The pylons of the Tower of Pisa for the safety of the Garisenda in Bologna. The restoration from 2025

The pylons of the Tower of Pisa, with two machines and a toothed wheel that allow the ropes that embrace the tower to slide. This is the solution found to get the Garisenda out of the yellow alert and into the green code, which will also imply the reopening of the Asinelli for visits.

This was the announcement of the mayor Matteo Lepore, who illustrated the results of the working group with Massimo Majowiecki and Nunziante Squeglia, who worked in Pisa.

“We have taken the encapsulation hypothesis off the table – said Lepore – we have the aim of doing well and also doing it quickly, the ambition is to reduce the time and secure the Garisenda by 2024. In 2025 and in 2026 there will be further consolidation and restoration work, which still needs to be planned.”

The mayor says: “Faustini and Bruni went to Pisa, they had the green light for the pylons of the Tower of Pisa, they are also studying from a logistical point of view how to install these pylons which will allow us, also thanks to the company identified for the intervention, to really reduce the time we would have had to take, building a possible structure from scratch, as was done at the time for Pisa, and carrying out very original interventions from scratch. In fact, for some, these are unique pieces. Using these pylons means reusing an important thing from the history of our country, which also have a reason from an aesthetic and architectural point of view, they already exist and you just need to transport them. they will have the function of pulling the tower, keeping it safe, they are not installed to straighten the tower”.

To ensure safety, other techniques will be used, fairly traditional interventions, so much so that the risk percentage falls into the green zone. The risk had to be within a sustainable range, when it went out of the range the intervention was carried out. Resources from the Pnrr will be used and collected from private individuals; the phase now opening is that of the executive design of the system and installation within the year. Supporting these pylons, tying the tower, creating the necessary tension, should allow the tower to be permanently secured, at which point the tower would be in the green zone and the time for the restoration will be defined but not in a race against the time like the present one.

Now the objective is therefore to rewind the tape of the tower’s problems. The containers will remain installed for the moment, because they are considered a protection for the area. A public intervention with the donors will be organized in May, with a more detailed presentation, to inform the donors on how to use the resources.

“Various design hypotheses were analysed – said architect Faustini – the possibility of removing a part of the tower was also considered, but from a shipbuilding point of view it was impossible to work in this sense. We also evaluated the hypothesis of “castle” initially planned because the metal structure surrounding the Garisenda could not guarantee the future possibility of carrying out consolidation and restoration works on the tower, one of the fundamental requirements was to create a structure.

Thanks also to Majowiecki’s contribution, the possibility of reusing the two machines with a toothed wheel that allows the ropes to slide around the tower was taken into consideration. They are 12 meters high and we will need to get up to have as horizontal a pull as possible, given that we will have to place them near the tower, we will have to build machinery, there is a software part that will need to be modified, this solution has convinced us because it allows very precise control of the draft, even in tight times thanks to the use of the software. there will be 3 phases, with a consolidation intervention which will be done either with a “draught” or with injections of malate into the base. Once this phase is finished, we can proceed with the restoration