That’s because the whole thing is just a boring old bell tower. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is not its own thing: It’s a very small part of the Square of Miracles, which also includes the Pisa Cathedral and Baptistry.
Bob Tubbs/Wikimedia Commons
Which, while beautiful, is a lot less fun to pretend to push over in photos.
In reality, the nearby overlooked cathedral is way more interesting, and without it there would never have been a need for a bell tower, leaning or otherwise, but it rarely shows up in pop culture. And all because it didn’t suck and fall over.
2
Slovakia Is Not Some Gloomy, Murder-Warehouse Wasteland
Slovakia gets a bad rep in movies. According to films like EuroTrip, Slovakia is a poor, ugly, post-Soviet reenactment of Hell where a nickel is enough to buy an entire hotel… but not hope. The Hostel franchise thinks Slovakia’s primary industry is renting out dilapidated warehouses so rich businessmen can torture innocent people to death.
Let’s look at the facts: Slovakia has a national GDP per capita of $31,200. Now, the U.S. has a per capita GDP of $57,300, but let’s not forget that Slovakia is barely the size of a Texas Walmart. So while Slovaks make less money than Americans, they use it more wisely, with only 12 percent of the population living below the poverty line, compared to America’s 15 percent. Slovakia is also one of the top five countries on the planet in terms of income equality. America is in the bottom third.
So the poverty thing is a myth, but what about the torture? Surely the torture stuff is accurate! Shockingly, no: Slovakia sports a lower crime rate than the United States. In fact, Slovakia is in the highest tier for efforts to combat human trafficking. In 2016, human trafficking in the United States rose by nearly 36 percent. Slovakia might not be paradise on Earth, but it’s nothing like the torture-warehouse anus of Europe that movies make it out to be. Hell, it’s actually the 40th happiest place on Earth. Why? Lots of reasons, though having one of the lowest beer prices in Europe probably helps.
1
The Alamo Is Mostly Gone, And What Remains Is Wildly Out Of Place
The bloody 1836 battle between the defenders of the Alamo Mission in modern-day San Antonio, and the superior forces of General Santa Anna has been featured on film dozens of times. It’s an icon of the Wild West, and this is pretty much what everybody pictures when they think of it:
Just looking at this photo counts as a ninth-grade geography credit.
But just like with the pyramids, that image features some very strategic cropping. This is what the Alamo looks like when you zoom out a little:
Turns out the nation’s seventh-largest city consists of more than just adobe ruins.
While no longer surrounded by the Mexican army, the Alamo is besieged by a collection of fast food restaurants, tourist traps, and a Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The modern surroundings of the Alamo are reportedly pretty jarring to most new visitors, though it shouldn’t really be a surprise that the world around the site has moved on. Well, maybe the word “around” is incorrect, because much of the town has actually been built on top of the original Alamo Mission.
The iconic Alamo building we picture from the movies is, in reality, just the mission chapel. It was central to the defense of the settlement, but the compound that it served was much larger than what you see today. It’s just that huge parts of it were deemed “less iconic” than the stone church, and have since been paved over and forgotten in the name of progress. But even the chapel doesn’t look as it did during the actual battle of the Alamo. Since 1836, there have been numerous revisions to the building: a roof was added, facades were put up and then torn down, buildings were added and removed — even the iconic curved parapet at the top wasn’t added until the 1850s.
In short, even the Alamo doesn’t remember the Alamo.
Jacob Lewis is the sole writer at It’s All Clown Shoes, the co-creator of the hit television series Alias and Lost, and the defendant in no less than 36 Intellectual Property related lawsuits brought by J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot… for unknown reasons.
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