The innocents abroad; . plots and conspir-acies with friends. My experiences of Florence were chieflyunpleasant. I will change the subject. At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structurethe world has any knowledge of—the Leaning Tower. Asevery one knows, it is in the neighborhood of one hundredand eighty feet high—and I beg to observe that one hundredand eighty feet reach to about the hight of four ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a veryconsiderable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspireto, even when it stands upright—^yet this one
The innocents abroad; . plots and conspir-acies with friends. My experiences of Florence were chieflyunpleasant. I will change the subject. At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structurethe world has any knowledge of—the Leaning Tower. Asevery one knows, it is in the neighborhood of one hundredand eighty feet high—and I beg to observe that one hundredand eighty feet reach to about the hight of four ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a veryconsiderable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspireto, even when it stands upright—^yet this one leans more thanthkteen feet out of the perpendicular. It is seven hundredyears old, but neither history or tradition say whether it wasbuilt as it is, purposely, or whether one of its sides has is no record that it ever stood straight up. It is built 250 THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA. of marble. It is an airy and a beautiful structure, and eachof its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns, some of. LEANING TOWER. marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that•were handsome when they were new. It is a bell tower, andin its top hangs a chime of ancient bells. The winding stair-case within is dark, but one always knows which side of thetower he is on because of his naturally gravitating from oneside to the other of the staircase with the rise or dip of thetower. Some of the stone steps are foot-worn only on oneend ; others only on the other end ; others only in the look down into the tower from the top is like lookingdown into a tilted well. A rope that hangs from the centre THE ANCIENT DUOMO. 251 of the top touches the wall before it reaches the bottom. Stand-ing on the summit, one does not feel altogether comfortablewhen he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on yourbreast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch yourneck out far enough to see the base of the tower, makes yourflesh creep, and convinces you for a singl
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
