Located in Pisa, Italy, it stands 117 feet tall and is about 10° (17 feet) off of where it should be. Many tourists flock to see it each year, hoping to see it before it collapses. To avoid this, the tower was closed off to the public in 1990 and work began in 1992 to secure its foundation. Amazingly, the tower has stood for hundreds of years, from the start of its construction in 1174 to the present day. Originally, the building started to sink after the construction of the 3rd floor. Even so, workers managed to complete it in the year 1372.

The Leaning Tower is built in the Romanesque style of architecture and contains 8 stories of stone arches and marble columns. The walls are 13 feet wide and over 300 steps rise to the 8th story. It is a bell tower, and it stands amidst a cathedral and a baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square), which is in the center of Pisa.

The Tower of Pisa was built to show the rest of the world the wealth of the city of Pisa. The people of Pisa were very good sailors and they conquered many lands, including Jerusalem, Carthago, Ibiza, Mallorca, Africa, Belgium, Britania, Norway, Spain, Morocco, and other places. However to show how welth they were doing they started to build a really useless belltower to go with the rest of the buildings near it - the Cathedral, Baptistery, and Cemetery.

Perhaps it was the invention of Gerardo, who had to cooperate more as a co-author. The plan of the bell tower exists and it's an admirable one. Of course it isn't a design on paper but documented in the Tower itself and in its measurements. This is the way the construction of the Bell Tower began. When the construction reached about one meter and half of the third floor, because of marshy and unstable soil, it leaned fearfully, so the works were suspended. The events which led to the inclination of the Tower are not known. Surely two phenomenon contributed to the inclination; excess bearing pressure on the sandy soils and differential sinking of the soils themselves.

Restarting of the works took place in two phases, during which the builders tried to reduce the lean. It is not known which height was reached at the end of the first phase of the resumption, before the intervention of Giovanni di Simone. The second phase of the thirteenth-century, started probably about the years 1272- 1275 and perhaps consists in the building of four "loggette". In the sixth "loggetta" some round arch windows for the bells were made. The lean continued to be worrisome. Completion of the Tower is usually dated in the year 1350. The Bell Tower, because of its lean, looks like as if it dares the laws of gravity. It is one of the most original works of art of the Europeen Middle-Age and continues to enjoy an enormous popularity.