A Pound of Flesh: Leaning Towers

The leaning tower of Burano.

Sometime back near the beginning of our days in Venice, probably when we first ventured across the lagoon to Torcello, I read somewhere about the leaning campanile of San Martino on Burano. Like all the islands in the Venetian lagoon, Burano is a soggy-bottomed mudflat, and as such it is not the most stable place to build a tall skinny tower. Anyway, the thing I read that now, travelling without so many of our books, I can't find my way back to, was that the tower is leaning at the same angle (5 degrees) as the famously tipping tower in Pisa.

Really there are a lot of similarities between Venice and Pisa. At the junction of the Arno and Serchio rivers, between the 11th and 13th centuries Pisa rivalled Venice and Genova as a naval and sea-trading power. Gathering goods, treasures, ideas, and iconography from around the Mediterranean, south to Africa, as well as across to the east, Pisa developed it's own Romanesque style and built it's now famous 'Field of Miricles'. But in the 13th century both Pisa's naval and geographical luck changed. After losing some key battles and outposts, the port silted up leaving Pisa as good as landlocked. As it turned out, this silty soil was not great for holding up heavy marble structures, and the results are rather similar to the topsy turvy, higeldy pigeldy, falling down nature of Venice.

Burano, before a storm.

Campo San Angelo, Venice.

San Pietro, Venice.

Torcello.
Back in the hot hot days of summer...

Towers, sticking up as they do, stand out from all the other slumping structures, and their footprint to height ratio no doubt doesn't help their tip-ability. In Pisa all the buildings in the 'Field' are on a lean - most significantly the baptistry leans 1.8m to the north, while the tower is headed 4m to the south.

Pisa.
The Duomo and it's campanile.

The strange thing about the leaning tower in Pisa is that they realised it had a lean on during construction. The first construction team got it up four stories, by which time it was abundantly clear that the bottom was sinking. The second team tried to right the lean and got almost to the bells, but not quite. The last lot put the bells on top, again at an angle compensating for the lean, but the bells themselves weighing in at something quite heavy didn't help matters... A decade of reconstructive surgery completed in 2001 has supposedly stabilised the tower for another 300 years.