Leaning Tower of Pisa
— a fall that never finishes.
Not only on a wall.
“Every photograph of Pisa is the same photograph: someone in the foreground, palm out, holding it up. The tower has been falling since 1178, when the third storey rose on ground too soft to hold its weight. The builders kept going, curving the upper floors to chase the vertical, and the lean only deepened. Eight centuries later it still stands, caught now at just under four degrees after engineers spent a decade easing it back. It is the bell tower of the cathedral beside it. Almost nobody comes for the cathedral.
Leaning Tower of Pisa, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The tower stands on the Piazza dei Miracoli, the walled cathedral green at the northern edge of Pisa, in Tuscany. It is the free-standing campanile, or bell tower, of Pisa Cathedral, and shares the green with the cathedral, the round Baptistery, and the Camposanto cemetery. The four monuments were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Pisa sits about a kilometre north of the Arno, roughly an hour west of Florence by train, near the Ligurian coast. The tower rises 56 metres on its high side, eight storeys of white and grey marble, reached by 296 steps spiralling inside the hollow drum.
The lean is a construction error that never stopped moving. Work began in 1173, and by the time the third storey went up around 1178 the tower was already tilting, its three-metre foundation set in soft subsoil of clay, fine sand, and shells that compressed unevenly under the weight. Building halted for nearly a century during Pisa's wars, which may be the only reason it still stands: the ground had time to settle. Later builders curved the upper storeys back toward vertical, so the tower bends faintly along its height. By 1990 the tilt reached 5.5 degrees and the structure was closed as unsafe.
Engineers stabilised the tower between 1993 and 2001, siphoning soil from the high side until the lean eased from 5.5 to about 3.97 degrees, a correction of some 44 centimetres. In 2008 they declared it stable for at least two hundred years and reopened the climb. Visitors book a timed ticket to climb the 296 steps; bags are not allowed inside, and children under eight cannot go up. Most people, though, never climb. They stop on the lawn of the Square of Miracles to pose with a palm raised, pretending to hold the tower upright. The cathedral and Baptistery are separate tickets.