TOURIST SNAP: A NEW SLANT ON THE LEANING TOWER OF

Went to Pisa today to have lunch with friends from California who are on a 30-day cruise of the Mediterranean. (I had linguine with fresh asparagus tips and peas, bliss.) There are many wonderful things to photograph in Pisa but I just had to do the leaning tower. In Italian it is Il Torre Pendente di Pisa.

The piazza with the tower, the cathedral and the basilica must be one of the most beautiful sights in the world. The buildings are all incredibly beautiful but their very beauty has created massive crowds of tourists and cafes, souvenir stalls, horse and buggies and even a grown-up choo-choo train -- the sublime and the ridiculous.

The tower was built in 1173 and began to lean shortly thereafter. Galileo once dropped two canon balls from it to determine speed of descent. It almost toppled over quite recently but engineers from all over the world evolved a plan to tilt it back -- not too much, mind -- and make it stable. There is much to be found on he Internet about the tower and the piazza so will not rabbit on here.

This is a detail of one of the gate posts to the tower: GATE POST

This is but a tiny portion of the circus that surrounds the piazza: TOURIST CIRCUS

We were delayed getting to Pisa because of a fatal road accident. This is the traffic being moved along after the cars were towed away and the ambulance had been and gone. My white jacket just visible in side-view car mirror. Am beginning to like taking photographs from moving cars. After a road accident