Seventh Street Improvement Arches

Transcription

It's a marble masterpiece, one of the most famous buildings in the world. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is simply an impossibility. More like something you dream than something that can exist. For hundreds of years, the world has watched in amazement as the building defies gravity teetering on a razor's edge. It really is quite miraculous that it has not fallen over. And thank goodness it hasn't. If the Tower were to fall no one would feel it more than the people of Pisa. For them the Tower is the heart of their city. It is what draws hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, each one anxious to give a helping hand. It really needs one. The Leaning Tower of Pisa can tumble in an instant. For 800 years architects and engineers have been trying to fiix the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Nearly every attempt has been disastrous. But somehow the Tower has serenely survived. Today the Tower is in greater danger than ever. It's lean is so extreme that the Italian government has closed it to avoid a potential disaster. It's been more than ten years since anyone has walked up its marble stairway which leads to its stunning bell chamber until now. We will take a behind the scenes look inside the Tower that's been locked off to the public for so long and climb to the top for a rare view of its breathtaking vistas. We'll examine the bizarre history of the 800 year effort to save the Tower and introduce the current plan that some believe just may make the Tower safe forever, that is if it doesn't destroy it first. Today, the Tower is in crisis a patient in intensive care. 830 tons of lead have been added to hold down its north side. Steel bands cinch its waist. 340-foot long cables are wrapped around it to prevent an impending catastrophe, while a group of international experts struggle to fiind a permanent solution. Michele Jamiolkowski a geo-technical engineer is the chairman of the current team to save the Tower. This is not an easy task. Not only me, but all the other members of the committee became acquainted with the responsibility and with the risk which we are incurring with this task. Their goal is to reduce the Tower's lean by about 16 inches. This would take the Tower out of danger, but keep it looking the same. After all, no one wants a straight Tower of Pisa. We never considered straightening the Tower, because the inclination is part of its character. It's absolutely central to Pisa. So there are two unacceptable scenarios really, aren't there? One would be a straight Tower but the other one would be one that fell over. The common perception is that the Tower is in danger of tipping over. In fact, that is only one of two perils that could reduce it to rubble. One problem is the very well known continuous increase of inclination, which was bringing the Tower to falling over. And the second problem was the concern about the structural collapse. The first problem, the Tower's increasing slant is due to the soft soil it is built on. Professor Carlo Viggiani is a member of the committee to save the Tower. He has been studying the Tower for over 35 years. The leaning was by change. Probably because on the south side of the Tower the subsoil was weaker than the north side. So, and once it started to lean from that side, then the weight is going on that side and the thing is continuously increasing. By 1990, the Tower was leaning at an astounding five and a half degrees, or 17 feet off the perpendicular. It literally defies the laws of physics. Committee member John Burland is a professor of soil mechanics. I think it's miraculous. I mean, when we came here in 1990, we couldn't get it to stand up on our computer. It's leaning at 5.5 degrees. We could only get our computer Tower to lean at 5.44 degrees and then it used to fall over. So it really is quite miraculous that it has not fallen over. The Tower isn't just in danger of falling, it can collapse under its own weight. Part of the problem stems from its structure. Although the Tower appears solid, it's actually a hollow cylinder reaching 185 feet into the sky. Within it, a staircase winds up to the top. Most of its 14,000 tons are supported by its walls. Its walls, however, aren't solid either. They're stone, lime and mortar, covered with a thin marble facade. One side with all of the stone is getting a lot of pressure. The other side with all of its stone is not getting that pressure, so there is an inequality. As the Tower's lean continues the pressure intensifies. Eventually the marble in this second floor section will give way the building will collapse upon itself. It could explode at any time, or this was the case in 1990 anyway. So we've got a Tower that's just about to fall over and it's on the point of exploding. And that makes it probably the biggest civil engineering challenge there is. Solving the challenge of the Tower has stumped generations of engineers. Its problems began almost as soon as it was built. When plans for the Tower were first drawn up in the 12th Century, a spot was chosen with a commanding view of Pisa. It was beautiful. But not a very good place to build, since in ancient Italy the site had been a lagoon. Piero Pierotti, is an art historian and professor of medieval architecture at the University of Pisa. Pisa was a system of islands in the middle of a very wide lagoon. This lagoon was slowly filled in by the two most important Tuscan rivers. The Arno and the Auser. And where the rivers had filled in, they left mud, which is softer and wet. The soft wet soil