The Tower That Wouldn't Stand Up Straight
Episode 2 · Leaning Tower of Pisa
Pisa, Italy, 1990 to 2001
Episode coming November 1
Why listen?
For centuries, the world's most famous tower had been falling over, very slowly. By 1990 it was closed to the public, and some of the fixes already tried had only made the lean worse. This is the story of the team called in to save it.
Key moments
In this episode
- Why the ground under the Square of Miracles is barely ground at all
- Two long pauses in construction that may have saved the tower
- How a 19th-century walkway made the lean worse
- The 1989 tower collapse in Pavia that changed how Italy saw its towers
- Lead, liquid nitrogen and the night the tower moved the wrong way
- A full-size trial, a custom drill and a very careful plan
- Why the tower has survived centuries of earthquakes
Sources
Sources
- John Burland, "The stabilisation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa," Ingenia, Issue 10, November 2001 (main source)
- Burland, Jamiolkowski and Viggiani, "Leaning Tower of Pisa: Behaviour after Stabilization Operations," 2009
- NOVA (PBS), "Fall of the Leaning Tower: History of Interventions"
- University of Bristol, "500-year-old Leaning Tower of Pisa mystery unveiled by engineers," May 2018
- Gulf News, "A structural revival" ("our darkest hour" and the bookmaker's odds)
- L. Binda (ed.), Learning from Failure, WIT Press, 2008 (Pavia)
- Calvi and Priestley, "Preliminary comments on the collapse of a mediaeval tower," ICCROM, 1989 (Pavia)
- Practical Engineering, "How Engineers Straightened the Leaning Tower of Pisa," December 2023
A note on details: the "darkest hour" quote and the bookmaker's odds come from a single attributed interview.
Listen on
Listen to this episode
Episode 2 arrives on November 1 with the rest of season one. Listening links will be added here at launch.
About the show
What Anatomy of a Near-Miss is
Anatomy of a Near-Miss is a monthly narrative podcast about the moments when famous buildings almost went wrong. Each episode follows one project from the first drawings to the close call, then looks at how it was caught, how it was fixed and what the industry learned from it.
Every episode is built on public, well-documented stories. We work from published histories, engineering reports and reputable reporting, and the sources for each episode are listed in its show notes.
About the host
Davide Aternino
Anatomy of a Near-Miss is hosted by Davide Aternino, Principal at Mouldex Composites.
New episodes on the 1st of every month.
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