Since I had injured my ankle pretty badly a few days earlier in Rome, I opted for the bus (LAM Rossa, which is just across the street from the train station). The Campo dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles), or Piazza del Duomo if you’re not a tourist, is an easy 30 minute walk or 7 minute bus ride from the train station. The attractions in Pisa are concentrated within a few square blocks, easy to see and definitely worth a couple of hours of time. Nevertheless, Pisa is one of those places you almost feel like you have to visit, especially when you’re only 45 minutes away in Florence. "They wanted them to be eternal.It’s interesting to think that without a rather dramatic flaw in engineering, Pisa wouldn’t be nearly the tourist center that it is. Just like the " ancient Romans wanted to build monuments that last," like the Coliseum, so did the tower's builders, Fiorentino said. For now, iconic history will live on through the tower. He and his colleagues learned that it has a longer, less destructive natural vibration period - or the time it takes structures to vibrate back and forth during seismic activity - thanks to the soft soil under the tower's foundation, which offers the building protection from the region's earthquakes.Īlthough no physical interventions are planned, the tower is monitored constantly with instruments that measure factors such as its tilt and the water table. Fiorentino's own research has investigated why the tower has fared well during earthquakes despite its precarious tilt. Additionally, because the tower's base is thicker than its column-coated upper half, its center of mass is lower to the ground, making it more stable. Did Marie Antoinette really say 'Let them eat cake'?įirst, the long interruptions to the tower's construction gave the structure time to settle into the malleable soil, fortifying its structure until the next bout of building. Who was the first person to write about the British Isles? But in the meantime, the tower is safe for a few reasons, Fiorentino said. Within the next 300 years, it could tilt back to its 5.5-degree lean from the 1990s, shifting atop the soft soil yet again. This was only a temporary fix, he said, and it's impossible to estimate how much longer the tower will stand. "When they did it, they said they back the clock of the tower by 200 years," Fiorentino said. These efforts decreased the tower's lean by 10%, leaving it at a 5-degree slant. After more brainstorming, the committee attempted "underexcavation" - that is, using long tubes and drills to noninvasively remove the ground beneath the north side of the tower's foundation.Īs soil was removed, the structure slowly started to rotate northward. But this didn't stop the rate of tilt, even after they added an extra 300 tons (272 metric tons) to the north side, along with ground anchors, according to Fiorentino. The committee first affixed 600 tons (544 metric tons) of lead to the base of the tower's north side in 1993, hoping to compensate for the sinking southern side. "There is a great debate around how much we can change about the monument. "It's one of the symbols of Italy," Fiorentino told Live Science. In 1990, it appointed a committee of experts to mitigate the lean - but without eliminating it and its tourist attraction. As the tower's slant gradually grew to 5.5 degrees, the Italian government took action to protect the landmark, according to Fiorentino.
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