Truemors
The leaning tower of Pisa will be safely standing for another 300 years, according to an engineer who's been monitoring the somewhat wonky building in Italy.
"All of our expectations have been confirmed," Professor Michele Jamiolkowski, an engineer and geologist, was quoted as telling Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera.
The tower's tilt of about four metres off the vertical has remained stable in recent years, after a big engineering project that ended in 2001 corrected its lean by about 40 centimetres from where it was in 1990 when the project began.
"Now we can say that the tower can rest easy for at least 300 years," Jamiolkowski told the paper in an article published on Wednesday.
The tower was shut to visitors for almost 12 years from 1990 -- when it was sinking about a millimetre a year -- and reopened in December, 2001 at the end of the biggest phase of the consolidation and restoration project.
The 14,000-tonne free-standing bell tower, an internationally recognised architectural symbol of Italy along with Rome's Colosseum, was built in several stages between 1174 and 1370.
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