The group will meet inside Palazzo della Carovana, in front of the porter’s lodge, 5 minutes before the arranged time.
The meeting will give access to various historical spaces of the building and in particular to the Sala del Ballatoio (on the second floor), still today the place where the materials of the Archives Centre can be consulted. Under the supervision of its qualified personnel, nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps, photographs and documents relating to Palazzo della Carovana and its protagonists can also be viewed, revealing various salient facts of the history of the Scuola Normale Superiore.

The visit to the Archives Centre usually takes place on the second Saturday of each month. Please check the availability in the timetable.

The group will meet inside the church, through the entrance door, 5 minutes before the arranged time.
Constructed ex novo by Giorgio Vasari in the 1560s, by order of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri was for almost three centuries the church of the homonymous military-religious order. The itinerary, on a single level, will go over the main stages of the building’s construction; the numerous artistic treasures and historical documents conserved within its walls will also be described, including the elegant wood ceiling, constructed at the start of the seventeenth century and depicting the historical vicissitudes of the Order, and the imposing early eighteenth-century high altar by Giovanni Battista Foggini, dedicated to Saint Stephen. The walls of the church are adorned with banners and ship’s lights captured during the Knights’ naval activity; at the sides of the apse two magnificent organs can be admired. The visit ends with a visit to an annex of the church where the so-called ‘bozzettone’ (literally ‘the big model’) is still conserved: a gigantic group of wood sculptures created by Foggini for a late seventeenth-century ephemeral ceremony and which has miraculously survived.

Owing to the restoration works currently in progress, the visits inside the church of Saint Stephen will take place on exceptional occasions, in the context of the special openings promoted by the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le Province di Pisa e Livorno. Please check the availability in the timetable.

The group will meet at the entrance hall of Palazzo dei Dodici 5 minutes before the arranged time.
The itinerary, on two levels, will trace the main historical and artistic events of the building, currently the site of the Istituzione dei Cavalieri di Santo Stefano: from its late medieval and Renaissance traces (including a fragment of a fresco of the school of Ghirlandaio) to the imposing renovation of its structures between the end of the sixteenth and the start of the seventeenth century, with the intervention by Pietro Francavilla. There will be a summary of the various functions over the centuries of the palazzo, which owes its present name to the Consiglio dei Dodici (the Council of Ten), one of the governing bodies of the Order of Saint Stephen. The visit ends in the magnificent Sala dell’Udienza, among the most prestigious and representative spaces of the entire piazza. Decorated with wall paintings done at the end of the seventeenth century by Pietro Paolo Lippi and Antonio Giusti, it presents a gilded and engraved ceiling, which boasts five paintings: in the corners, the Cardinal Virtues by Ventura Salimbeni (1603) and at the centre the Triumph of St. Stephen by Giovanni Camillo Gabrielli (1692).

The visits within the Palazzo dei Dodici usually take place on the afternoon of the third Friday of each month. Please check the availability in the timetable.

The group will meet inside San Rocco 5 minutes before the arranged time. The visit will highlight the vicissitudes of the small single-nave chapel, dominated in the centre of the vault by the fresco of Saint Roch healing the plague victims, attributed to the Pisan painter Francesco Venturi (early 18th century). From San Rocco we then access the adjoining church of San Sisto to appreciate its significant array of paintings and sculptures.

The opportunity will also present itself to review the history of Pisa in the Lombardic and Carolingian eras, when the area now occupied by San Sisto constituted an important centre of power of the city.

Admittance is usually on the first Saturday morning of each month. Please check the availability in the timetable.