Eight hundred and 34 years on, the city of Pisa’s world-famous leaning tower is to get a distant double. Three miles away from Il Campo dei Miracoli (“Square of Miracles”), home to the original tower, work is about to begin on constructing a modern tower of exactly the same dimensions, set in a square the same size as the medieval Campo.
The centrepiece of a new development on rubbish-strewn wasteland beyond Galileo Galilei airport, the tower is also claimed to have been designed so it appears to be tilting. “It will be ‘virtually bent’,” according to Corriere della Sera newspaper, “and thanks to an architectonic game of light and shadow, the observer will see it as leaning in a mixture of virtual reality and metropolitan mirage.”
“Absolute rubbish!” chortles Dante Oscar Benini, 60, the architect of the new tower. “The tower will have a retractable glass sheath to keep it cool in summer and warm in winter, and some stupid person saw the drawing of this and said I wanted to copy the leaning tower’s tilt. But that’s not part of my idea at all.”
The new building is, however, intended as a sort of homage to the original tower, of which it has a splendid though distant view. “The client wanted to build a stadium here, but it would have been very small,” said Mr Benini. “I said, we have to have an idea. I said, what good new architecture has been built in Pisa after Miracle Square? None. In the past five centuries only very ugly housing for the people has been built here. So this is my gesture of respect to the tower.” The development will contain offices, a small hotel and housing set around the new piazza.
“My great dream,” said the architect, “is that Japanese tourists will come here after they have seen the leaning tower. They will take the lift to the roof, where there will be a viewing gallery as well as a bar, restaurant and gym, and eat a pizza and take a photo of the leaning tower. And then one, just one, photo of my tower.”
The original, the bell-tower of Pisa’s cathedral, began to tilt soon after construction began in 1173. In 1964 international experts, including British engineers, were given the task of sta- bilising the building without correcting the lean – which provides the city with vital revenue from tourists. The corrective work was completed in 2001, and the building is said to be safe for the next 300 years.
by Peter Popham
Courtesy of The Independent
