The Tower of Pisa is Reopened , Now Less Tilted

Corriere Della Sera


Sunday 16 December 2001 

by our reporter Marco Gasperetti 



No representative of the government is at the ceremony.

 The president of the Province: it is after all only the most famous bell tower in the world






The inclination is reduced by 44 centimeters.  

After 12 years, visits by tourists are again possible:
 
a ticket costs 15 euro




PISA- To celebrate the recovered Tower there was the snow.  So, at 11.30 o'clock the first 10 children selected at random in Piaz dei Miracoli have climbed the last of the 295 stairs, Pisa has appeared to be a spellbound city.  After 12 years the bell has returned to play and the old Leaning Tower has been returned to the Pisans and to the tourists (a few tens the first day), who now paying for a ticket of 15 euro, will enter its interior, climb for 52 meters, and try the experience of the inclination, certainly reduced by the engineers (44 centimeters to be exact), but still sufficient to make the world astonished. 



The ceremony of inauguration, yesterday morning, has been sober. "But the disaster of the twin towers is near", explained Pierfrancesco Pacini, president of the Work of the Primaziale, who oversees the Pisan monuments, "and we did not want to miss the spectacle".  It would not have served: the risen Tower is already a "show" and the almost 100 journalists who arrived from all the world have not grown tired of climbing and descending to catch the details that make news.



The first tickets have been bought by a Danish couple, but a Spanish tourist, Maria Carmen Navarro, a little more than 20 years old, a nurse from Barcellona, is the first to step over the ancient front door opened by mayor Paolo Fontanelli and by archbishop Alessandro Plotti. When she arrived on top she had dizziness: "it turns my head", she said smiling, "but I don't know if for the height or for the emotion". 



But the most happy of all is Michele Jamiolkowski, the "professor", the protecting magician of the monument.  He is almost a hero to Pisa and tomorrow he will be awarded honorary citizenship, but when January 7, 1990 the bell tower was closed, few would have bet on of him. "There have been terrible moments", he admits, "and I have felt the weight of the responsibilities of a monument that is the patrimony of humanity". Now he smiles and he announces: "The Tower is healthy for at least three more centuries and who knows, perhaps forever".
 


The problems are not gone. At the inauguration,  there might have been three ministers present: Lunardi, Urbani and Matteoli.  Instead there was not not even an undersecretary.  The reason? "I don't know them and I don't understand them", said Guno Nunes, president of the Province of Pisa, "The most famous bell tower was inaugurated to the world. They had other appointments". 



The absence of the government has mattered much, because the recovery of the bell tower is still not finished. "54 billion lire has been spent", explained Jamiolkowski, "but they need to reserve another 9 billion for restoration of the masonry". 

Translated by Gary Feuerstein, 14 January 2002, from the Corriere della Sera article