Insomnia and the World Not Sleeping Record

In 2006 we visited Tuscany and stayed At the Hotel Royal Victoria which was a grand old building but was unfortunately located on a busy main road.  As soon as the light went out the traffic noise immediately increased in volume and I worried that I might be about to suffer a night of enforced insomnia.

It became increasingly intolerable to the point that I even contemplated overcoming my reluctance to close the rotting wooden shutters.  This would have been useless because it was clear that even after carefully maneuvering them into position this would make no discernable difference at all to the appalling din because there was a constant drone of vehicle noise made worse by the rattling engines of the Vespa scooters (bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz); Vespa is Italian for wasp and believe me these things are well named; they are a complete bloody nuisance!  This was accompanied by the piercing sirens of the police cars (da-loo-da-la, da-loo-da-la) which although quite lyrical during the day are downright diabolical at night and these were competing with the shrieking ambulances (do-dah, do-dah, do-dah), and worst of all there was a loose inspection cover in the road directly below the room which of course every vehicle just had to drive over with irritating regularity (ker-chunk, ker-chunk).  Italy of course is the home of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati and a nation with a reputation for a love of pace and reckless behaviour behind the wheel so everything seemed to be travelling at top speed and using full throttle.

I eventually managed to block out the noise (it’s amazing what half a litre of Chianti can do) and eventually dropped off to sleep.  But not for long and it became so unbearable that Kim even contemplated sleeping in the bath tub at the back of the room just to get as far away from the street noise as possible.  This was truly a room for insomniacs and the more I tried to blot out the dreadful noise the worse it got.  On May 11^th 2007 a Cornishman, Tony Wright, beat a forty three year old Guinness World Record by staying awake for eleven days and eleven nights.  If he had booked in to the Hotel Victoria in Pisa he could have gone on much, much longer.

We couldn’t possible put up with another night of traffic disturbance and Kim had worried all day about a repeat of the sleepless experience so back at the hotel the next afternoon there was only one thing to do and that was to apply for a room change away from the relentless traffic noise.

Almost every guest review said that eventually they had to make the same request so I don’t suppose it came as a great surprise to the desk clerk to get this urgent application.  He searched the hotel register and found an alternative room at the rear of the hotel and apologised for the fact that we were moving from one of the best suites in the establishment to a basic standard room.  He seemed to think it was an odd decision and this has led me to the conclusion that Italians are obviously oblivious to traffic noise but quite frankly we couldn’t have been happier and were delighted to be transferred to an obviously inferior but crucially quieter room with a delightful roof garden outside.

We moved in, opened a bottle of red wine and because the weather was improving and Pisa had not had the heavy rain that we had experienced in Siena, sat outside to celebrate the transfer and enjoy the relative peace that the rear of the hotel offered.

Later we walked out to a nearby restaurant that we had picked out the day before and enjoyed an excellent meal of wild boar.  After dinner we went back to the new hotel room and after a final drink on the roof garden enjoyed a peaceful and undisturbed night’s sleep.  It was lovely.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is probably one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in Europe and probably the whole World.

I can certainly remember it from a school encyclopedia article and when I was a schoolboy I was always intrigued by the concept of a building listing so perilously to one side that it was apparently just waiting for a strong wind to topple it over.  I had secretly suspected that the pictures had exaggerated the buildings predicament so I was astounded when I actually saw it for the first time and was able to satisfy myself that this tower really does lean over a very long way indeed.  The tower actually leans at an angle of five and a half degrees and this means that the tower is four and a half metres from where it would stand if it was perpendicular.  That may not sound like a lot but believe me this thing really leans.

Although obviously intended to stand vertically, the tower began leaning over soon after construction began in 1173 due to a poorly prepared ground that allowed the inadequately prepared foundations to shift.  Today the height of the tower is nearly fifty-six metres from the ground on the lowest side and nearly fifty-seven metres on the highest side.  The width of the walls at the base is a little over four metres and at the top two and a half metres. Its weight is estimated at fourteen thousand five hundred tonnes so little wonder then that it started to sink.

Impending collapse brought construction proceedings to a halt for a hundred years while architects and builders considered what to do and over the intervening years there have been a number of attempts to prevent the whole thing giving in to the law of gravity and crashing to the ground.