left behind by the rivers was where the Tower was built. The ground is so soft that it's really like building a brick Tower on a soft carpet. You can go to a certain height, and no matter how straight you try and keep that Tower, it will start to lean and then fall over. Why build a Tower doomed to lean? Although the medieval architects knew that the soil was soft, they may not have known how soft. They thought they had found the perfect spot to build a monument to the glory of Pisa. Today, Pisa is a quiet university town of 100,000. In the 11 th Century, it was a powerful city-state. Its navy roved the seas conquering other cities. In 1062, the Pisa navy sailed to Palermo, the capital of Sicily, bent on conquest. When Pisa's fleet arrived in Palermo... the Sicilians they encountered there said that the citizens of Pisa were the meanest and most ignorant people they had ever met. In reality, there was this strong arrogance of considering themselves the first, the best. This arrogance made it easy for other cities to fiind allies against Pisa. In 1063, the victorious Pisan navy returned, their chests bursting with pride and their pockets bursting with Sicilian money. They decided to build a glorious square, the religious center of medieval Pisa, the square known today as the Piazza dei Miracoli, Square of Miracles. It would have a magnificent cathedral, one that would surpass any other church in Italy. Next to it would be a baptistery where Pisa's richest citizens could be baptized. It's crowning glory, the masterpiece of Pisan civilization would be the cathedral's bell Tower, or campanile. On August Ninth, 1173, the foundation for the Tower was laid, directed it is thought, by Pisan architect, Bonnano Pisano. By the time the third level was built the Tower was starting to settle unevenly. It was leaning north not south as it does today. The Italians weren't worried. Many buildings in Pisa leaned a little. They simply compensated by making the columns and arches on the north side of the third level a little taller. Pisa had something like 10,000 towers. It was known that an adjustment of the ground was necessary. They would start construction and they would look onto which side the Tower was leaning and would build up the other side. They didn't have the technology which we have now. If we were doing the Tower now we would have driven what are called piles down onto that dense sand 40 meters down. But they didn't have that technology in 1173. They just learnt that you could build towers to a certain height from years and centuries of experience. But what they had learned from experience, did not hold true for this Tower. The soil here was softer and the Tower would have fallen if they continued building. But they didn't. In 1178, construction stopped. Some historians say it was because the Tower was tilting too much. Others say it was political and military troubles in Pisa. Whatever the reason, the delay lasted 100 years. The Tower survived only because the interruption allowed the soil beneath the Tower to settle to include the resistance and to support the fiinal lot of the Tower. When work resumed in the 13th Century the Tower was leaning about seven inches to the north. As building continued upwards, the Tower began to tilt in the opposite direction. This time, the masons tried to correct the tilt by making the stones on the south side taller. They corrected the shape just to bring the Tower in a vertical position so that the Tower is not actually straight. It is like a banana. It is shaped in this way. In 1278, work on the Tower stopped just short of the fiinal floor. 82 years passed before architect Tomasso Andrea di Pisa came on to build the bell chamber. By 1370, the Tower was complete and the original vision of the great square with its Tower was realized. But as soon as the Tower reached its full height, the lean started to accelerate. They didn't realize that by putting the little bell chamber on top it was really going to start moving. They didn't have that understanding at that time. It was thought at the time that the bell chamber would stabilize the Tower The bell chamber is designed to correct the problem, to balance out the whole preexisting structure. The 14th Century solution was to build a different number of steps on each side of the bell chamber. On the north side were four steps, on the south, six. In total, the south side ended up being 34 inches higher than the north. To further balance the weight larger bells were placed on the north side. Finally, Pisa's cathedral had its Tower, and the Tower had its voice. Next to the entrance to the Tower masons sculpted a relief of two ships entering the Pisan port, as a tribute to Pisa's mighty marine power. Unfortunately by this time, Pisa's marine power wasn't very mighty. The Tower conceived as symbol of Pisa's grandeur, was now, a crooked testament to the city's faded dreams. I am sure that many explained to you in a precise, technical way why the Tower is leaning. But if we wanted to joke, the Tower could be leaning for another reason. Its imperfection could be considered a symbol of the death that was already inside the society of Pisa. The Square was supposed to be completely paved in marble. It was never paved the grass is still here. It wasn't supposed to be this way. And all of this gives the idea of what was thought that this city would become and never became. The people of Pisa would try for centuries to straighten the whole thing out. >From the moment it was complete the leaning Tower was crooked and loved by the people of Pisa. It is one of the miraculous