Pisa

Our stop in Pisa was meant to be relaxed. It was meant to offer us several hours to climb the tower, visit the museum, grab a snack, and yes, take pictures. But when we moved our boating adventure to Tuesday, Pisa got cut to only the most minimal time to run to the tower from the train station and back.

What most people don't realize, is that the Leaning Tower of Pisa is only one of several buildings in the Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles) and is part of the cathedral complex. (Many of Italy's most famous cathedrals have separated bell towers like this, including the Duomo in Florence and the Basilica San Marco in Venice.)

Seeing the tower this way always reminds me of this photo series of famous landmarks zoomed out.

Technically, the tower is a campanile, or free standing bell tower, for the church. Seeing it in person makes it all the more obvious that what you're visiting is an engineering error, as the sunken foundation can only be seen as a terrible mistake:

"The tower's tilt began during construction, caused by an inadequate foundation on ground too soft on one side to properly support the structure's weight. The tilt increased in the decades before the structure was completed, and gradually increased until the structure was stabilized (and the tilt partially corrected) by efforts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries." (wikipedia) The tower's tilt began during construction??? As a contractor's daughter, this is somewhat horrifying. The groundbreaking was in 1173 and the tower took 200 years to complete (1372), but it was another 800 years before it was stabilized! That's just crazy.

Julie wanted to visit for this picture:

Joe wanted to visit because of the scientific significance of this place. The Tower of Pisa, after all, is where Galileo Galilei tested his theory of gravity, ultimately unseating the previous theory pioneered by Aristotle that a heavier body falls faster than a lighter one.

Here's a short video on Galileo.

Here's an long video that explains Galileo's impact on science a better.

And here's a clip of astronauts on the moon recreating Galileo's leaning tower experiment in zero gravity:

We had just enough time to snap a few pictures and then hop in a taxi back to the train station. (It was all for naught in the end because our train from Pisa left late and caused us to miss the last train from Empoli to Siena anyway.)