In 1272, for example, builders returned to the project and four more floors were added at an angle to try to compensate for the lean.  Their answer was to build the support columns higher on one side than on the other to get the whole thing vertical again.   Now I am not an engineer but I think that even I would have spotted the inherent problem with this particular solution that has resulted in the curious curve in the structure about half way up.  It continued to lean of course because more weight meant even more pressure on the dodgy foundations.  Then in the 1930’s Benito Mussolini ordered that the tower be returned to a vertical position, so concrete was poured into its foundation. This was a massive engineering cock-up and the result was that the tower actually sank further into the soil and there was a real danger that it would suffer the same fate as the Venice campanile which collapsed in 1902.

 In 1964 Italy finally had to concede that it couldn’t maintain its erection any longer, called for help and requested aid in preventing the tower from falling over completely.  A multinational task force of eggheads was assembled to come up with a miracle Viagra cure.  Then, after over two decades of serious cranium scratching, the tower was closed on 7th January 1990 and work to stabalise it began.  It took a further ten years of corrective reconstruction and stabilisation efforts before the tower reopened to the public in 2001.

I am glad of that because I visited in 2007 and purchased a ticket for the trip to the top.  There are two hundred and ninety four steps up a spiral staircase that take visitors up and which due to the absence of windows, and therefore orientation, is reminiscent of a fairground wacky house attraction, especially when although you know that you were ascending sometimes according to the extreme angle of the tilt of the building it feels as though you were going down at the same time, which, believe me, is a very weird experience.

I liked the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it lived up to all of my expectations, I tried to bring to mind anything else that was famous for leaning but all I could think of was Oliver Reed after forty pints of beer and George Formby who used to lean on lamp posts looking at ladies but that was in a previous age when this was still an innocent and acceptable thing to do.

In London St Stephen’s Tower at the Palace of Westminster which contains the clock Big Ben is leaning to one side and may eventually become unstable – but only in thousands of years and it will take a long time to challenge the Leaning Tower of Pisa for tourist bragging rights.  St. Stephen’s Tower leans 0.26 degrees to the north-west, putting it out of alignment by about 0.5m at its highest point but right now the 0.26 º angle is one 16th of the Leaning Tower of Pisa’s tilt.

A Life in a Year – 10th August, The Leaning Tower of Pisa

After finishing her University course in 2007 my daughter Sally quickly found employment as a school teacher and being unaccustomed to a salary and a credit balance in her bank account quickly set about making arrangements to get it spent.  What better way than to go on holiday, so in early August she set off for a whistle stop back packing trip to Italy.  Before she went she invited me to meet her for a night at the end of the first week and we agreed on Pisa.

As she was planning to stay in hostel accommodation, Sally’s motive was to make sure that at the half way stage she would be guaranteed a hotel room with a decent bed and en-suite facilities.  I have to confess that my motive was to some large extent to make sure that she was alright.

I flew to Pisa on 10^th August on an uneventful early morning flight and arrived a couple of hours later in a bright sun-kissed Galileo Galilei Airport.  The Airport is only a very short distance from the city so I took a bus and within minutes I was in the Campo di Miracoli and admiring the Leaning Tower.  I checked in at the Hotel Francesco and then sat in a bar for a couple of Pironi beers while I waited for Sally and her friend Natalie to join me from their previous nights stop in Bologna.   They arrived two hours later and I was pleased to see that they were both in good health and looking well, clearly I had been worrying unnecessarily about their trip.

Unpacking is an unnecessary distraction when there is sightseeing to do so they left their packs and we went straight out into the street and walked back the short distance to the Campo.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is probably one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in Europe and probably the whole World.  Although intended to stand vertically of course, the tower began leaning over soon after construction began in 1173 due to a poorly prepared ground that allowed the inadequate foundations to shift.  Today the height of the tower is nearly fifty-six metres from the ground on the lowest side and nearly fifty-seven metres on the highest side. The width of the walls at the base is a little over four metres and at the top two and a half metres. Its weight is estimated at fourteen thousand five hundred tonnes (that is about six hundred fully loaded UK dustcarts) so little wonder then that it started to sink. 

We purchased immediate entry tickets to the museum next door and all of the other magnificent buildings at the Campo dei Miracoli including the Duomo (the Cathedral) and the Babtistry that were both constructed on the same unstable sand as the Tower and also lean half a degree from centre.  We finished the tour by visiting the impressively and recently restored Camposanto or monumental cemetery with some renovated plaster wall paintings that had been destroyed during the Second-World-War by Allied bombing raids as the Germans were being pushed out of Italy and back towards Central Europe.

