49 Fun Facts About Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a freestanding bell tower, a type of building known in Italian as what?

Campanile comes from campana, the Italian for bell. Pisa's is known the world over, yet who designed it is still argued over.

Pisa is a city in which region of Italy?

Tuscany is ruled from Florence, which seized Pisa in 1406 and ended its centuries as an independent republic.

What is the Leaning Tower of Pisa faced with?

Marble is heavy, and the soft ground could not carry it evenly: the tower began to tilt when only about three of its eight storeys were built.

In 1995 engineers froze the ground beside the Leaning Tower of Pisa with what, triggering a sudden jolt?

Liquid nitrogen was meant to keep groundwater out of a dig at the base; instead the tower moved as far in one night as it usually did in a year, a fright the team called Black September.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa took about how long to build?

200 years, near enough: work stopped twice for decades at a time, and the bell chamber went on only around 1370, long after the first builders were dead.

A widow, Berta di Bernardo, left sixty soldi in her 1172 will to buy what for Pisa's new bell tower?

Some of its first stones: her sixty soldi went to the works office buying stone for the tower, which was already sinking within about five years of its foundations being laid.

Work on Pisa's Leaning Tower stopped for almost a century; how did that pause save it?

The soil had time to settle and firm up under the first three storeys; engineers say that finishing the tower in one go would almost certainly have toppled it.

To offset the tilt, builders gave Pisa's Leaning Tower taller upper floors on one side, with what result?

The tower is curved, faintly banana-shaped, because each generation of builders corrected the lean of its day, only for the tower to go on tilting.

Which rival republic destroyed Pisa's fleet at the Battle of Meloria in 1284?

Genoa hung pieces of the great chain from Pisa's harbour around its own city as trophies; they were handed back only in the 19th century and are kept in the Camposanto.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa holds seven bells, one for each what?

Musical note: the oldest bell was cast in 1262, about a century before the tower had a bell chamber to hang it in.

A bell later moved to Pisa's Leaning Tower first hung on a city palace, where it tolled to announce what?

Executions: the bell was known as La Giustizia, Justice, and tradition has it tolling for the death of Count Ugolino, the traitor Dante meets gnawing a skull in the Inferno.

Legend says Galileo dropped cannonballs of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show what?

They fall at the same speed, against Aristotle's rule that heavy things drop faster; the tale comes only from a pupil's biography, and whether the drop ever took place is still argued over.

In 1971 an Apollo 15 astronaut re-ran Galileo's legendary Leaning Tower test on the Moon, dropping a hammer and what?

A feather, taken from a falcon: commander David Scott let both go live on television in the last minutes of his final moonwalk.

Sent to check the Leaning Tower of Pisa for German spotters in 1944, what did US soldier Leon Weckstein do?

Held his fire: under orders to call down the guns at any sign of the enemy, he was so struck by the beauty of the tower and cathedral that he never gave the word.

From 1993 engineers stacked hundreds of tonnes of which metal on the Leaning Tower of Pisa's raised side as a counterweight?

Lead ingots on the north side pulled the top back a fraction, but they were such an eyesore that the search for a lasting cure went on.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa closed to visitors in 1990 after a medieval tower suddenly collapsed in which city near Milan?

Pavia's Civic Tower, which was not even leaning, fell without warning in 1989 and killed four people; within a year Pisa's tower was shut for the first time in 800 years.

Which method finally saved the Leaning Tower of Pisa?

Remove soil from beneath the raised end: corkscrew drills drew it out a little at a time, and the tower sank gently back by about half a degree.

An architect dug a walkway around the Leaning Tower of Pisa's sunken base in 1838; what happened?

Water gushed in and it lurched, because the trench dipped below the water table; the rescue of the 1990s aimed to put the tower back where it stood before that dig.

Engineer John Burland, who helped save the Leaning Tower of Pisa, also kept which London landmark from tilting during Tube tunnelling?

Big Ben's clock tower was kept upright by gently pumping grout into the ground while the Jubilee line was dug some 40 metres beneath it.

A 2018 study found the soft soil under the Leaning Tower of Pisa has shielded it from what?

Earthquakes: at least four strong ones have struck since 1280, but a tall, stiff tower on soft ground does not resonate with the shaking, so the flaw that tilts it also protects it.

What gradually cut the old sea power of Pisa off from the coast, which now lies about 10 km away?

Silt from its river built the plain ever further out to sea, and by the 15th century laden galleys could barely reach the city; the same soft deposits lie under the Leaning Tower.

Which Italian poet, later famous for seizing the port of Fiume, gave Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli its name in a 1910 novel?

Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote of the 'prato dei Miracoli', the meadow of miracles, in Forse che sì forse che no, seeing the four monuments on the grass as miracles of beauty.

Pisa's Camposanto cemetery is said to have been built around a shipload of sacred earth brought from where?

Golgotha, the hill of the Crucifixion: tradition says Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi shipped the earth home from the Crusades, which is why the cemetery is called the Campo Santo, the holy field.

What happened to Pisa's Camposanto cemetery on 27 July 1944?

An Allied bomb fragment set it ablaze, and the burning roof fell on the frescoes; peeling the survivors off the walls revealed the artists' underdrawings, now shown in a museum of their own.

How was the building of Pisa Cathedral, begun in the 1060s, largely paid for?

