My first glimpse from the train of the celebrated buildings, the Duomo, Baptistery, and Leaning Tower, was disappointing; due to the wide expanse of plain on which they stand, which dwarfs their real size. Next morning it was a different story. Passing through narrow streets, unmodernized, and emerging suddenly on a wide grassy space, you might fancy yourself in an English cathedral close. But the Cathedral, Baptistery and Tower, built of white and coloured marble, with a wealth of sculptured decoration, under an Italian sun, and the blue of an Italian sky, presents a very different picture to that of Durham, Lincoln, York, or Canterbury, weather-beaten and wrinkled with age and the storms of a Northern climate. Imagine a tower of marble, its sides encircled with decorated arcading, perfectly straight, like an ornamental jam pot, rising to a height of one hundred and eighty feet, and leaning fourteen feet out of the perpendicular, with a top story a little less in diameter than the rest of the tower, but with neither battlements or pinnacles atop. You enter and find a stairway in the wall which is fifteen feet thick, and from the top look down into the centre, which might be compared to the bore of a huge cannon; you walk round the top, which slants so much on the lower side, that one has the feeling that the whole thing must tip over, a slight iron fence being your only protection, Not less than three persons may ascend at one time, for the reason that one might commit suicide, in the case of two there might be murder, but three are supposed to be safe. There are seven bells, one weighing six tons, the heaviest being hung on the side of the tower opposite the overhanging part.
