The leaning tower of Pisa..

.. is far from being the only one in Italy. During my weeklong tour of the infamous land of art and chaos, I saw not one, but three leaning towers. Pisa's slanting campanile, the most famous, and certainly the most ornate, and two others in Bologna. But, as it turns out, there are five other tilted edifices in Italy I did not get to behold, the many scoliotic houses of charming Venice notwithstanding. So all in all, at least eight major lopsided structures in the cradle of glorious art and architecture. You're probably asking yourselves why that is. Bad architects or bad terrain? Neither. I have uncovered the reason. When the fashionable Italian boot was finding its way through the mediterranean puddle, it was too taken by its own beauty and style to notice that mischievous Sicily was in the way.

And so it happened.

Italia, la bella scarpa, tripped elegantly over Sicily, her beautiful towers swiveled and leaned but did not fall, and the tourists, of course, lived happily ever after.