The origins of the tower go back to the 12th century, when Pisa’s city fathers decided to celebrate the power and spiritual authority of their state with the erection of a superb marble cathedral and baptistery, topped off by a great campanile or bell tower. If the proposed solutions here in Pisa were new, the problem was not. The issue was not so much the restoration of a fading or eroding work of art dating from long ago. The Leaning Tower, which all came to see and perhaps had hoped to climb, was out of bounds, encased in scaffolding-with copious explanations about how here, in the Piazza dei Miracoli, the latest miracles of modern science would finally freeze the tower’s historic tilt. In the 1990s, as tourists in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel marvelled at the renewed brightness of Michelangelo’s ceiling, visitors to Pisa were in for a let-down. Like the figures on a rotating weather vane, one great building or gallery pops out for all to see just as another goes into hiding for a while.
Italy is crammed with historic works of art in need of restoration.
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