Loot from a raid on Palermo: Pisa's fleet struck the Muslim-held port in the 1060s, and an inscription on the cathedral's front still boasts of the victory.

A legend says a lamp hanging in Pisa Cathedral set the young Galileo on the path to which discovery?

The pendulum's steady beat: he is said to have timed the lamp's swings against his own pulse and found that each took the same time, however wide the arc.

Pisa's round Baptistery, which stands facing the cathedral, holds what distinction?

Largest of its kind in Italy: inside stands Nicola Pisano's pulpit of 1260, the work with which many histories of Renaissance sculpture begin.

During the final stage of the 1990s rescue, what stood ready to hold the Leaning Tower of Pisa?

Steel cables ran across the square from the tower to two anchor frames, a safety harness that could be tightened at once if the tower began to move the wrong way.

How do visitors climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa?

Inner spiral stairs run up through the walls; to make up for the lean, the medieval builders gave one side of the climb a couple more steps than the other.

Attendants in Pisa's Baptistery regularly pause to show off which feature of the building to visitors?

Its remarkable echo: an attendant sings a few notes and lets the round, domed hall answer, and researchers who tested the sound in 1999 called the whole building a giant musical instrument.

Germany's Suurhusen church tower leans more steeply than Pisa's because its oak foundations did what?

Rotted after drainage: the oak trunks had stayed sound for centuries in the wet ground of the marsh, and decayed only once the land was dried out and air could reach them.

In 2010 Guinness World Records certified which building as the world's furthest-leaning man-made tower, with an 18-degree slope?

Capital Gate, Abu Dhabi, leans on purpose: its concrete core was built with a slight tilt the opposite way, to balance the weight of the floors that hang out beyond it.

Which Italian city sealed off the leaning Garisenda, one of its famous Two Towers, in 2023 over fears of collapse?

Bologna's Garisenda leans about as steeply as Pisa's tower; it was cut down in height in the 14th century because it was already tilting, and Dante worked it into his Inferno.

Which mathematician is also known as Leonardo of Pisa?

Fibonacci learned Hindu-Arabic numerals as a boy in North Africa, where his father was a Pisan merchant, and his book of 1202 helped spread them through a Europe still counting in Roman numerals.

Galileo enrolled at the University of Pisa to study which subject, before mathematics won him over?

Medicine was his father's choice; Galileo switched to mathematics against his wishes, and by 1589 he was back at Pisa as the university's professor of the subject.

Why have the Leaning Tower of Pisa's bells been kept from swinging since the twentieth century?

Their vibrations risked a collapse, yet stilling the bells was not enough: the lean kept growing, and in 1990 the tower itself was closed to visitors.

What does a corrupted Superman do to the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the 1983 film Superman III?

Straightens it, in a fit of spite, and blows out the Olympic flame for good measure; restored to himself by the end of the film, he flies back to Pisa and tilts the tower again.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, like the cathedral it serves, is a showpiece of which style of architecture?

Romanesque, in Pisa's own version: the tower repeats the tiers of slender columns on the cathedral front, and the cathedral itself reuses columns and carved stone taken from ancient Greek and Roman buildings.

Why was the Leaning Tower of Pisa's tilt cut by only a tenth?

So nobody noticed: the engineers judged that a Leaning Tower must go on leaning, and a tenth was enough to make it safe for centuries.

Bonanno Pisano, long credited with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, cast the cathedral's great doors in which metal?

Bronze: Bonanno's main doors were lost when fire swept the cathedral in 1595, but his Door of San Ranieri in the south transept survived; Vasari later named him as a founder of the tower.

By 1990 the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa overhung its base by how far?

5 metres, give or take, and creeping a millimetre or two further each year; the rescue that followed pulled the top back by less than half a metre, which proved to be enough.

Which Italian tenor, born in a village near Pisa, took a law degree at its university before turning to music?

Andrea Bocelli paid his way through law school by singing in piano bars, then spent a year as a court-appointed lawyer before music won.

Rustichello of Pisa, a writer of romances, wrote down which traveller's tales while the two shared a prison?

Marco Polo had been home from China only a few years when he was captured fighting for his native Venice; with time on his hands, he dictated his travels to his cellmate Rustichello.

A half-size copy of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, finished in 1934 in Niles, Illinois, was built to hide what?

Water tanks: a factory owner wanted swimming pools in his workers' park but no ugly water tower, so he had the tanks and pumps tucked inside a concrete Leaning Tower.

Which English Romantic poet made Pisa his home in 1820 and was joined there by Lord Byron?

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned two years later, aged 29, when a storm sank his boat on the way back from Livorno.

In 2008 engineers announced what about the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the first time in its history?

It had stopped moving: after the rescue ended in 2001 the tower kept easing itself upright for seven more years, by 48 cm in all, before sensors showed it had finally come to rest.

Pisa straddles which river shortly before it meets the sea?

The Arno rises in the Apennines and reaches Pisa by way of Florence, where in 1966 a sudden flood sent it pouring through the city's streets.

Who founded Pisa's Scuola Normale Superiore in 1810?

Napoleon ordered it as an Italian twin of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and its students have since included Nobel winners such as the poet Giosuè Carducci.

Which physicist, later the builder of the world's first nuclear reactor, won a place at Pisa's Scuola Normale in 1918?

Enrico Fermi arrived at 17 already ahead of his teachers: the head of the physics laboratory said there was little he could teach him and asked Fermi for lessons instead.