A major clean-up job on the first 'ring' of the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been successfully completed, officials said Monday.
The lowest ring of arches has been cleaned to restore its marble and other stonework to gleaming perfection after a five-month operation.
The special scaffolding used by the restorers has now been shifted up to the tower's second ring, and organisers said the next stage of the clean-up will concentrate on the rest of the column.
Work is meanwhile continuing inside the tower, where a section that has been hidden from public view by a wooden floor that used to house an old monitoring system should be restored by the end of the year.
Visitors are still able to climb to the top of the 56-metre tower despite the ongoing work.
The tower was saved from toppling in a decade-long engineering project in the 1990s, reopening to the public in December 2001.
The reopening was made possible thanks to a 53-billion-lire project - involving steel girdles, lead weights, and a heap of digging - that straightened the tower by 40cm, hauling it back to the position it had in the mid-19th century.
Before the efforts to reverse the lean, the eight-storey tower was adding an average of 1mm a year to its 4.5-metre lean out of the perpendicular.
The tower was begun in 1174 but was only completed in 1350, when its tilt was already about half what it is today.
In a 2005 check-up on the tower's health, experts pronounced it safe for the next three hundred years.
