 Pisa, the Tower reopens but only for a day The experts have been able to reduce the inclination by 13 centimeters. Saturday a party for 200 students. Within a year, visits for all (PISA)- It doesn't seem so, but the Tower is recovering. For the first time in the its eight hundred years of life of unstable balance, the Tower of Pisa is a little bit more secure. The scientists who for ten years have attended the Tower have gotten a small return. Something imperceptible, 13 centimeters in less than 4.5 meters of lean. Impossible to recognize. The Tower is always there leaning dangerously toward South, suspenders of steel, entombed everywhere with pylons, chains and stirrups, surronded by gigantic ropes, anchored to earth with tons oflead blocks. In the more critical points, it has also received injections of cement. The patient is in intensive therapy, though out of danger. On Saturday the Tower will reopen to the public for an hour, in honor of the festival of St. Ranieri, patron of the ancient marine republic. It has not happened since January 1990, when the Tower, visited by more than a million tourists each year, then suddenly stopped. The first visitors will be two hundred Pisan students, selected among the superior and normal schools. "We start with students because they weigh less" joked the minister of the Public Works, Nerio Nesi, who will be in Pisa tomorrow, with Carla Fracci and the members of the scientific committee, to announce that within a year the Tower will definitely reopen. June 17 2001 the famous bell tower of Piazza dei Miracoli will be returned to the city, at least to limited numbers. During this coming year of work, the technicians intend to effect another 30 centimeters removed from the inclination: enough to assure the Tower two more centuries of life. |
"It will remain standing another two centuries" by our envoy ANAIS GINORI The man of the miracle: how I will save the bell tower (PISA) He has the destiny of one of the seven wonders of the world in his hand. He admits with Oriental coldness: "I have never seen anything similar." You adds: "nothing similar exists - it is a big responsibility." Michele Jamiolkowski must save the Tower of Pisa. For ten years he has directed the group of experts (eleven Italians, two foreigners) that are designated to secure a future for the tottering bell tower. It is the seventeenth committee, in eight centuries, that has taken office along the Arno. When this Polish engineer arrived in Pisa he was told: if all goes well, the Tower has twenty years of life remaining. Now, he can answer: if things go bad, it will withstand two more centuries. He feels like a surgeon who must operate an old star. The eyes aimed ahead and all that he thinks about is how to do it. On his desk, strange plans have arrived. From China a recommendation to take down the Tower and recompose it new, an American has proposed putting it in a transparent cylinder, the English have studied a new tower to support the medieval one. Superman in a his film has tried with kriptonite: it is enough to wish to straighten the Tower to bring consternation to the souvenir sellers. Now that the Tower is indeed a little bit more astute, Jamiolkowski doesn't think about being Superman. "we used eight years almost to decide what thing to do", he says, but it the correct system for the Tower has been found." How? Remove the earth under the base. The technicians have in fact arrived at more intuitive solutions. The Tower leans toward South? We remove some earth under the North part, it yields on this side and settles down again a little bit straighter. A system so simple that already in 1961 an Italian engineer had thought of it. Nobody listened to him so he went to experiment with success on the cathedral in Mexico City. It is so that, after thirty years, the Italian technique has been rediscovered in its own country. On the North side of the Tower, 41 drills have appeared: they descend up to 20 meters under the earth and they excavate small cylinders of clay. From February 13, the beginning of the work, they bring up 100 kilos of earth per day. The plan of the excavations is definite - 24 hours per day, with continuous contact between the work and experts. "before the direction is given for the next day", details the engineer, "the Tower is reviewed to see how it has reacted." The bell tower is under observation thanks to 120 sensors: there is not a movement that evades the technicians and there it is not a day that the Tower stands still. If it continues as now, within a year, the bell tower will be returned to the condition of the Renaissance. "It is a return to the future" comments Jamiolkoswski. He, that for thirty years teaches geothechnical engineering at the Polytechnic in Turin, and who has planned a bridge on the Straits of Messina and the recovery of Chernobyl, has not ever spent times so intense for fear of problems. The funds of the State that were blocked, the letters of accusation about the plans tried that did not work. And the fear of a mistake, to make it collapse. "Fear has accompanied us always." he acknowledged. "Each time we touch the Tower it is enough to make one worry." In June 2001 it will be finished: Jamiolkoswski will finish his odyssey, he will not receive two faxes and emails each day to know how the patient goes, and how to intervene. "I hope that it finishes in a hurry, and maybe then I will be missing. I will return to Pisa like a tourist to see again it with new eyes." |
