The Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of the dumbest and most iconic tourist attractions in the world, but a recent survey has revealed that it’s nowhere near as angled as it once was.

Featured Image VIA

A while ago now, engineers were worried about the tilt of the tower and how it might fall over and cause a major disaster, so from 1990 to 2001 they worked on counterbalancing it. They did this by using hundreds of tons of lead counterweights at the base and extracting soil from under the foundations.

By the end of the project, the tower had straightened by more than eleven inches and in the twenty one years since then, it’s now standing almost two inches more upright. Here’s a video explaining how it’s been stabilised:

I think that’s a pretty cool process and sure, nobody wants the actual tower to fall over and possibly kill or injure a load of people, but alternatively I don’t think it really makes that much sense to straighten up the tower because the whole reason that people even know where Pisa is is because it was leaning all over the place. Kinda ruining the USP by straightening it up there. They might wanna try and figure something else out before you destroy the entire tourist industry of the region, just saying.

For more of the same, check out the creepiest and most sinister photographs uncovered by Google Maps. There’s a lot of messed up stuff in the world.