structures of the Middles Ages. And especially since it started to fall, it gave it a kind of reclame that normally it might not have. It quickly became the center of public life. Big feasts and celebrations took place on the Piazza. Standing on the balconies every family and even their guests had a privileged space. They could come out like they did from the balconies of their own palaces. It was like having a reserved box for the theater. In 1590, the Tower even played host to a little known local scientist, named Galileo. Legend has it he conducted his famous experiments with gravity from its bell chamber. While the Tower's lean wasn't increasing much, the building was sinking. By the 19th Century, the Tower was slumping down about 10 feet into the ground. And a part of the first floor was completely obscured. And in 1838, an Italian architect Alessandro Gheradesca, decided to do something about it. Alessandro Gheradesca said "Wouldn't it be a wonderful idea to dig out around the foundation so everyone can look in and see these lovely columns going down to the base of the Tower?" So he went in there and dug out this walkway around the base of the Tower that's called the catino. Unknown to Gheradesca, there was a water table within yards of the surface. No sooner had he dug down, than water came gushing in. Suddenly, the Tower that had stood serenely and safely for five centuries, lost its balance. It lunged over a foot. And how it didn't fall over, we really don't know. It was another miracle that it didn't. The Tower had survived the first modern attempt to improve it. And for 70 years, no further attempts to help it were made. Then, in 1902, Venice's St. Marco's Square, a bell Tower came crashing down. It had stood more than 1,000 years. But on the morning of July 14th, a huge crack snaked up the Tower and the whole structure collapse into an 18,000-ton pile of dust and rubble. It took some two days that collapse so there were no people killed by that. But it was impossible to stop that collapse. Scared by the disaster in Venice the Italian government formed a committee to study Pisa's Tower. Experts reviewed the leaning Tower's condition, but nothing was done to stabilize it. That is until 1933, when fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, turned his attention to the Tower. Mussolini was obsessed with returning Italy to the glory it hasn't known for several centuries. It was unthinkable that Italy's national symbol should be a tilting Tower. He had made the trains run on time, how difficult would it be to straighten a Tower? The idea was to try and inject cement into the foundation masonry, not into the ground but into the masonry. And the reason being that water was seeping up through Gheradesca's catino up through the masonry and washing out the mortar. Mussolini's engineers thought that excess water under the Tower was weakening the foundation. They decided to seal the base of the Tower with concrete to prevent water from seeping in from below. Workers drilled over 361 holes into the Tower's foundations. Then they pumped in over 80 tons of cement. Once again, the Tower's delicate balance was shattered and it lurched southward nearly three and a half inches. Now the Tower was in real danger but there was no time to fiix it. World War II had started. American soldiers were hitting the back door of Hitler's fortress. This was Italy. Bombs were raining down on Italy, reducing large sections to rubble. In 1944, the Allies entered Pisa hoping to control the Arno River, which ran through the city on its way to the Mediterranean Sea. The Allied troops found themselves under attack by artillery fire from above. But where could it be coming from? The Germans, as they were retreating demolished all the bell towers because they could be observation posts. So the bell towers of important churches were demolished. Obviously the most important of the bell towers was this one and it has not been demolished. The Allies suspected the Germans were firing from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. US Sergeant Leon Weckstein, a scout with the 91st Infantry division, received his orders in July 1944. He was to take out what soldiers called, The Tiltin' Hilton, and if he detected any enemy action blow it to smithereens. Weckstein would recall his mission 50 years later in his memoir, Through My Eyes. I was sent out to get as close as I could to the Tower. And if I saw any action up there at all, I was to direct all these weapons against the Tower to get it out of the way. In those days, we were very gung-ho. If it meant the life of one of our men, we would have destroyed the Tower very easily. Weckstein watched for hours. Nothing seemed move inside the Tower. He thought about blasting it to pieces anyway, just in case. On a basis of suspicion, I might have just said, go ahead, fire, you know? But there might have been an ounce of sentiment in seeing this beautiful Tower and what it was. And probably that registered strongly enough for me to withhold any rash movement on my part. Then, artillery bursts began exploding above Weckstein's head. Judging by the direction of the fire, Weckstein reported to his commander that there were Germans in the Tower. The fate of the building hung on the US Army's next decision. At the last minute, Weckstein was ordered to retreat. The army had spared the beautiful building. The Leaning Tower of Pisa had survived World War II, for the most part. The only serious damage to the Tower during the war was the breaking of a small column, not due indeed to the Allied Forces attacks, but simply to