Galileo’s dropping ball at Pisa Leaning Tower is a “legend” and an anecdote

My cousin posted this photo of Pisa Leaning Tower at Facebook from the Leaning Tower.  Here is my comment: 

I thought you would stand slanting 3.99 degrees in line with the Tower.

Did you stand at the spot where Galileo stood dropping the ball to conduct his experiment on the velocity of falling objects?  Will Durant tells the “legend” as an anecdote in his The Age of Reason Begins (Vol. VII of The Story of Civilization).

The story first appeared in an early biography of Galileo, written by his friend Vincenzo Viviani in 1654 (12 years after Galileo’s death),

“. . . repeated experiments from the height of the Campanile of Pisa in the presence of the other teachers and philosophers, and the whole assembly of students . . .”

Durant had his doubt, he wrote,

“Galileo himself nowhere mentions the Pisa experiment in his extant writings; neither is it mentioned by two of his contemporaries who in 1612 and 1641 reported their own experiments in dropping objects of diverse weight from the top of the Leaning Tower.  Viviani’s story has been rejected as a legend by some scholars in Germany and America.”