🙂 Leaning Tower! Charming town.
🙁 Tat for sale.
26-27 September 2021
The drive from Cinque Terre took about 2 hours. We were dropped off at the quaint Casa San Tommaso for our overnight stay. This is a small guest house set in a traffic-free zone of central Pisa, just 350 yards from the Leaning Tower. The rooms offer air conditioning, wood-beam ceilings, and free Wi-Fi. It is set in a historic building. Most rooms are found on the 1st floor, which was built during the 18th century. Breakfast was included. Super reasonable given location!
We set straight off to explore – it was great to see the Tower lit up at night and we had lots of fun taking photos of us holding the tower up.
WE had an excellent pizza (but had to send wine back!) at a lovely Indian owned place right next to the Tower.
We were up early the next morning and headed back to the centre after breakfast. We had the first tour booked – HOW EXCITING! We could not quite believe that we were going up these ancient stairs …
It took 3 stages and 177 years to build the Tower of Pisa. The architect Bonanno Pisano began its construction in 1173 with the first floor which was surrounded by 15 columns in white marble with classic capitals and blind arches. With the construction of the third floor in 1178, the tower bent 5 cm. to the southeast, due to the unstable subsoil on which the tower was built, thus ceasing its construction. This period was very important and allowed the settlement of the ground, otherwise the tower would have collapsed.
Giovanni di Simone, 100 years later, resumed work trying to compensate for the inclination of the tower by vertically building four floors, however the results were not as expected, the bell tower was still leaning and the works stopped again. In 1298 a plummet deviation of 1.43 m was measured and 60 years later this figure had increased to 1.63 m. Tommaso Pisano continued the construction of the bell tower whose works concluded in 1372. According to Vasari, Nicola Pisano and his son Giovanni deserve credit for this work.
The inclination of the tower slowed down during the following centuries, it is believed that its weight was an important factor allowing a certain stabilisation of the building. The architect Alessandro Gherardesca made the first restoration in 1835 eliminating the muddy soil and replacing it with a marble base. The result was tremendous, this provoked a new tilt and in 1918 the Plumbing deviation reached 5.1 m. Until 1990, the tilt of the tower continued to increase from 1 to 1.2 mm. annually.
The bell-chamber was finally added in 1372. It was built by Tommaso di Andrea Pisano, who succeeded in harmonizing the Gothic elements of the belfry with the Romanesque style of the tower. There are seven bells, one for each note of the musical major scale. The largest one was installed in 1655.
AMAZING! On the way back we all bought a bit of tat from the stalls lining the way….
We headed back to collect our bas and continue on our journey to Florence.
Go to: Italy
Go to: Italian Roadtrip
Go to: Florence
