Leaning Tower of Pisa Trivia
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49 free Leaning Tower of Pisa trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Leaning Tower of Pisa trivia quiz covers the world's most famous architectural mistake, from the widow's bequest that paid for its first stones to the engineers who declared it finally still in 2008. The easy questions ask what the tower actually is, which Italian region it stands in, why it leans, roughly how tall it is and which scientist is said to have dropped cannonballs from it. From there it moves through the 199-year construction, the wars that paused it, the bells, the earthquakes it has shrugged off and the square it shares with a cathedral, a baptistery and a cemetery. The hard end is for people who have climbed all 296 steps: the exact tilt before and after the rescue, the tonnes of lead and cubic metres of soil involved, the American sergeant who declined to shell it in 1944, the bell that once tolled for executions, the German steeples that challenged its Guinness record, the deliberately tilted skyscraper that beat it and the shipload of Holy Land soil next door. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the tower, Pisa, the Piazza dei Miracoli, Pisa Cathedral, the Baptistery, the Camposanto, Galileo's experiment, John Burland, the Leaning Tower of Suurhusen and Capital Gate before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Italy, world landmarks and Galileo quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a freestanding bell tower, a type of building known in Italian as what?
Campanile
Campanile comes from campana, the Italian for bell. Pisa's is known the world over, yet who designed it is still argued over.
Q 02Pisa is a city in which region of Italy?
Tuscany
Tuscany is ruled from Florence, which seized Pisa in 1406 and ended its centuries as an independent republic.
Q 03What is the Leaning Tower of Pisa faced with?
Marble
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.
Q 04In 1995 engineers froze the ground beside the Leaning Tower of Pisa with what, triggering a sudden jolt?
Liquid nitrogen
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.
Q 05The Leaning Tower of Pisa took about how long to build?
200 years
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.
Q 06A 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
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.
Q 07Work on Pisa's Leaning Tower stopped for almost a century; how did that pause save it?
The soil had time to settle
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.
Q 08To offset the tilt, builders gave Pisa's Leaning Tower taller upper floors on one side, with what result?
The tower is curved
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.
Q 09Which rival republic destroyed Pisa's fleet at the Battle of Meloria in 1284?
Genoa
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.
Q 10The Leaning Tower of Pisa holds seven bells, one for each what?
Musical note
Musical note: the oldest bell was cast in 1262, about a century before the tower had a bell chamber to hang it in.
Q 11A bell later moved to Pisa's Leaning Tower first hung on a city palace, where it tolled to announce what?
Executions
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.
Q 12Legend says Galileo dropped cannonballs of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show what?
They fall at the same speed
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.
Q 13In 1971 an Apollo 15 astronaut re-ran Galileo's legendary Leaning Tower test on the Moon, dropping a hammer and what?
Q 21What gradually cut the old sea power of Pisa off from the coast, which now lies about 10 km away?
Silt from its river
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.
Q 22Which 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
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.
Q 23Pisa's Camposanto cemetery is said to have been built around a shipload of sacred earth brought from where?
A feather
A feather, taken from a falcon: commander David Scott let both go live on television in the last minutes of his final moonwalk.
Q 14Sent to check the Leaning Tower of Pisa for German spotters in 1944, what did US soldier Leon Weckstein do?
Held his fire
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.
Q 15From 1993 engineers stacked hundreds of tonnes of which metal on the Leaning Tower of Pisa's raised side as a counterweight?
Lead
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.
Q 16The Leaning Tower of Pisa closed to visitors in 1990 after a medieval tower suddenly collapsed in which city near Milan?
Pavia
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.
Q 17Which method finally saved the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
Remove soil from beneath the raised end
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.
Q 18An architect dug a walkway around the Leaning Tower of Pisa's sunken base in 1838; what happened?
Water gushed in and it lurched
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.
Q 19Engineer John Burland, who helped save the Leaning Tower of Pisa, also kept which London landmark from tilting during Tube tunnelling?
Big Ben
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.
Q 20A 2018 study found the soft soil under the Leaning Tower of Pisa has shielded it from what?
Earthquakes
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.
Golgotha
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.
Q 24What happened to Pisa's Camposanto cemetery on 27 July 1944?
An Allied bomb fragment set it ablaze
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.
Q 25How was the building of Pisa Cathedral, begun in the 1060s, largely paid for?
Loot from a raid on Palermo
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.
Q 26A legend says a lamp hanging in Pisa Cathedral set the young Galileo on the path to which discovery?
The pendulum's steady beat
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.
Q 27Pisa's round Baptistery, which stands facing the cathedral, holds what distinction?
Largest of its kind in Italy
Largest of its kind in Italy: inside stands Nicola Pisano's pulpit of 1260, the work with which many histories of Renaissance sculpture begin.
Q 28During the final stage of the 1990s rescue, what stood ready to hold the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
Steel cables
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.
Q 29How do visitors climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
Inner spiral stairs
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.
Q 30Attendants in Pisa's Baptistery regularly pause to show off which feature of the building to visitors?
Its remarkable echo
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.