NEWS THAT the leaning tower of Pisa has been made safe for another 300 years is, I suppose, welcome. Even so, it threatens to take some of the thrill out of climbing it, writes Frank McNally.
When I first ascended the 294 steps a few years ago, the jury was still out on the success of the stabilisation work. And although the tower had looked perfectly secure from ground level, once I set foot inside, all assurance disappeared. Thereafter, nothing would convince me that this was not the day it was finally going to fall.
It didn't matter that it had been leaning for centuries. Nor that the most pessimistic prediction, pre-stabilisation, was that it would collapse some time after 2030. Once on the spiral stairway, you knew that only a miracle had kept it standing until now, and its luck was about to run out.
The tower lists only in one direction. The person climbing leans in several: pitched away from the wall on the high side; then gradually tilted into it on the low. And although the badly worn steps underneath should be a welcome reminder of the tens of thousands who have safely preceded you, on the contrary they only adds to your disorientation.
Fighting vertigo, I found it helpful to stare at my feet while pretending to be between floors in Liberty Hall. Unfortunately, I was followed up the tower by a group of chirrupy Americans, whose optimism had been undented by (the then recent) 9/11.
"Hey, this thing's really leaning!" they would say, happily throwing themselves against the wall as the stairs hit another trough. They were seemingly oblivious to the feeling, gripping me harder with every step, that a careless move by any of us might tip the tower's balance. But better men than I have been so afflicted. Here's Mark Twain, writing atop the tower in 1869: "Standing on the summit, one does not feel altogether comfortable when he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on your breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your neck out far enough to see the base of the tower, makes your flesh creep, and convinces you for a single moment in spite of all your philosophy, that the building is falling.
"You handle yourself very carefully, all the time, under the silly impression that if it is not falling, your trifling weight will start it. . ."
In our era, when health and safety officials have inherited the earth, it is cheering (except when you're in it) to recall that the tower's original builders noticed it was already leaning after only three floors. This slowed the project down by a century or two. Then the Pisans finished it anyway, trying to correct the problem on the way up, so that the building ended up with a curve as well as a lean.
And come to think of it, the tower's sheer outlandishness will probably ensure that the stabilisers' 300-year warranty does not make much difference to the visitor experience. Scientists get things wrong, after all. So no doubt the next time I climb it, unless the head of the stabilisation team accompanies me in person, the guarantees that seemed so well founded on the ground will be listing heavily on the way up.
IN ANOTHER development that promises to make tourism safer but less interesting, a British railway company is abolishing the practice whereby lone travellers have to share sleeping compartments.
The providers of the London-Cornwall service say the tradition is outdated and comparable to asking strangers to share a hotel room. So, in future they will provide only single-occupancy compartments for individual passengers - a precedent likely to become standard practice everywhere eventually.
I take the point about hotel rooms. But rare as it may be in real life, this could also abolish the railway romance, a classic example (fictional of course) being the meeting between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. It will also limit the scope for unromantic but interesting chance encounters, such as the one portrayed in another Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train.
Still, it should be a while before the no-sharing trend catches up with the St Petersburg-Moscow overnight service, on which I once shared a compartment with a Russian businessman who ignored protests that I wasn't hungry and that I needed a night's sleep - obliging me to join him in the dining car where we consumed caviar and vodka until 3am, resulting in a hangover that still makes my head throb when I think about it.
And it may be even longer before the trend reaches the Udaipur-Delhi night train, on which I shared a cramped six-berth compartment with two local couples and their several small children for 17 long hours. In their different ways, neither of these experiences was entirely pleasant at the time. But they left vivid memories, which is half the point of travel.
Anyway, returning nearer home, I am indebted to Donal Kennedy for a funny story that illustrates what we may lose in an era of single-only compartments (the unlikelihood of meeting Eva Marie Saint notwithstanding): "A young woman was travelling on the overnight train to Stranraer when the carriage jolted violently, throwing a young man on to her bunk and awakening her. 'What's your game?' she asked. 'I'm going to Larne,' said the flustered youth. 'Not with me, you're not,' she replied."