a mistake of the Pisan anti-aircraft, which was not capable of striking one aircraft during the whole war, but was able to strike a small column of the bell Tower. In the post war years, the Tower became a favorite attraction for tourists in Europe. Meanwhile, it continued its slow swoop downward. At the beginning of the century there was not a great concern about the tower. And even in 1940,1950, the increase of inclination was very, very little. But the speed of inclination increased so in 1990 it was doubled. By the end of the 1980's, the Tower was leaning 17 feet off the perpendicular. The more the Tower leaned, the more its unevenly distributed weight pressed against the blocks of marble that made up its thin facade and the greater the risk that the marble would give way. The Tower obviously was ever in the danger of collapse, but with the progressive inclination the safety margin was decreasing. The collapse of Tower was expected in next 30 to 50 years. Despite the growing risk, the Italian government didn't authorize any action until 1989, when a 900-year old bell tower in nearby Pavia came crashing down. And it wasn't even leaning. This was sudden collapse. It took ten or 20 seconds, not more. And unfortunately we had some people killed in that collapse. The Italian government announced that Pisa's Tower was unsafe. No longer would the Leaning Tower be able to welcome the hundreds of thousands of people who traveled from everywhere to see it. At three o'clock on January seventh 1990, Italy's most famous building closed its doors. To see the Tower closed for the first time in its history for security reasons, it made you realize that there was a real risk, a concrete danger. That day I cried. What a sin. It was beautiful. Then to see the Tower without anyone in it, it was no longer beautiful. It was sad, very sad. The closing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa could have been easily avoided. This was done to dramatize the problems that the Tower faced and in order to justify this radical intervention. Because when there is a dramatic case, a close danger, then the money is forthcoming. In 1990, the Italian government formed a committee of engineers to save the Tower once and for all. They began by reviewing potential solutions. Proposals poured in from all over the world. You get some really wacky ideas like balloons and growing trees up the middle and so on, which are good fun but not very serious. As creative solutions were studied engineers gathered data. Measurements taken throughout the century, were used to track the Tower's lean. And in 1992, a computerized monitoring system was installed to keep track of the Tower's smallest movements. Sensors were attached to very major crack. If a crack widened, it could be the start of a structural collapse. These instruments, measure the thickness of the crack in real time, so we have nine years of recording of the movements of these cracks. A routine was established that continues to this day. Every morning a technician enters the tower to check on its condition. Through a horizontally leveled telescope, any increase in the tower's tilt can be detected up to one 100th of a millimeter. Taut wires cut across the tower to measure any distortion in the structure. Three pendulums incased in gray tubes track any shift in the tower's center. They hang from the seventh level down to the first floor. After two years, the team studying the Tower still couldn't agree on how to fiix it. But they were ready to try some temporary solutions. Their first task was to strengthen the Tower at its weakest point, the critical zone. The inclination of the Tower is creating very high compression on this side, because the Tower is inclined in this direction. This edge is really the position in which the compression stress is the highest one. So the fail of the collapse would begin certainly in this position if would happen. Workers wrapped a belt of plastic covered steel cables around the Tower's second story in an effort to keep the cracks from widening further. The operation went smoothly. The band of steel was discreet enough not to arouse any protest. Then, over the course of six months 600 tons of lead weights were methodically added to the base of the north side to keep the lean from getting worse. The first lead weight was added on July 13, 1993. Nervous engineers recorded every step of the process with their own cameras. Tests were carried out to calculate how the Tower was reacting to the lead weights. But nothing is certain with a building that is so unique. We put the first lead weight on and we got a positive response. Because it was by no means certain that we would, it was very nerve wracking. The tension was really very high indeed. After the last weight was added, monitors registered a northward movement of almost an inch. The intervention had been a success. It was a historical moment. For the first time in 800 years the Leaning Tower of Pisa moved back the other way. There was just one snag. The lead weights were an eyesore. Art experts protested. The people of Pisa complained. The weights had to go. The lead weights are rather ugly. And in Italy they have a saying that anything temporary becomes permanent. And so, the Tower's engineers came up with a daring and complex plan, a plan that some feared would destroy the treasured Tower. The plan to eliminate the weights holding the Tower down was so controversial and so filled with danger, that it's outcome came to be known as Black September. The idea was to build a concrete ring round the Tower's base from which ten cables