They are each worn out in a different place, as thousands of people over the years have stepped on the spots that seemed most natural. If your body’s internal senses can’t tell you which way you are leaning as you spiral up the building, the grooves in the stairs will help. The staircase to the top is circular, leading around the inside wall (the middle of the tower is hollow). You tilt with the tower, taking on a lean that feels unnatural, even though you’re in alignment with the walls close on either side of you. Climbing the Leaning Tower of PisaĬlimbing up those stairs to the top is certainly a strange experience. As it turns out, these alterations only made things worse, but at least the builders were able to finish the job. What many people don’t realise is that it took about 200 years to complete the whole building – partly because of the challenges of the construction and partly because a couple of pesky wars distracted everybody.Īs the lower part started to shift early on, the subsequent levels were built at a different tilt to try to compensate. On the south side of the tower, the soil is slightly more compressible, which is why the foundations of the building sank in that direction. Why does Pisa Tower lean?Īssuming the design was not intentional, the most popular theory about the tower’s lean is simply that the soil it was built on wasn’t strong enough to support the weight – basically it had too much sand and silt in it from the flooding of a nearby river estuary.

It’s fascinating to discover that the architecture of almost a thousands years ago still baffles experts of today. For years scientists and engineers have studied the building, trying to work out how it happened, how to fix it and how to stop it unexpectedly falling on top of a bunch of tourists one day!

What better way to make your city renowned through all the lands than with an iconic building that has no equal in the world? Well, maybe, but… These ‘experts’ claim it may have been because of Pisa’s rivalry with Florence at the time that the city wanted something to distinguish itself. There’s a school of thought that says the slant of the tower in Pisa was no accident.

Perhaps it was meant to be built like that! Perhaps it’s all a marketing scam, this leaning tower thing.

Leaning tower of pizza