Pisa's famous leaning tower began sinking into the ground in 1178 during construction because the brilliant medieval architects decided to build a massive, incredibly heavy…

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Pisa's famous leaning tower began sinking into the ground in 1178 during construction because the brilliant medieval architects decided to build a massive, incredibly heavy marble bell tower on a foundation of soft mud and unstable clay. It took them nearly two centuries to finish this architectural disaster, during which they tried to compensate for the lean by making the columns on one side taller, essentially resulting in a building that is both tilted and weirdly curved like a giant stone banana. Today, the town's entire economy relies on millions of unoriginal tourists coming to a random patch of grass in Italy to pretend they are holding up the tower in forced-perspective photographs. It is a stunning monument to the fact that you can screw up your one job so monumentally that people will literally travel across the globe for a thousand years just to mock your engineering incompetence!