Remedies for the Tower's plight have been proposed for centuries. Some of them come from the wilder reaches of the imagination. One proposal advocated attaching a helium balloon to the top of the tower; another favored reshaping the surrounding meadow so that it would slope in the same direction as the tower leans and make it look upright.

The latest project seeks to raise the tower by half a degree or 40 cm. Soil will be extracted from beneath the high Northern side of the foundations, thereby, says Professor Burland, a member of the Pisa commission which is in charge of the restoration, "reducing the inclination in a gentle and controlled manner by an amount that is imperceptible to the eye." Temporary steel cables are being used to hold the tower "in the very unlikely event of unforeseen detrimental movements."

Like other schemes before it, the current engineering operation has aroused vociferous criticism, causing the monument to be dubbed the "Tower of Discord" in the Italian press. An organization called ArtWatch International, which monitors art restoration projects, says that repair work has made the structure more stable than before. Professor Piero Pierotti, a Pisan art historian who has published a book entitled Una Torre Non Salvare ("How not to save the Tower of Pisa"), was quoted as saying that this work of "soaring imagination and symbolic beauty is also "unquestionably a phallic symbol" and that "perhaps the attempt to pull it erect is another aspect of the age of Viagra."