The Tower!

I can tell you that I am absolutely glad I did the tour and climbed this tower.  Would I do it again?  NOT ON YOUR LIFE!  293 stairs up a narrow, marble staircase (SLIPPERY!!!) and I am afraid of heights.  LOL!!  But I wanted my kids to see this phenomenon for themselves! 
The outside of the tower is absolutely beautiful as you can see from my pictures.  The inside is dark, narrow and slippery…scary slippery!  LOL.  I almost fell several times. 
Do you know why the tower leans????  Here’s a quote from the official website-in English:
The inclination
The problem of the inclination is the one that over the centuries has most fascinated and intrigued visitors, art lovers and experts and that has made this monument so famous all over the world.
All this is also due to the fact that the reasons for the inclination of the building are still fairly mysterious.
The experts have discussed for a long time, especially in the last century, whether such inclination might be due to the static problems of the building while it was built, in other words whether the incline of the Tower was an effect that the builder had deliberately wanted to achieve or if conversely it was the consequence of an unpredictable or otherwise progressive subsidence of the ground.
In the last century, the increasingly accurate measurements of the building and the surveys of the subsurface conducted with a wide range of devices, combined with historical and archival surveys, have shed some light on the matter. The Tower was presumably initially designed as a straight building; however, it must have begun to subside right from the first stages of the building work. The subsidence was due to the special morphological features of the ground, composed of several layers of clayey materials and silt, run through by groundwater levels at about one metre deep. These conclusions can be drawn from an observation of the soil, and the corrections made to every floor of the building. What is certain, based on the scarce information we have, is that over the centuries the oscillation of the building was minimal, since it must have eventually settled on the ground. This situation is corroborated by the accurate survey conducted in 1817 by two English experts, Cresy and Taylor. A few years later, in 1838, some event must have occurred which must have abruptly accelerated the oscillatory motion of the building, bringing back the need to carry out some decisive protective work. On that date, based on historical and aesthetic needs, it was decided that the bottom of the tower had to be cleared of the mantle of soil that had been hiding it for centuries. This work, that caused the Tower to lose its balance, involved the demolition of the buildings and constructions that stood next to the Tower and above all the draining of the brackish water that always surrounded the entrance of the building. The subsequent measurements showed that the inclination of the Tower had increased by approximately 20 centimetres: in the 267 years between Giorgio Vasari’s surveys in 1550 and those of the two Englishmen in 1817, the inclination had increased by just five centimetres. The leaning movement kept accelerating for a few years after the work of 1838, then decreased again to about one millimetre a year. During the XX century, better information and improved technical instruments, along with the support of governmental and safety authorities, led to a proliferation of studies, surveys and even special projects.
I took the following photo from one of the windows on my way up:

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get this photo to lighten more than this without completely washing out the background:

Finally got to the top:

BTW, we were only able to take the older children into the tower.  I am eternally grateful for this.  I think I would have had a heart attack if Seth and Emily had been up there with me.  It’s dangerous.  Seriously.




Looking down the inside of the tower you are supposed to be able to see straight down, but they were doing renovations and so we couldn’t.  Here’s the bell.





This next picture….look really close at the hedge, if you can see the orange shirt, that is Pat.

NO?  Try this: orange-Pat, yellow-Seth, Pink-Em



After the beach and dinner that night, we walked up to see the tower at night.



Cathedral

Baptistery:

I have my dh to thank for the night photos.  He did these without a tripod or they would have been crystal clear! Next post is of the beach near Camp Darby.