How many steps is the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
294 or 296, depending on which staircase you take. The tower has two spiral stairways and the north one has two fewer steps on the seventh floor, so both counts are correct. Visitors climb about 269 of them to reach the bell chamber, which is as high as anyone is allowed to go.
The disagreement is real, not sloppiness. Pisa’s tower is a hollow cylinder with a spiral staircase running up inside its wall, and it was built in three stages across nearly two centuries while the ground beneath it sank unevenly. The seventh floor is where the two stairways differ, which is how the same tower honestly measures 294 one way and 296 the other.
The other numbers you will see are shorter climbs described as if they were the whole thing. 269 is ground to the bell chamber, the highest point open to visitors. Counts near 250 usually start above the entrance steps. None of them is wrong; they are answers to different questions.
At roughly 183 feet, the climb is about 18 flights in the sense your iPhone means it — Apple Health scores ten feet of ascent as one flight, regardless of how many steps that took. Which is the useful part: your phone measures height, the tower is described in stairs, and the two only line up by coincidence.
What that many steps equals
Each one links to where the number came from.
- 138 stepsa football pitch, end to endSource