There’s a particular quality to Pisan light in December—crystalline, precise, carrying both warmth and chill simultaneously. Though my initial visit coincided with the tail end of literary events, I’ve found myself lingering in this city whose winter character offers a different kind of inspiration than its more famous summer persona.
The tourist crowds have thinned considerably, leaving the Piazza dei Miracoli with room to breathe. Last night I walked there after sunset, when the cathedral and baptistery were illuminated against the early darkness, their marble surfaces capturing and transforming the artificial light into something that appeared almost otherworldly. The tower, of course, continues its perpetual lean, but in the winter evening light, its imperfection seemed particularly poignant—a reminder of how beautifully we can adapt to fundamental instability.
The city has dressed itself for Christmas with a restrained elegance that feels distinctly Italian. Unlike the sometimes overwhelming holiday displays in London or New York, Pisa’s decorations emphasize light rather than abundance—simple strands stretched across narrow medieval streets, creating tunnels of soft illumination that transform familiar pathways into dreamlike passages. Along the Arno, trees wrapped in tiny white lights reflect in the dark water, creating mirror images that double the enchantment.
Yesterday afternoon I visited Palazzo Blu, where a special exhibition titled “Reflections of Modernity” features works by Italian and European artists of the mid-20th century. The palace itself—with its distinctive blue façade that gives it its name—provides a wonderfully atmospheric setting for art viewing. Originally a medieval structure that underwent Renaissance and later modifications, its rooms offer an architectural journey through time even before one encounters the artworks within.
The exhibition explores how artists responded to rapid technological and social changes, their work reflecting both excitement about new possibilities and anxiety about lost certainties. I was particularly struck by a series of urban landscapes that depicted familiar European cityscapes transformed by industrialization and war—recognizable places rendered strange through perspective shifts, omissions, or surrealistic interventions.
Walking through these galleries, I found myself thinking continuously about Anna, the protagonist of “Anonymous Letters,” and her gradually shifting perception of her coastal surroundings. There’s a scene toward the end of the novel that I’ve never been entirely satisfied with—where Anna finally confronts the sender of the mysterious messages—and suddenly, surrounded by these paintings of transformed reality, I understood what was missing.
The scene needs precisely this quality of familiar-made-strange that these paintings capture so effectively. The moment of revelation should carry both recognition and disorientation, the sense that what she’s seeing has been there all along but rendered invisible by her perceptual frameworks. The light needs to fall differently across a face she thought she knew, revealing contours previously unnoticed.
Later, as dusk fell and I emerged from the museum into Pisa’s illuminated streets, this insight deepened. The way the holiday lights transformed ordinary buildings and squares—not disguising them but revealing different aspects of their character—offered a perfect visual correlate for what I was trying to achieve in that pivotal scene. It’s not that Anna discovers something entirely new, but rather that familiar elements reorganize themselves into a pattern that suddenly becomes legible.
This morning I sat in a small café near my hotel, revising that scene with these fresh impressions. The wintry light through the window—clear but without summer’s intensity—created shifting patterns across my notebook as I wrote. Nearby, a barista prepared coffee with practiced movements while carrying on three separate conversations with regular customers, each interaction inflected with particular shared histories and inside references.
These layered interactions, transparent to participants but opaque to outsiders, capture exactly what I’m trying to convey about Dorimore in my novel—how communities operate according to unwritten codes, how belonging requires deciphering these implicit patterns, how outsiders misread situations precisely because they lack contextual knowledge that insiders take for granted.
Tonight there’s a small chamber music concert in one of Pisa’s historic churches—a program of Vivaldi and lesser-known Italian baroque composers. I’ll attend not just for the music itself but for the experience of contemporary performance activating historical space, another instance of how present action gains resonance through dialogue with the past. This interplay between time periods feels central not just to Pisa’s identity but to the themes I continue to explore in my fiction.
As my time in Italy draws to a close and the new year approaches, I’m grateful for this unexpected period of creative recalibration. What began as simple tourism has evolved into something more complex—a conversation between visual and literary arts, between historical weight and present moment, between public spectacle and private reflection. The fragile beauty of winter Pisa, with its clear light and long shadows, has helped me see my own work more clearly, illuminating both its strengths and the places that still require refinement.
“In winter light, even imperfection achieves a kind of perfection.” (I’m not sure who wrote this—perhaps it was something I read on a museum placard today—but it captures what I’m taking from this December sojourn in Pisa)
— Anastasia