The story of this place
Begun in 1173 as the free-standing campanile of Pisa Cathedral, the tower started leaning by the time its third storey rose, its foundations sinking into soft, waterlogged subsoil. Construction halted for nearly a century—a pause that ironically let the ground settle enough to save it—before finishing around 1372. Builders tried to compensate by curving the upper floors, giving it a subtle banana shape. Galileo, a Pisa native, is said (probably apocryphally) to have dropped weights from it to study gravity. By 1990 the lean reached 5.5 degrees and the tower was closed; an 11-year engineering effort removed soil from the high side, easing it to a stable 3.97 degrees. It reopened in 2001 and should stand for centuries more.