Leaning Tower of Pisa

“ Few of us can have had a childhood so unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional diversions shan’t have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model of the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the famous crookedness of its campanile. ”

“ But we may as well remember also, that although a thousand nameless architects have written essays to show how the Leaning Tower of Pisa should have been built, it still continues to hold its reputation as one of the Seven Wonders of the world, and still continues to lean. ”

“ Thus alone in this place of death Pisa lives, ah! not in the desolate streets of the modern city, but fading on the walls of her Campo Santo, a ghost among ghosts, immortalised by an alien hand.
Coming last of all to the greatest wonder of the Piazza, it is really with surprise you find the Campanile so beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful tower of Italy. It is like a lily leaning in the wind, it is like the slanting horn of an unicorn, it is like an ivory Madonna that the artist has not had the heart to carve since the ivory was so fair. ”

“ That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man's history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. ”

“ Here, in one grand square, within a stone's throw of each other, are the four wonders of Pisa; the great Duomo, or cathedral, the Baptistery, the Campo Santo, and the Leaning Tower—standing in a magnificent group by themselves in the open space, rendering all else near them shrunken, petty, and insignificant by their beauty and superb finish. These glorious structures seem like the newly-created wonders of [533] some magical workman, who has placed them here together in the quiet old city for the tourists of all nations to come and gaze upon, admire, wonder, and depart. ”

“ It leans so much on each layer as to make the top of the tower reach away over the base on the leaning side, so much so that, were it to break loose, it would fall over to the earth without touching the base or foundation of the leaning side of the tower.
The City of Pisa is well known in Italian history, by the awful contentions that used to exist among next door neighbors. Men used to fight on the top of their own houses, and go on conquering, from house to house, until they would slay as many as twenty lords, whose property would be theirs as spoils of war. ”

“ The Italians are not considered a courageous people, yet it is surprising what hazards they will encounter sometimes, and that, too, without necessity. After seeing a powder-mill on Mount Vesuvius, it did not much surprise me to find leaning towers nodding their lofty heads over a populous city. The other tower is only one hundred and forty feet high, and inclines six feet and a half. The same erroneous belief, as in the case of the tower of Pisa, prevails with regard to these structures, namely, that they were built upright, and leaned afterwards by the sinking of the foundations. ”

“ On returning, we had a fine view of Pisa. In the distance it appears like a city of white marble, with its tower leaning at one end, and the blue mountains far away in the background, looking, however, much nearer than is actually the case. Distance is almost annihilated in this clear, dry, Italian atmosphere, which also to a great extent prevents decay, the most ancient buildings looking often singularly fresh. "Antiquity refuses to look ancient in Italy; it insists on retaining its youthful aspect." ”

“ Pisa is more of a sanitarium than it is a gay{126} watering place however. The city is, in fact, like its celebrated leaning tower, half tottering on the brink of its grave. Commerce and industry are far from active and its streets are half deserted; many of them are literally grass-grown and all the others are paved with great flat clean-swept flags, a delight for the automobilist, whose chief experience of pavements has been in France and Belgium.
The entrance to Pisa by road from the north is one of the most pleasing of that of any Italian city. ”

“ From the twelfth century, Pisa gave an impetus to the art by building its Duomo, its Baptistery, its Leaning Tower, and the cloisters of its famous Campo Santo; so many admirable works forming an era in the history of modern art, and in a brilliant manner opening the career on which so many distinguished men were to enter, rivalling each other in invention, in science, and in genius. In these monuments the union of Oriental taste with the traditions of ages gone by created an originality as grand as it was graceful. ”

“ The tower of Pisa is to me like a word from this doctrine; no longer a leaning tower, but an image of a sinner who raises himself, or is raised up by the invisible, who dwells above and in the light.
Campo Santo is a magnificent museum of tombs, interesting rather with reference to historical art, than for the beauty of its works of art. For the greater number of these are mutilated or belong to a class of art long since dead and gone, as for example ”

“ This, you know, is the wood where Ugolino in Dante dreamed he was hunting when they had shut him up to starve in the Famine Tower at Pisa, and it deserves its fame. It is quite another world from the hot rich valleys below; among the trees there are fresh, English-looking meadows with daisies very big and very pink, and beyond—the wonderful Mediterranean coast, rose colour in the sunset. Pisa far down there showed every detail distinct, cathedral and leaning tower like toys ”

“ The most attractive part of [Pg 182] the city is that lining the Arno, where there are several palaces of some architectural pretensions. The great attraction of Pisa lies just outside of the city proper, consisting of a group of edifices which are celebrated all over the world. These are the Cathedral, the Baptistery, and the Belfry, or, as it is more generally known, the Leaning Tower. ”

“ I never knew how beautiful marble could be until I came to Pisa and Rome. Somehow I had associated Pisa with the Leaning Tower, and not with the Baptistry. I knew it existed, and, vaguely, that it was worth seeing; but Pisa meant the Leaning Tower to me. Now I couldn't tell you which has left the deeper impression. I'm not at all the same girl that I was before I put Pisa and Rome into the gallery of my mind. I must make myself a worthy frame for such pictures as I am storing up now. ”

“ On the one side is Pisa, with its leaning tower, and on the other we may see them at Rovigo, Ferrara, and elsewhere. The soil here is generally bad for foundations, I suppose, and these plain brick towers without any projection at the base are the most ill-contrived constructions for such{300} foundations that one can conceive. In this case it is possible to get views of the two towers which shew an apparently impossible amount of overhanging on the part of the smaller one, and I confess to a strong preference for walking to what one may call the windward side of such an erection! ”

