Really Nice Vacations

Well, I wrote Tourist Trap: Leaning Tower of Pisa on 8 May 2008 and I said the tower was still tilting. Well, I was wrong.

This 14,000 tonne free-standing bell tower - an internally recognized architecture symbol of Italy along with Rome’s Colosseum, was built in several stages between 1174 and 1370. It began to tilt after completion of several storeys due to unstable ground. The Times of London said the conservationists had estimated that the tower will collapse “sometime between 2030 and 2040″.

Now, worries no more. Professor Jamiolkowski told Italian leading daily, Corriere della Sera, that “Now we can say that the tower can rest easy for at least 300 years.” The professor and his team has been monitoring the iconic Italian tourist attraction for at least 30 years. For the first time since 12th century, the bell tower has finally stopped moving and is declared safe from the law of gravity. The tower’s tilt of about 4m off the vertical has remained stable after a big engineering project that ended in 2001 corrected its lean by about 40cm from where it was in 1990 when the project began. Between 1990 and 2001, the tower was off limit to tourists.

The work done so far was reported in The Straits Times on 30 May 2008, with a pictorial explanation on the work carried out. According to the daily, the graphic was adapted from Reuters. You can click on the diagram and magnify it further to have a clearer picture.

Info and Graphic Source: The Straits Times, Singapore, 30 May 2008

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