This was a bonus episode of Cool Weird Awesome for the people who make the show possible! It was exclusive to them until January 1, 2025.
It really does take time, effort and money to make good things happen, and no one knows that better than officials in the Italian city of Bologna.
They’re planning to spend more than 4 million dollars to protect their famous leaning tower.
For the record, we’re not talking about the famous Leaning Tower, which is in Pisa, Italy.
This is the Garisenda tower, part of a pair of famous towers in Bologna.
It was built in the 12th Century, when there was actually a lot of tower construction going on in the city.
In those times it was always handy to have a tall structure to watch for any signs of, say, invaders.
But in Bologna, it was mostly because the wealthy families wanted to flaunt their wealth by trying to build towers that were higher than the other families’ towers.
The Garisenda wasn’t the tallest – it’s actually shorter than the neighboring Asinelli tower – but it became one of the best known.
That’s partly because it’s still standing all these centuries later, and also because of its lean.
Just like in Pisa, sinking ground under the Garisenda made for a tower that points not quite straight up.
It’s been like this for a long, long time; Dante wrote about it in the Inferno, which was finished in the early 1300s.
In that same century, there were such strong fears that the tower might fall that it was actually lowered, to its current height of 158 feet.
And those fears never really went away.
There have been various projects to make the tower more stable, especially since the 1990s.
But in July of last year, experts started to see signs that the tower’s foundation was increasingly compressed, and the lean of the structure was actually shifting directions.
So in December, the city announced new efforts to address concerns that the Garisenda could come down.
They’re blocking off the immediate area to the public, setting up sensors that could detect any cracking or breaking, and setting up nets that could catch the debris from a collapse.
And once that work is done… they have to try to figure out how to save the Garisenda.
Do they lower it again?
Do they build a kind of cage around it to keep it in place?
Can it be dismantled and then rebuilt with a better base?
Whatever the solution is, people are interested in finding it: a crowdfunding campaign to help preserve the tower brought in over 800,000 Euros in its first week.
A year is, of course, a way to mark how long it takes for Earth to go all the way around the Sun. But you could also mark what’s called the Great Year or the Platonic Year.
That’s a way to mark how long planets, stars and all the stuff around them return to the same positions they were in before.
That takes about 26,000 years or so.
I’m Brady, mark your calendar now!
‘Leaning tower’ in Italy on ‘high alert’ for collapse (CNN)
The Platonic Year (Oxford University Press)