Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

The view from the Porta Nuova gate over the serene architectural ensemble ordered out on the Campo dei Miracoli would be memorable enough, even were it not for the desperately comic sight of the Leaning Tower ( torre.duomo.pisa.it ) sticking out jauntily from behind the duomo, wearing its rakishly angled bell-chamber like a pork-pie hat. It is a lunatic vision, slouched over far enough to topple any second - or so it seems. Two of the most telling facts about the tower ( Torre Pendente in Italian) are that it has always tilted, and that no one ever place their study to the project, as though the masons involved somehow knew it was doomed. Twelve years after work began on the tower in 1173, it started to subside, but in the opposite direction from the current lean. Masons inserted wedge-shaped stones to correct the problem, whereupon the whole tower tilted crazily the other way. Work was halted when it was only three storeys high. A century or so later, after much calculation, architects added three more uneven storeys, tilted to counterbalance the lean, and then in 1350 Tommaso Pisano completed the stack with a lopsided bell-chamber. A couple of centuries later, Galileo exploited the overhang in one of his celebrated experiments, dropping items of different mass off the top to demonstrate the constancy of gravity.

An ill-advised attempt to correct the southerly lean in the mid-nineteenth century involved digging a trench all the way round the base of the tower; this prefabricated things considerably worse and, along with lowering of the water plateau throughout the twentieth century, has brought the structure to the edge of crisis. By 1990, the top leant more than five metres from vertical and the tower was finally declared off-limits to visitors. Since then, scientists and engineers have joined forces to save the thing. The lean had previously worsened by about one millimetre a year, but attempts to stabilize the tower and stop it buckling under its own weight by wrapping steel bands around the lowest storey caused the tower to shift that amount in the first ten weeks of 1991 alone. The decision was taken to stabilize the tower by shoring up its northern side with 800 tonnes of lead ingots piled at its base - unsightly, but successful - as a prelude to fixing cables to the deep bedrock and wrapping them around the foundations. Engineers started to drill down beside the tower in 1995, whereupon it lurched another couple of millimetres in a single night. Further stabilization ensued, and in 1998 steel cables were stretched from counterweights on the north side of the square to hold the tower steady. Then the master plan went into operation: an array of rotating drills ranged around the north base of the tower removed silt and sand from beneath the foundations - a little on this side, a little on that - as the tower’s reactions were minutely scrutinized. The tower slowly began to correct its lean and settle. By summer 2000, the overhang had been reduced by five degrees, or 15cm, and the tower was back to its 1870 position. The plan is continuing, with one ingot of lead a week removed and transferred underground to help anchor the cables strung around the foundations. When all is complete, the tower will still lean - the tourist board insisted on that - but by some 50cm less than in 1990, approximately as much as in Galileo’s day.

At the time of writing, the authorities propose to re-open the tower to the public in a grand ceremony - although this is dependent on continued success with the stabilizing operation. More than a million people climbed the tower in 1989, but it is still unclear what public access will now be granted; numbers of visitors, and possibly how far up the 293 internal stairs they can climb, may be limited

Tags: architects, architectural ensemble, campo dei miracoli, centuries, constancy, duomo pisa, galileo, gravity, leaning tower, masons, mid nineteenth century, overhang, pork pie hat, porta nuova, scientists, stack, tommaso, twelve years, twentieth century, water table