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LEANING TOWER OF PISA

The Leaning Tower expresses the joys and sorrows of its earlier 800 years and waits for an happy end to its old-age convalescence with quiet wisdom.
A widow, whose name was Berta of Bernardo, living in the house of Santa Maria Institution, the 5th of January 1172 left in her testment sixty "coins" to the "Opera Campanilis petrarum Sancte Marie", to purchase some stones to build the Tower. As far as the author is concerned there are a lot of uncertainty, exsperts are still argueing. Would have been Bonanno, marvellous bronzeis foundryman, who afterwards made the first Cathedral's doors ? Or Deotiusalvi, one of the greatest architects of the XII centuries, who founded the Battistero ? Perhaps the intervention of Gerardo, who had to cooperate more as a co-author and interpreter than a simple executor of the orders given by Diotisalvi ? Or Guidolotto, worker of Santa Maria Opera ?

Or was master Guglielmo, of German nationality, perhaps the same one who in about the year 1160 carried out the first pulpit of the Cathedral ? Whoever has done it, the author was a fantastic.
The only certainty is its date of birth, 9th August 1173.
The plan of the bell tower exists and it's an admirable one. Of course it isn't a design on paper but documented in the Tower itself and in its measurements.

This way the construction of the Bell Tower began. When the construction reached about one meter and half of the third floor, because of marshy and unstable soil, it leaned fearfully, so the works got suspended. The events which led to the inclination of the Tower aren't known. The proof we have are very uncertain. Surely two phenomenons took place: the building subsidence due to the weight excess and the soils differential sinking, which were the reasons for the inclination. The restarting of the works took places in two phases, during which they tried to reduce the slope. It is not known which height was reached at the end of the first phase of the resumption, before the intervention of Giovanni di Simone. The second phase of the thirteenth-century, started probably about the years 1272- 1275 and perhaps consists in the building of four "loggette". In the sixth "loggetta" some round arch windows for the bells were made. The slope kept on worrying, so the Duomo's Institution the 15th March 1298 gave Giovanni Pisano, Guido, who was the son of the dead master Giovanni di Simone and Orsello, the job of sounding the slope. Vasari ascribes the costruction of the belfry to Tommaso, who was the son of Andrea Pisano, and it's used to be dated, in the last studies, back to the year 1350. The Bell Tower, because of its slope, which looks like as if it daresthe static's laws, being one of the most original works of art of the whole Europeen Middle-Age, enjoys of an enormous popularity.

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