would be driven 50 meters underground to anchor the Tower in place. Laying the concrete ring was a dangerous task. Workers would have to dig under the catino, the walkway around the base of the Tower. The ground was full of water and once digging started, the water might gush up. But the engineers in charge were confident they had a way around that. The ground would be frozen using liquid nitrogen. The frozen ground would form a physical barrier that would stop ground water from flowing into the shallow excavation the concrete ring would be built in. Before the freeze started, engineers came across something puzzling. There was already another concrete ring in the ground, and it was attached to the Tower. Engineers guessed that it dated back to the 1800's. There was nothing about this ring in historical records, but it seemed safe to go ahead. On September seventh, workers started freezing the ground. They made some holes around the tower. And inside these holes they put liquid nitrogen, practically transforming all the ground underneath the tower into a freezer. For 36 hours liquid nitrogen was pumped into the soil. At first, the Tower didn't react. Then over night, the Tower suddenly moved one 16th of an inch, an amount almost equal to what the tower moves in a year. As we froze the ground the ice reacted against this concrete in the ground and caused the tower to move adversely. And as soon as that happened we stopped the job. When the water in the soil froze it expanded. The expanded soil pushed the concrete ring down, leaving a gap between the Tower and the ring. Once the soil defrosted, the tower sank down into this space, and lurched further south. I was extremely worried. And this was really a very very difficult week. We faced a serious risk of losing the tower, because when Tower started to rotate toward the south with this rate, nobody was able to evaluate if the Tower will stop or not. Desperate to stop the Tower from leaning further, engineers quickly added another 230 tons of lead weight to the Tower's base. The Tower stopped moving. But instead of fewer weights there were now more. And the tilt, instead of diminishing was increasing. Nothing had gone according to plan. This is a strange monument and one that has had too many doctors trying to fiix it. The Tower has most often been at risk of falling down, not from what ails it, but due to the mistakes of its doctors who have been exaggerating with their cure. In effect, the Tower has most often been in danger when there were external interventions. All of Italy was outraged. After five years of studying the Tower with the most advanced technology available, somehow the problem was worse. Shortly after the deep freeze of 1995 all work on the Tower stopped. The Tower remained closed. No one in Pisa knew when, if ever it would open again. It was a painful situation for a city that identified so completely with the monument. It's the maximum. It's the emblem of the city. Because when we go around the world when we say where we are from, that we are from Pisa, the first the first association is the Tower. The Tower is a universal symbol for the citizens of Pisa. As a little girl I used to always come here to the Piazza. And slowly, a passion began to grow within me as I became aware and began to understand the importance of the monument. The Tower was like a lung something that we felt. Not only because people had once climbed it, that makes it alive, but also because closing it brings a little economic damage. Pisans from all walks of life felt the closing of the Tower in their hearts, not to mention their pocket books. It's the Tower that attracts the tourist. As soon as tourists arrive, they see the Tower and that's it. They don't see the other things. When the Tower was open, there was a line, the people would climb on the Tower, they would have time to eat, they would come to our restaurants. A lot of people would stop to have a cappuccino. And then they would go inside the Tower. Now instead, since the Tower is shut down, our work is a hit and run. Tourists arrive, they take some pictures, they do a little bit of shopping for some souvenirs, and then they run away. With the Tower closed, tourism fell by 20 percent. It was a frustrating situation for the people of Pisa. They depended on tourism and tourism depends on the Tower. It is considered one of the most famous structures in the world. I believe that there cannot be a person on earth that doesn't know what the Tower of Pisa is. Tourists come from Japan, from America, from Canada, from Australia. These are people that have never seen the Tower before, and they come here expressly to see the Tower. Not to see the city. For us, the Tower is an artistic wealth, a priceless property. There was great concern about the alterations being made to this priceless property. At Columbia University in New York James Beck, a professor of art history has founded Art Watch, a non profit watchdog organization dedicated to protecting artistic treasures. Beck advocates an open exchange of ideas to save the Tower. It's very bad for the preservation of the Tower that they're so secretive. They put in a particular cure and then that cure fails and they put in another cure, but there's never discussion and careful explanation. If you believe that this is an object that belongs to the world, then you have to have all of the input that's possible. Beck believed that the Tower was not in imminent danger. There was time enough to debate the options openly. The estimates are 35 to 70 years. Therefore, the rush to do these rather stupid interventions