Among Americans, anyway, the bell tower in Pisa competes with the Eiffel tower as the most visually recognized European edifice. Other buildings are given more cultural significance—the Vatican, Colosseum, Versailles, Westminster Abbey—but everyone can instantly recognize the “leaning tower of Pisa.”

Nicholas Shrady has done us all a nice favor by assembling a breezy little history of the tower. He explores the tower’s mysteries, some explained (Why does the tower tilt?), others not (Who designed it in the first place?). He tries to debunk some myths, especially the one that has Galileo famously dropping balls from the tower’s top level. He gives a little political history of Pisa, helping us to understand the significance a bell tower had among Italian city-states. There’s some architectual analysis, describing, for instance, the differences between the Pisan designs and their contemporaries in Chartres. All those threads are woven together by the tower and apparently successful efforts of the 1990 commission assigned to save the tower from crashing down.

Shrady even takes a stab at explaining why we are facinated with the tower. It’s not the largest bell tower. Pisa, without it, is hardly a stirring tourist attraction. He argues that it’s the tower’s very improbability that draws us: “The image of his tilting, defiant campanile [bell tower] symbolizes all that is wondrous and strange in a wolrd that is fast losing good measures of both.”