Pisa, Italy
Torre di Pisa · TOR-reh dee PEE-za
A bell tower that began to sink when it was three storeys high, was left alone for a century, and was then finished at a slant. It leaned a little more every year for eight hundred years. In 2001 engineers pulled it back by forty-five centimetres, and stopped.
Photo: Guglielmo Giambartolomei, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are on short green grass, with a wall of old brick behind you. In front are three buildings of white marble: a round one with a dome, a long church with rows of small arches on its front, and behind the church a round tower of eight storeys, also arched all the way up. The tower is not upright. Your eye keeps trying to correct it and cannot.
The tower was begun in August 1173. In China it was the Southern Song (1127–1279), and the philosopher Zhu Xi was forty-three. In Paris the walls of Notre-Dame were ten years old.
The lawn is free. The cathedral is free with a pass. Every other building needs a ticket, and the tower needs a ticket for a set time.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The lawn and the outside of everything | Free |
| The cathedral | Free pass, included with any ticket |
| The tower | 20 euros, at a booked time; no one under 8 |
| The Baptistery | One of the paying monuments |
| The cemetery (Camposanto) | One of the paying monuments |
| The Sinopie Museum | One of the paying monuments |
| The cathedral museum | One of the paying monuments |
Pisa in the eleventh century was a sea power, with a fleet that fought from Spain to Syria. In 1063 it raided the harbour of Palermo and came home with six shiploads of treasure. The cathedral was begun the next year with the money.
Over two hundred years the city added a place to be baptised, a bell tower, and a walled cemetery: the whole of a Christian life, from first to last, on one lawn.
The ground here is river mud. The cathedral and the Baptistery lean too, though less. The tower is narrow and heavy, and it went over.
"It was built to lean." It was meant to stand straight. The builders spent two centuries trying to hide the mistake.
"It is still falling." It has not moved since 2008, and is expected to stand for at least two hundred years more.
"Galileo dropped two cannon balls from the top." The story was first told by his secretary, sixty years later. Galileo himself never mentions it.
"The square is called the Field of Miracles." Its name is Piazza del Duomo, Cathedral Square. A poet called it a field of miracles in a novel in 1910, and the tourist trade took it up.
"The tower is the thing to see." It is the bell tower of the church beside it. The church and the Baptistery are the greater buildings, and there is no queue for them.
The stops begin at the gate in the city wall and end on top of the tower.
Most cathedrals stand in the crowded middle of their towns. Pisa put this one at the edge, against the city wall, where there was room. The grass is a nineteenth-century idea; before that the ground was bare earth, with houses and a hospital among the monuments.
All four buildings use the same white and grey marble and the same rows of small arches on thin columns. The style is Pisa's own. The idea of the arches came with the fleet, from the churches and mosques of the eastern Mediterranean.
The front has four galleries of arches, one above another, each column different from the next. Look at the wall beside the left-hand door: the tomb of the architect is built into it. His name was Buscheto, and the Latin says he was cleverer than Ulysses.
Walk round to the door facing the tower. Its bronze leaves were cast about 1180 and survived the fire that destroyed the others. They tell the life of Christ in twenty small scenes, with palm trees and very few figures, like pictures drawn by a child who has seen everything.
Inside, sixty-eight columns of granite march down the nave. Many were taken from Roman buildings and, it is said, from the mosque at Palermo. The gilded ceiling replaced the one burned in 1595, and carries the arms of the Medici of Florence, who by then owned Pisa.
A bronze lamp hangs on a long chain in the middle of the nave. It is known as Galileo's lamp.
The pulpit near it was carved between 1302 and 1310 by Giovanni Pisano. Nine panels show the story of Christ with crowds of small figures twisting in every direction. It was taken to pieces after the fire and put together again in 1926; not everyone agrees that the pieces are in the right order.
The round building is the largest baptistery in Italy, 55 metres high. It took two centuries to build, and the taste changed halfway: round arches below, pointed gables above.
The pulpit inside was finished in 1260 by Nicola Pisano, father of Giovanni. At one corner stands a small naked man with a lion cub on his shoulder. He is the virtue of Strength, and he is copied from a Roman Hercules. He is the first nude in the classical manner carved in Italy for seven hundred years.
Every half hour an attendant shuts the doors and sings a few notes. The dome holds each note so long that he sings a chord with himself.
