Tilt : A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa

by Nicholas Shrady

• ISBN13: 9780743229265
• ISBN10: 0743229266
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-07
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

In Tilt, author Nicholas Shrady reveals how the campanile, or bell tower, in Pisa's Campo dei Miracoli became the iconic Tower of Pisa. Even standing straight and true, the tower's marble and lime façade would be instantly recognizable the world over. Yet its distinctive tilt, which measured 1.6 degrees from vertical when construction was completed in 1370, has long been a mystery. Was it the result of shoddy workmanship or the brainchild of a hunchback maestro who skewed the tower to avenge his own condition? Nearly a millennium since its construction, the tower still stands (more than 4 meters -- or 5 degrees -- askew) in defiance of logic, gravity, and soaring odds -- a mute witness to history as it has unfolded.

Envisioned as a display of wealth and power in Pisa's medieval heyday, the tower was revolutionary in its design. Architectural sleight of hand lent the campanile the appearance of weightlessness even as it supported seven colossal bronze bells. Technical achievements and rare beauty aside, it is the tower's glaring folly that has attracted legions of admirers and would-be saviors -- even as it alarmed engineers.

In addition to having defied the known laws of physics, the tower's cylindrical masonry has concealed a storied past. Galileo was said to have launched his experiments on the velocity of falling bodies from atop its heights. Lord Byron, the Shelleys, and their Romantics frolicked in its listing shadow. Benito Mussolini tried to right the tower by ordering that cement be injected into its foundation. During World War II, the "Tiltin' Hilton" was a suspected enemy hideout and narrowly escaped being bombed. Following a $30 million stabilization and restoration effort lasting more than a decade and into the twenty-first century, Pisa's Leaning Tower has been preserved for the ages as an architectural marvel and a paragon of modern tourism.

Tilt encapsulates the tower's singular history in a hugely entertaining and informative narrative, by turns learned and whimsical, reverent and surprising. Here is a "biography" that, like its subject, is all the more delightful for its thorough improbability. It is a celebration of inspired vision and human machinations, of supreme ambition and spiritual enlightenment, of science and superstition, of faith and miracles.

Author Biography

Nicholas Shrady is the author of Sacred Roads: Adventures from the Pilgrimage Trail. His articles have appeared in Architectural Digest, The New York Times Book Review, Travel & Leisure, Forbes, and Town & Country. Since 1986, he has made his home in Barcelona. His wife, Eva Ortega, and his sons divide their time between Barcelona and their olive grove in the hills above the Ebro Delta.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

A Pisan Time Line

ONE

Commissione #17

TWO

Afloat on a Blood-Red Sea

THREE

Booty Transformed

FOUR

Terreni Limosi

FIVE

Unfinished Business

SIX

The Stuff of Myth

SEVEN

Of Poets and Men of Progress

EIGHT

The Tiltin' Hilton

NINE

Step This Way, Signore e Signori

Excerpts

Chapter Eight: The Tiltin' Hilton "This is Abel George One. Fire!"The order, nearly given, which would have brought down an Allied bombardment on the tower during the Italian campaign of World War II. The Tower of Pisa limped into the twentieth century decrepit and abused, and suffering from exacerbated wounds, but its condition was no more dire than that of Italy as a whole. For Italians, the century dawned tragically with a regicide; in 1900, King Umberto I, widely known as Umberto the Good, was shot dead by an anarchist assassin at Monza. Only recently united, Italy scarcely had time to mourn, consumed as it was in a dizzying array of shifting cabinets, falling governments, riots, questionable military interventions at home and abroad, feudal land wars, political assassinations, and labor strikes, of which there were no less than six hundred in the first six months of 1901. Naturally, burdened with perpetual crises, a restive, irascible Parliament exhibited little interest in the precarious state of a medieval bell tower. Nothing short of a disaster would draw public and parliamentary attention to the fate of the Pisan campanile. As it happened, catastrophe wasn't long in coming.In the spring of 1902, a fissure appeared in one of the lofty blind arcades on the northern face of the campanile of Venice's Piazza San Marco. That bell tower, begun precisely one thousand years before and altered in the early sixteenth century, had long been one of the most cherished and recognizable landmarks in the city, rising 320 feet in the piazza between the architectural mayhem of the basilica of San Marco and the orderly formalism of Vincenzo Scamozzi's Procuratie Nuovo. Upon examining the crack in the brick face, municipal architects and engineers determined that the damage was insignificant and could be addressed in the course of routine maintenance. By the summer, however, nothing had been done, even though the fissure had grown and small bits of brick and mortar were occasionally falling into the piazza. On July 11, the architects and engineers returned, and once again assured city officials that there was no imminent danger, and certainly no cause for alarm. Just to allay any misgivings, nevertheless, they installed a series of glass sensors throughout the tower to detect any undue movement in the structure. The following day, observers found that the pieces of brick raining down from the campanile had turned into a deluge and that the crack now was a gaping wound. When engineers arrived, their inspection revealed that most of the glass sensors that they had installed only the day before had shattered. Still, it was Saturday, and they determined that any further intervention could wait until Monday. No precautions were taken and the campanile and piazza remained open.At 9:30 in the morning on Monday, July 14, a municipal engineer and a police inspector approached the tower and were shocked to discover that the campanile's fissure now ran from the ground level all the way to the height of the belfry. The floor of the piazza beneath the tower lay strewn with debris. The police inspector, if not the engineer, foresaw a potential disaster and ordered the tower, as well as all of the cafes and shops in the piazza, to be evacuated. With the public's mood at once panic-filled and strangely festive -- some thought the whole episode a hoax -- police eventually managed to clear the square of all but its pigeons. Everyone watched and waited. Then, at 9:47, the fissure burst open with the suddenness of a thunderclap, and amid screams and cries from the multitude, the campanile's massive pyramidal roof teetered to and fro; the slender columns of its belfry exploded, the bells issued some last discordant chimes; and the whole tower collapsed with a roar and disappeared in a billowing cloud of millennium-old dust. Some witnesses claimed to have seen the gilded an