The construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa began in August It was interrupted several times by wars, debt and while engineers worked on solutions to correct the lean. We now know that without these interruptions that allowed the soil to compress under the tower, it would have certainly toppled over. The Tower of Pisa is the churches belltower.
The city of Pisa was at the beginning a simple but important Italian seaport. With its growth, so did its religious buildings. Its fame and power grew gradually over the years, as the people of Pisa were involved in various military conflicts and trade agreements. The Pisans attacked the city of Palermo on the island of Sicily in In , engineer Bonnano Pisano laid a marble foundation large enough to park about 16 Ferrari s in and started building the campanile for the cathedral and baptistry of Pisa.
The Romanesque Tower of Pisa , comprising 14, tonnes of white marble, was completed years later — but it was also embarrassingly crooked. Because there was a lot of water under the ground in this area, Bonnano was able to place the foundation only about 10 feet down into the ground.
The builders tried to make it look better by building the columns and arches on the south side about an inch taller than those on the north side. However by the time they got to the fourth story, they had to make the southern columns 2 inches taller than the northern ones. The tower just continued to lean, and because of the difficulties the construction was stopped. In , the architect Benenato discovered that the tower was leaning even more. Now the south side of the fourth story was a full 6 inches shorter than the north side.
In reality, all this accomplished was to create an even heavier base that made the tower lean even more than it had before. Lead counterweights are stacked on the tower during restoration in Photo by Rolf Gebhardt.
The tower has survived centuries of well-meaning but misguided attempts to right it, including various engineers who added levels and arches of all different heights and one overzealous group who dug around the tower to open an underground tour which only helped to fill the area with even more water. But someone finally got it right in the 21st century and as of , the tower was officially declared stable for at least the next years. This website has helped me so much with my 6th grade social studies report I have to turn in about the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
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