The tower weighs about 14,500 tonnes and stands on a foundation only three metres deep, in soft clay. By 1178, with three storeys built, the south side had begun to sink. Then Pisa went to war, and the work stopped for ninety-four years.
The pause saved it. The clay had time to settle and harden under the weight. Had the masons gone straight on, it would have fallen.
When building began again in 1272 the masons made the new storeys taller on the low side, to bring the top back towards the centre. So the tower is not straight even in its lean: it is curved, like a banana. The bell chamber, added a century later, is tilted the other way again.
By 1990 the top was four and a half metres out of line and moving more than a millimetre a year. A medieval tower in another Italian city had just fallen without warning and killed four people. The tower of Pisa was shut.
The first attempt, freezing the ground, nearly brought it down in one night in September 1995. The answer that worked was the simplest. Long drills were slid in at an angle under the high side, and soil was taken out a few buckets at a time. The tower sank gently on that side and swung back.
Seventy tonnes of earth were removed in two years. The top moved back forty-five centimetres, to where it had been in 1838. The engineers could have gone further. The city asked them not to.
The stair winds up inside the wall, 251 steps to the top gallery and more to the bells. The marble treads are worn into hollows, and the hollows move: on one side of the tower they are against the outer wall, on the other against the inner, because every climber for eight centuries has been thrown the same way by the slope.
There are seven bells, one for each note of the scale. The largest weighs three and a half tonnes. They are no longer swung, for fear of shaking the tower; they are struck by hammers.
In July 1944 an American sergeant was sent forward to find out whether German observers were using the tower, and to call down the guns if they were. He looked at it through his glasses for a long time and did not give the order.
The long blank wall on the north side of the lawn hides a cloister begun in 1278. Its middle is a rectangle of grass, and under the grass is earth said to have been brought from Jerusalem.
The walls were once painted from end to end. On 27 July 1944 a shell set the roof on fire, and the melted lead ran down over the paintings. What could be saved was peeled off the walls, and under it the restorers found the artists' first drawings in red earth. They are in the museum across the lawn.
The greatest of the paintings is back in its place: the Triumph of Death, of about 1340. Three young lords out hunting come upon three open coffins. Their horses smell it first.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1064 | The cathedral is begun | Northern Song (960–1127) China (960–1127): Su Shi is twenty-seven; two years before the Normans conquer England |
| 1173 | The tower is begun | Southern Song China (1127–1279); Saladin is uniting Egypt and Syria |
| 1178 | The tower starts to sink and work stops | Zhu Xi is teaching at the White Deer Grotto academy within two years |
| 1272 | Work begins again | The Yuan (1271–1368) dynasty has just been proclaimed in China, and Marco Polo is on his way there |
| 1284 | Pisa loses its fleet to Genoa and never recovers | One of the Pisans taken prisoner will, years later, write down Marco Polo's story in a Genoese gaol |
| 1372 | The bell chamber finishes the tower | Ming China (1368–1644), the fifth year of the first emperor |
| 1590 | Galileo teaches at Pisa | Ming China, the Wanli reign; Shakespeare is writing his first plays |
| 1944 | The cemetery burns; the tower is spared | The last full year of the Second World War |
| 2001 | The tower reopens, forty-five centimetres straighter | China joins the World Trade Organization |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Galileo, a student of nineteen, sat bored at Mass and watched the lamp swing after the sacristan had lit it. He timed it with his pulse and found that the wide swings took no longer than the narrow ones. From that came the pendulum clock.
Source: Vincenzo Viviani, Life of Galileo (1654); the lamp now hanging was put up in 1587, after the date given
Galileo climbed the tower before the whole university and let fall two balls of different weights. They struck the ground together, and the professors who had taught for two thousand years that the heavier falls faster went home in silence.
Source: Viviani, Life of Galileo (1654)
An archbishop of Pisa came home from the Crusades with fifty-three shiploads of earth from the hill where Christ was crucified, and spread it in the cemetery. A body laid in it is said to turn to bones in a single day.
Source: Pisan chronicles from the fourteenth century
The devil, furious at the beauty of the cathedral, climbed its north wall to pull it down. An angel drove him off. A block of marble on that side is covered in small holes where his claws dug in, and no one who counts them gets the same number twice.
Source: Pisan popular tradition
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The site of the cathedral works of Pisa (opapisa.it), opening times and ticket rules as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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