in some cases, was totally unnecessary. Everybody wanted to get credit for saving the Tower of Pisa, just because it was good publicity. Whatever the objection of critics, by 1998, a new plan had been set in motion. And if it worked, the Tower would be safe for hundreds of years. Italy's team of engineers felt confident that it had come up with a way to stabilize the Tower. Their solution was a process called soil extraction. Engineers would remove soil from the north side of the Tower. The remaining soil would start to compress to fill in the gaps and the north side would literally settle down. We looked at, at least 12 different methods of doing it. But the more we looked at it the more we felt that we had to get gravity to work for us. Most of the solutions had been try to lift the low side. Do something to support the south side. But in doing that the ground is so soft you would disturb it and probably the Tower would fall over. And so this solution developed that maybe we could cause the north side of the ground to subside in some way. And the tower would follow that gravity would cause the tower to rotate northwards. If the project succeeded, the Tower's lean would be reduced by half a degree, or 16 inches. Visually, the change would be imperceptible. That means that for American and Japanese tourists this will make practically no difference. The local Pisans greeted the new plan with skepticism. They've required a lot of time to fiind a way that could insure security and stability to he work, that won't present any problems, because the Tower could go down very fast. One mistake is enough, and when the Tower comes down who's going to stop it? Soil extraction is a relatively rare technique, but far from new. As early as the 1800's, it had been used to diminish the lean on St. Chad's Tower in England. More recently it had been used successfully on the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. But remarkably, the technique had been recommended for the Tower of Pisa in 1962, when Fernando Terracina, an Italian architect, had submitted the idea. What has the committee done in the end? After spending ten years and 25 million dollars, what does it do? It accepts a project by Fernando Terracina, a project of under-excavation from the 1960's. Terracina's suggestion was easy to miss. It was buried in a technical report three decades old. What further astonished critics was that the idea had been suggested again in 1990 by Vittorio Novelli and Nazareno Paccaloni, surveyors from Cesna, Italy. They told us it was a process that was too violent and impossible to carry out. I kept in with the president of the committee who, very cordially, told me that he was trying to fiind a unanimous decision on the choice of an intervention. And that our project wasn't taken into consideration. Yet, in the end, the committee adopted an operation with many similarities to ours. In fact, we were a little bit astonished after such a long time, nine years. With so much at stake and with the eyes of the world upon the current team of engineers, everyone's nerves became strained. It's been incredibly tense. You can imagine you don't rush into a tower that is on the point of falling over and start digging furiously. This risk is huge because the Tower could feel unstable from one moment to the next since it has been in this position for so many centuries. We are now all in the hands of these people, waiting. It just seems to me it's Keystone Cops. And that fact that they had five different operational plans in ten years, shows that they're not very secure about what they're doing. The committee believes in its plan. But just in case the Tower moved the wrong way, it proposed wrapping two steel cables around the Tower's third level. The cables were to be anchored into the ground, 100 yards away. If catastrophe struck during the soil extraction, the cables could be tensioned to hold the Tower in place. There was never any intention that we would use the cables to pull the Tower back. I think there was one newspaper article, which said, "They are going to irresponsibly drag the Tower back by the cables." That was never the intention. They're simply there to gently hold the Tower if it began to move. The cables would in that event be tensioned by lead weights so the load on them would be constant. Work began in December 1998. Putting the cables in position was a major and perilous task. Each cable was 340 feet long and two inches thick. They were enormously heavy. Just ten yards of cable weighed a half a ton. We felt that it was necessary to have those there just so that if something went wrong, we could hold the Tower and fiind out what was happening and correct it. So they are simply a safe guard and the contractor calls them his parachute. With parachute in place, the way was clear to start extracting the soil. On the tenth of February, 1999, engineers recorded the start of the process. First 12 pipes were placed approximately four yards from the edge of the Tower. Then, with a kind of mechanical corkscrew, the ground was removed very gradually from beneath the bell tower. At the end of five months the results were in. The Tower had moved over half an inch north. For the committee, the victory couldn't have been sweeter. Finally, after ten years, they had found a method to stabilize the Tower. The response has been beyond our wildest expectations. It's been very positive. We've moved the top of the tower northwards just by drilling a few holes. Far fewer than we are going to use with the full intervention. So at present, it's looking good. But you don't