With a profile that stands five degrees off kilter, the bell tower in Pisa's Campo dei Miracaoli--a.k.a. the Tower of Pisa--is one of the world's great icons. Less well known, however, is how it got that way. Was it shoddy workmanship? Soft ground? Or the brainchild,perhaps,of a hunchback maestro who skewed the campanile to avenge his own condition?
In this fascinating history, Nicholas Shrady reveals the truth behind the Tower of Pisa and how it went from being a flawed yet revolutionary structure at its completion in I370 to a paragon of modern tourism--a journey that witnessed the experiments of Galileo, the Romantic poetry of Byron, the nearly ruinous corrective surgery of Mussolini, and much more. Hugely entertaining and informative,Tilt is a triumph worthy of its imperfect yet enduring subject.