In the summer of 2018, I went to Pisa for the European Go Congress, partly as a participant and partly as a volunteer. Go is an ancient strategy board game, often compared to chess, though its rules and style of play are quite different. Every year, players of all levels gather somewhere in Europe for two weeks. There are serious matches, of course, but the whole thing feels less like a fierce competition and more like a festival for people who happen to love Go.
Volunteers didn’t have to pay the registration fee, so I signed up partly to save the money. I ended up meeting and befriending more Go players in those two weeks than I had in several years of going to tournaments here and there in Germany.
Pisa in August was sweltering. Unlike the dry summers I was used to in Germany, the humid air carried the smell of the sea and reminded me of summers back in Korea. Fortunately, Germany was having an unusually hot summer too, so I had escaped a country where air conditioning was practically a myth and landed in a blissfully cool, air-conditioned congress hall instead.
Everyone says there is nothing in Pisa except the Leaning Tower.
Apparently everyone at the congress agreed, because every conversation with someone new seemed to begin with the same question:
“Have you seen the tower yet?”
For the first few days, I kept answering no. Eventually, on a day off, I decided it was time. Armed with absolutely no information except Google Maps, I set off to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
(I would end up visiting it three times during my ten days in Pisa. Which, if anything, proves the point about Pisa.)
The Leaning Tower is actually the bell tower of Pisa Cathedral. It was supposed to be an accessory to the cathedral, the decorative sidekick, essentially. Unfortunately, it went slightly wrong and then stubbornly refused to collapse for several centuries, becoming vastly more famous than the building it was meant to accompany.
The result is a wonderful reversal of roles. Pisa Cathedral now feels almost like the optional attraction people wander into after coming to see its defective bell tower. The cathedral itself is beautiful, but it simply cannot compete with the sheer novelty of the tower.
On the lawn outside, everyone was busy taking the obligatory photos: pushing the tower upright, holding it up, leaning against it. I settled for an ordinary selfie and moved on.
I bought a ticket to climb the tower, looked around the cathedral and its surroundings, and returned at my assigned time. Inside, a guide gave us a short introduction.
Construction began in 1173, when the tower was still a perfectly respectable vertical structure. But the ground beneath it began to sink as construction progressed. Rather than take this as a sign, people kept building. The tower was constructed in several stages over nearly two centuries, and the builders repeatedly tried to compensate for the growing tilt. If you look closely, the upper levels are subtly uneven, with adjustments made to pull the structure back toward vertical.
None of this stopped the tower from continuing to lean. By the late twentieth century, the situation had become serious enough that extensive stabilization work was carried out to keep it from eventually toppling over.
Because I am afraid of heights, climbing the tower was not exactly pleasant.
I have never enjoyed climbing tall structures with sheer drops beside them. A tall structure with a sheer drop that was also visibly leaning turned out to be considerably worse. By the time I finally reached the top, my main thought was that I would very much like to leave the leaning top of the leaning tower.
I took the necessary photos and videos and made my way back down as quickly as possible, deeply relieved to have survived.
It was the kind of experience I would have regretted not trying once. Having tried it once, I am equally delighted that I never have to do it again.
Pisa may have little besides its tower, but perhaps the reason people passing through Tuscany keep making the detour is that photographs fail to capture its strangest quality.
In photographs, the tower looks plausible enough. Yes, it leans. You know that before you go. You have seen it a hundred times.
Then you stand in front of it.
And suddenly the questions become much more immediate. Why is it leaning that much? How is it still standing? How has this thing stayed like this for centuries?
Take another photograph, and somehow it looks perfectly reasonable again.
There is a peculiar sense of wrongness to seeing something that looks as though it should not be standing, yet plainly is. A photograph flattens that feeling. Standing beside it does not.
Sitting in the shade and looking at the tower, though, I found something unexpectedly comforting about it.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is not an overwhelmingly grand building. It was only a bell tower beside a cathedral. What made it famous was the fact that it spent centuries almost, but never quite, failing.
Had it remained perfectly upright, it would probably have become just another old bell tower. Had it collapsed, there would be little left to marvel at. Its fame exists precisely in that narrow space between broken and unbroken. It went wrong, and then it simply kept standing.
There is something strangely reassuring about that.
Not everything in the world can possess the grandeur of Versailles or Dolmabahçe Palace. Not everything can take your breath away through natural beauty like the Adriatic coast or the landscapes of Cappadocia. Not everything can preserve the splendour of a vanished civilization like Ephesus or Pompeii.
The Leaning Tower offers another possibility.
Some things become remarkable simply because they endure.
Some things become distinctive because they went wrong.
Life cannot be perfect, and people sometimes break in one way or another. But being damaged does not necessarily make something useless, nor does it mean it must be discarded. Things that continue despite their damage accumulate a history of their own. Given enough time, the damage itself can become part of the shape they leave behind.
Once you accept those imperfections as part of yourself, the distance between who you imagined you would be and who you are now becomes easier to bear. And when you stop punishing yourself for that distance, it becomes easier to take one small step from wherever you happen to be.
Enough small steps eventually become a path.
And once something you once thought of as damage has become part of the grain of who you are, there may even come a day when someone else uses the path you made as a signpost for their own.
Only those who walk without looking for signposts are truly lost. If you keep yours in sight, then however slowly you move, you are still getting closer to where you meant to go.
That is enough.
There is no need to exhaust yourself trying to walk someone else’s path.
You only have to keep walking your own.
When I checked into a hostel in Pisa for ten nights, the staff member looked genuinely surprised. Apparently there had once been another person who stayed that long, and she immediately wanted to know what on earth I was doing in Pisa for ten whole days. In London or Paris, where long stays are ordinary, nobody would have thought twice about it.
Pisa, as it turned out, was a surprisingly entertaining little place.
I remember the humidity.
I remember the seagulls.
And, of course, there was the tower.