raise the flag when you've taken the first step up Everest. So we have to be very very careful. We've got a very, very long way to go still. As it turned out, they had even longer to go than they thought. Just as they began making progress the money ran out. It's a paradox that at the exact moment when the right project has fiinally been found, there is a risk that the funds to develop it are lacking. So, we can see that the relationship between the committee's work and the government's response has always been a difficult one and sometimes even dramatic. The Tower that had survived 800 years of danger, was now facing a truly formidable foe the Italian bureaucracy. Although many people were infuriated with the committee's slow pace, the committee placed the blame squarely elsewhere, the government. The whole project has taken an inordinate length of time... largely due to Italian bureaucracy. We are set up by a law, which has to be renewed every two months, and very often it isn't. And we have long, long periods of time, anything up to six months or more, where we have no mandate. And people say, "Why haven't you done anything?" The simple answer is, ask the Italian government. The mission to save the Tower was once again on hold. While the bureaucratic wheels turn slowly, life in Pisa goes on as it always has. The tourists who visit the Tower know little of its complex history or how close it's come to destruction. I read that they did something on the foundation to keep it from falling over. They didn't want to set it up straight, they'd lost tourism, hey? And I think they shouldn't. It's like if they take the smile away from the Mona Lisa. It looks like it's going to fall over. Well, it was crooked when they first built it, so I'm not surprised that it is still crooked now. It does look different now when you see it in real life compared to seeing it in books and magazines. It's quite different when you're actually right there in front of it and you're trying to figure out how it actually got like that and how it stays up. So, it's amazing. It's one example of something that went wrong. But at the same time they're trying to fiix it and it's going to be a nightmare. Just imagine somebody tries to straighten it up and it falls apart. We wait. Who knows when it will fall? It is something everyone wants to witness. As the Tower waits for the Italian government to release funds so the soil extraction project can resume, everyone else waits too. We are waiting of the Italian government, because we are now not in position to start for a number of bureaucratic and fiinancial problems. So that we are ready for May and now we are in November waiting for someone saying to you, go. For everyone, even the engineers working on the Tower, it has been a long journey. When the work will be fiinished I shall be extremely happy to become a free citizen and not be involved in Pisa Tower and not be involved, the mass media, not be involved in the relations with politicians and so on. Pisans long for the day the Tower will reopen. But no one expects that day to come any time soon. Some political problems. Some fiinancial. The funds arrive they don't arrive. They close the building site they threaten to close, then the money returns and we start again. In short, these are all the things that we Italians are used to and we have to be used to. Often I hear the elderly people of Pisa say, "But how could it possibly be, in the year 2000, when everything has been invented, and we live in an information age where man has gone into space, that a tower like this one takes more than ten years to stabilize?" At the beginning they were talking about six months, then a year. Nobody could have known that the work would last ten years and still continues. Once the soil extraction can be exhumed and completed, the Tower will, presumably, be stabilized and can be open to the public again. Or will it? The problem to open the Tower has not yet been discussed by the committee. Because a large part of these people believe that the Tower should be admired from the square not climbing up. We expected that the Tower would have opened again for the millennium. Instead we found out that the work will go on and that nothing is certain anymore. I fiind all of this deeply unfair. We are fighting to have the tower reopened so that everyone can once again admire its beauty. We have faith and we hope to see the Tower soon beautiful and smiling like once it was. No one can imagine a Pisa without its Tower. The Tower is simply unique, with a unique hold on the imagination of Italy and the world. There's a little quirk in the wonderful Italian romance that likes things that are a little different. And the fact that this is a leaning tower, as opposed to just an old building, is romantic in their eyes. Actually, I'm convinced that no architect in the world today would be capable of creating a thing like this. They could dream of it, but defiinitely not build it. Nature decided it would be tilted, that it would come out inclined, therefore people come to see this miracle this is still standing. It is so magnificent. Such a beautiful structure. And the whole Piazza is so beautiful. It really would be unthinkable that the Tower should be lost really to the world. I hope the future is at least another 300 years. The future of the Leaning Tower of Pisa remains as uncertain as ever. But for 800 years the Tower has risen above human folly, serenely surviving friend and foe. And it continues to do so today soaring into the sky, magnificent and improbable beautiful and strange, a wonder of the world.