Leaning Tower

During our family vacation in Italy, we weren’t sure whether we wanted to take the time to visit Pisa. There were so many places we wanted to see, and we wondered whether making a special trip just to see the famous Leaning Tower would be worth it. In the end, we decided that we were this close, we should take the train and see this landmark for ourselves. And there it was. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of those structures that has become so familiar through photographs that it is easy to forget how extraordinary it is until you are actually standing in front of it.

Construction of the tower began in 1173. It was intended as the freestanding bell tower, or campanile, for Pisa’s cathedral. The famous lean was not part of the design. The tower began tilting while it was still under construction because its relatively shallow foundation was built on soft, unstable ground. Construction proceeded in stages over nearly two centuries, and the builders attempted to compensate for the tilt as they continued upward. That long effort helps explain why the tower actually has a slight curve.

The tower is only one part of a much larger religious complex in the Piazza del Duomo, often called the Piazza deiMiracoli: the Square of Miracles. The cathedral, baptistery, monumental cemetery, and tower together reflect the wealth and importance Pisa enjoyed during the Middle Ages, when it was a powerful maritime republic with trading connections throughout the Mediterranean.

By the 20th century, however, the increasing tilt had become a serious concern. The tower was closed to visitors in 1990 while engineers undertook an enormous stabilization project. Soil was carefully removed from beneath the higher side of the foundation, reducing the lean without attempting to straighten the tower completely. It reopened in 2001, still unmistakably leaning but considerably more stable. After seeing the landmark we had come for, we wandered away from the crowds and through the streets of the city. Somewhere along the way, we found a small family restaurant and stopped for lunch. It became one of our favorite meals of the trip.

I don’t remember the name of the restaurant or exactly where we found it, but I remember the experience. We had come to Pisa because of a building known throughout the world, yet one of the memories I carried away was something completely ordinary, a family sitting together over lunch in a restaurant we happened to discover while wandering. That has happened to us many times while traveling. The famous places give us a reason to go somewhere, but they are not always the experiences we remember most. Sometimes the best part begins after we have seen what we came to see and simply start walking.