Tower of Pisa Now Leaning a Little Less
For the first time in 800 years, the leaning Tower of Pisa is straighter than it used to be.
“The tower is leaning less than it used to. It’s back where it was two years ago,” Michele Jamiolkowski, head of a panel supervising efforts to shore up the monument, told the news agency ANSA.
The fractional shift of 0.078 of an inch is invisible to the naked eye, but experts hailed it as a major success for the first phase of the tower’s “cure,” which consisted of burying a 140-ton counterweight of lead ingots at its foot.
The 183-foot white marble tower, which leans five yards off the perpendicular, has been closed to the public since 1990, but experts hope it may be reopened in 1994.
In a country reeling from a series of bombings, the news that the tower had stopped leaning--even just a bit--was highlighted on lunchtime television newscasts.
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