After the lean, however, the highest side of the tower reaches a mere 56.67 meters (about 186 feet), while the lowest side is 55.86m, or 183 feet.īy 1990 the tower had reached a tilt of 5.5 degrees – nearly 15 feet from its base and enough to topple it over by most calculations! Luckily, this considerable tilt was enough to overcome the world-famous inertia of Italian bureaucracy and kick start a massive restoration program that reduced the tilt to only 3.97 degrees. The leaning tower of Pisa was supposed to be 60 meters tall (196.85 feet). The lean creates some interesting imbalances Tower of Pisa

However, the weight of the extra floors caused the edifice to sink further and lean more.

The next stories were built slightly taller on the short side of the tower in an attempt to compensate for the lean.

The lean, first noted when three of the tower’s eight stories had been built, resulted from the foundation stones being laid on soft ground consisting of clay, fine sand and shells. Its architect and engineer tried to correct this by making the remaining stories shorter on the uphill side – but to no avail. Today, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is more than five meters off perpendicular. Over the next 800 years, it became clear the 55-metre tower wasn’t just learning but was actually falling at a rate of one to two millimeters per year. Shifting soil had destabilized the tower’s foundations. Thanks to the soft ground, it had begun to lean by the time its builders got to the third story, in 1178. The leaning of the Tower of Pisa comes into the story in 1173, when construction began.

How tall is the leaning tower of pizza