We rested for a while on the hotel terrace where I enjoyed some more beer and the girls caught up on their internet correspondence and then we returned at the appointed time for our visit to the tower.  We had to climb the two hundred and ninety four steps spiral staircase that takes visitors up and which due to the absence of windows, and therefore orientation, was reminiscent of a fairground wacky house attraction, especially when although we knew that we were ascending sometimes according to the angle of the tilt it felt as though we were going down at the same time, which was a very weird experience. 

I liked the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it lived up to all of my expectations, I tried to bring to mind anything else that was famous for leaning but all I could think of was Oliver Reed after forty pints of beer and George Formby who used to lean on lamp posts looking at ladies.

A Life in a Year – 7th January, Leaning Tower of Pisa Closed for Viagra Treatment

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is probably one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in Europe and probably the whole World.  I can certainly remember it from a school encyclopedia article and when I was a schoolboy I was always intrigued by the concept of a building listing so perilously to one side that it was apparently just waiting for a strong wind to topple it over.

I had secretly suspected that the pictures had exaggerated the buildings predicament so I was astounded when I actually saw it for the first time and was able to satisfy myself that this tower really does lean over a very long way indeed.  The tower actually leans at an angle of five and a half degrees and this means that the tower is four and a half metres from where it would stand if it was perpendicular.  That may not sound like a lot but believe me this thing really leans.

Although intended to stand vertically of course, the tower began leaning over soon after construction began in 1173 due to a poorly prepared ground that allowed the inadequately prepared foundations to shift.  Today the height of the tower is nearly fifty-six metres from the ground on the lowest side and nearly fifty-seven metres on the highest side. The width of the walls at the base is a little over four metres and at the top two and a half metres. Its weight is estimated at fourteen thousand five hundred tonnes so little wonder then that it started to sink.

Impending collapse brought construction proceedings to a halt for a hundred years while architects and builders considered what to do and over the intervening years there have been a number of attempts to prevent the whole thing giving in to the law of gravity and crashing to the ground.  In 1272, for example, builders returned to the project and four more floors were added at an angle to try to compensate for the lean.

Their answer was to build the support columns higher on one side than on the other to get the whole thing vertical again.   Now I am not an engineer but I think that even I would have spotted the inherent problem with this particular solution that has resulted in the curious curve in the structure about half way up.  It continued to lean of course because more weight meant even more pressure on the dodgy foundations.  Then in the 1930’s Benito Mussolini ordered that the tower be returned to a vertical position, so concrete was poured into its foundation. This was a massive engineering cock-up and the result was that the tower actually sank further into the soil.

In 1964 Italy finally had to concede that it couldn’t maintain its erection any longer, called for help and requested aid in preventing the tower from falling over completely.  A multinational task force of eggheads was assembled to come up with a miracle Viagra cure.  Then, after over two decades of serious cranium scratching, work started in 1990, but it took a further ten years of corrective reconstruction and stabilisation efforts before the tower reopened to the public in 2001.

We were glad of that and purchased a ticket for the trip to the top.  There are two hundred and ninety-four steps up a spiral staircase that take visitors up and which due to the absence of windows, and therefore orientation, is reminiscent of a fairground wacky house attraction, especially when although you know that you were ascending sometimes according to the extreme angle of the tilt of the building it feels as though you were going down at the same time, which, believe me, is a very weird experience.

Because the Tower had been built at a time when health and safety was not such an important consideration in construction the modern safety instructions were quite clear especially in respect of young children and how parents should take care to hold the hands of the under twelve’s.  We were bemused therefore to see some young  children dashing about the building and their parents defying this sensible instruction.  Sensible because even if the stone surfaces were dry, which today they certainly were not, it really wouldn’t be too difficult to disappear over the side in an instant and become a permanent addition to the new foundations.

I liked the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it lived up to all of my expectations, I tried to bring to mind anything else that was famous for leaning but all I could think of was Oliver Reed after forty pints of beer and George Formby who used to lean on lamp posts looking at ladies but that was in a previous age when this was still an innocent and acceptable thing to do.

 

A Life in a Year

In the first week of my new project, ‘A Life in a Year’ I will explain the significance to me of the introduction of the Euro in 2002, the birth of James Wolfe in 1719 and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1924.  After that it is the death of Donald Campbell in 1967, the Prague Spring of 1968, St Stephen’s Crown returned to Budapest in 1978 and the closure of the Leaning Tower of Pisa for safety reasons in 1990.

It all makes perfect sense to me but if you are confused check out this blog on 1st January 2011.