On This Day in History: December 15

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

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One of the funniest scenes in the 1986 movie Highlander is a newsstand operator feigning ignorance to cops while reading an article about how they can’t find a serial killer. “What does in-comp-etent mean?” he jokes. There was plenty of incompetence in the construction of the Tower of Pisa, and it was revealed early, but they kept on building it anyway.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 15, 2001--

Holy non sequitur. Anyway, this fucking tower. We’re not even sure who to blame, because there is much debate as to who the architect was. And we can blame the architect, because the design called for a mere 10-foot-deep foundation, which was laid beginning in 1172. Coupled with unstable soil, the fucker went from Tower of Pisa to Leaning Tower before they’d even completed the second floor. The builders said fuck it, let’s do six more floors anyway. Can’t possibly get any worse. Narrator voice: It got worse.

They did take almost a century off from the building project, but not to fix the problem. Rather, there was a bunch of war going on that halted construction. Lucky thing, too, because that was what allowed the soil underneath to settle. Had they not taken that hundred-year break, it would have been named the Crashed to the Fucking Ground Tower of Pisa. Continues below …

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Construction resumed in 1272 under the guidance of master builder Giovanni di Simone. Because it was already leaning as fuck, di Simone got the grand idea to compensate for it by making the upper floors taller on one side. So it’s not only leaning, it’s curvy. The Curvy Leaning Tower of Pisa. The seventh floor was finished in 1319, and the bell tower finally topped it off in 1372. A couple of centuries later it’s believed Galileo utilized the lean to drop two cannonballs of different masses from the tower to prove they’d fall at the same rate.

I don’t mean to be down on Italian architects; the country is full of impressive shit many centuries years old that still stands. But in 1989 there was another tower—the 236-foot high Civic Tower in Pavia—that toppled, killing four and injuring 15. The Italian authorities had been studying how to stabilize the Tower of Pisa for two decades; the tragedy in Pavia got them to say enough fucking around, we gotta fix this.

The tower, which had reached a lean of 5.5 degrees, was closed in January of 1990 and the path it might fall on was evacuated and cables were attached to the third floor and anchored in the other direction. The bells were removed to ease the weight at the top, and 870 tons of lead counterweights were stacked at the base of the tower. A shit-ton of soil was removed from the raised end and the tower itself was subject to structural strengthening. The lean was corrected by a foot-and-a-half, bringing it to just under four degrees. On December 15, 2001, the tower reopened to the public. They say it should be good for a couple centuries.

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