“ Pisa had already, at that day, its leaning tower, its cathedral, its baptistery, the exterior ornamentation of which had just been changed, its Campo Santo, the paintings of which were not finished, and were not yet attributed to Orcagna. Along the walls of the cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques which inspired the Tuscan artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phædra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. ”

“ But at all times, except on the occasion of the triennial festival of the patron saint of the city, Pisa is little better than a solitude: the few inhabitants it contains have nothing to do but to kill time. I visited the place again about a month later, and nothing could be more striking than the contrast which its lonely and silent streets offered to the gay crowds that now met my view within its walls.
The first object to which a traveller hastens, is the leaning tower ”

“ In the evening, at half-past 6, we left San Rémo by express—reached Genoa at 11, and the next day at 1.10 p.m. set off for Pisa, when our route through Spezzia and near Carrara extended along the coast of the Mediterranean, through scenery of the most beautiful description. At 7 o'clock we arrived at Pisa, and the next morning, before our departure for Florence, saw the exterior of its celebrated leaning tower, 180 feet high, and 13 feet out of the perpendicular, built in the year 1174, by Bonanno of Pisa. ”

“ To enter Pisa by the Porta Nuova, coming at once into the Piazza del Duomo, is as though at midday, on the highway, one had turned aside into a secret meadow full of a strange silence and dazzling light, where have been abandoned among the wild flowers the statues of the gods. For the Piazza is just that—a meadow scattered with daisies, among which, as though forgotten, stand unbroken a Cathedral, a Baptistery, a Tower, and a Cemetery, all of marble, separate and yet one in the consummate beauty of their grouping. ”

“ I think now that perhaps of all the lovely things I saw abroad the cathedral and tower and baptistery and campo santo of Pisa grouped as they are in one lovely, spacious, green-sodded area, are the loveliest and most perfect of all. It does not matter to me that the cathedral at Pisa is not a true Gothic cathedral, as some have pointed out. It is better than that—it is Italian Gothic; with those amazing artistic conceptions, a bell-tower and a baptistery and a campo santo thrown in. Trust the Italians to do anything that they do grandly, with a princely lavishness. ”

“ The Pisa tower is circular on plan, about 51 ft. in diameter and 172 ft. high. Not including the belfry storey, which is set back on the inner wall, it is divided into seven storeys all surrounded with an open gallery or arcade. (See Architecture, Plate I. fig. 62.) Owing to the sinking of the piles on the south side, the inclination was already noticed when the tower was about 30 ft. ”

“ During the twelfth century, when the cities of Italy, 'tutte piene di tirranni,' were rivals in arms as afterwards in arts, watch-towers of considerable elevation were frequently erected. In Venice, in Pisa, in Cremona, in Modena, and in Florence these singular structures yet remain; but none are more remarkable than the towers of the Asinelli and Garisenda in Bologna. The former, according to one chronicler, was built in 1109, while other authorities assign it to the year 1119. The Garisenda tower, constructed a few years later, has been immortalized in the verse of Dante. ”

“ Desolate and sober enough on a day of rain, when the sun shines this gaunt outpost of Pisa, for it is little more, is as gay as a flower by the wayside. The road runs through it, giving it its one long and almost straight street, while behind the poor houses that have so little to boast of, lies a beautiful old Piazza, with a great palace seemingly deserted on one side and an old tower and a church with a beautiful façade on another. Always a prize of the enemy, Cascina in the Pisan wars fell to Lucca, to the Guelph League, and to Florence. ”

“ XII. Still, the reader will say that all these variations are probably dependent more on the bad foundation than on the architect's feeling. Not so the exquisite delicacies of change in the proportions and dimensions of the apparently symmetrical arcades of the west front. It will be remembered that I said the tower of Pisa was the only ugly tower in Italy, because its tiers were equal, or nearly so, in height ”

“ For Pisa herself is soon lost in the vagueness of a world thus delicately touched by sun and cloud, and seemingly so full of ruinous or deserted things like the beautiful great Church of Settimo, whose tower you may see far away in the golden summer weather standing quite alone in a curve of the river ”

“ The cathedral and tower of Pisa show greater unity of conception.
The next great change was, that after the eleventh century, the interlaced work, or Solomon's knot, was no longer the secret sign of the Comacine work. They probably found that there was a limit even to the combinations of the interlaced line, or that it did not give enough relief. Certain it is, that on the rise of Romanesque architecture, the intreccio faded away into mere mouldings, or got changed into foliaged scrolls for architraves ”

“ But the same Corsican face is so plentiful in some parts of Italy at this day, that a more commonplace solution of the coincidence is unavoidable.
If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its Tower, it may claim to be, at least, the second or third in right of its beggars. They waylay the unhappy visiter at every turn, escort him to every door he enters at, and lie in wait for him, with strong reinforcements, at every door by which they know he must come out. ”

“ Cities full of towers were common all over southern France and central Italy, but Tuscany had more than any other state, and those of Pisa were the most famous of all. The habit of building and dwelling in towers rather than in houses may have arisen from the difficulty of expanding laterally within an enclosed city; but a stronger reason may be found in the dangers and uncertainty of life in a period when a man might be attacked at any moment by his fellow-citizen, as well as by the enemy of the state. It was a distinct military advantage to overlook one's neighbor, who might be an enemy ”