Rome Leans On Tower of Pisa, Bars Climbers

PISA, Italy — The Italian government, leaning harder than an angry Pisa could resist, rang down the curtain on tourism-in-a-tower here Sunday, shutting one of the world’s most famous landmarks to climbers for the first time in 800 years.

The government says Pisa’s Leaning Tower isn’t safe. Scornful Pisans say they are victims of bureaucratic Roman bullies.

“We will leave nothing undone,” promised Public Works Minister Giovanni Prandini, who ordered the temporary closure of the tower to restore it and beef up its mushy underpinning.

“They haven’t even got a plan,” snapped Pisa Mayor Giacomino Granchi in an interview. Later, he grudgingly locked the historic tower Sunday afternoon with a small modern key that was disappointing in a context that begged for something large and medieval.

On Sunday, the 179.5-foot-tall (54.73-meter) bell tower of finely sculpted white marble, sometimes called one of the seven wonders of the modern world, uncomplainingly bore the final assault of another 2,500 excited climbers.

Like the rest of the nearly 18 million paying guests since 1922 alone, the visitors Sunday labored for eight stories up 293 worn steps, past 207 columns to a colonnade where seven bells still summon the faithful to the 927-year-old cathedral next door.

The last man up Sunday was a 19-year-old Italian army conscript. At the tower’s graffiti-marked top, he and other climbers over the centuries have been rewarded with a splendid view of rich countryside, mountains and the sea--from a dizzying perspective 16 feet off center.

My, how it leans--another .047244ths of an inch (1.2 millimeters) yearly. It’s no more than usual; less in fact, asserts provincial Pisa. Enough already, says mighty Rome.

More than a dozen do-gooder commissions have pondered ways to stabilize the tower so far this century, their passage marked more by rhetoric than success. How long it will take to straighten out the controversy this time around is anybody’s guess.

After long and loud resistance to orders from Rome, Granchi surrendered to the threat of dire legal sanctions and ordered the tower shut down, but only for three months.

Prandini said, however, that it may take three years before the tower can be fully restored.

No Pisan believes him: A disproportionate number of townsfolk climbed their tower Sunday, many of them for the first time.

Begun on Aug. 9, 1173, by sculptor-architect Bonanno Pisano, the tower in Pisa’s Piazza of the Miracles began leaning south within a decade, with only three stories completed. It was abandoned in embarrassment. Not until almost a century later did Pisans come to understand that if all other bell towers were straight, a beautiful one that leaned could not be all bad.

The sculptor Giovanni di Simone completed the tower at seven stories in 1284. It leaned about four feet then. Construction under Tommaso Pisano, completed in 1360, added the bell colonnade, trying with counterweights to compensate for the lean. It didn’t work.

Pisan astronomer-physicist Galileo used the lean at the end of the 16th Century to derive laws of gravity and the principles of falling bodies.

Over the centuries, the lean grew more pronounced, but the tower survived everything from tourists to earthquakes to the Allied bombardment of Pisa during World War II. Of late, say Pisans, the lean rate has slowed. Left to its own devices, the tower would not topple, they say, for anywhere from another 200 to 1,000 years.

The tower is badly shopworn, though, and there is danger of marble pieces falling from its sides. A 1988 study by a commission of experts summoned by the Italian government recommended immediate remedial action to restore the structure and to launch a so-far unspecified subterranean attack on the lean.

“By the end of this year, we will decide on a project for consolidation of the foundation,” promised Public Works Minister Prandini.

Complicating a welter of engineering proposals and what Prandini calls “vivacious discussion” over how to proceed, is a nasty struggle in Rome between his ministry and the ministry that oversees Italy’s artistic patrimony over which should be responsible for the tower’s salvation.

All of it infuriates Pisans, for whom the tower is not only a global symbol of civic pride but also an important source of income.

In 1965, there were 204,695 climbers. In 1989, 812,000 visitors climbed the tower and fueled the tourist industry, souvenir shops to restaurants and hotels, that flourishes in its lee. Pisan patriots can only guess how many tourists will still come, content just to look at their wondrous tower.