The medieval towers of Bologna

Step Yoshi
Atlas Obscura
Sun, 12 May 2019 22:15 UTC

© Toni Peccoraro

Artists impression. Over 100 towers were built in Bologna during the Middle Ages, but only 22 survive.

During the 12th and 13th centuries, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, an incredible number of towers were built throughout Bologna, making for a urban skyline that almost resembles modern-day Manhattan. Today, only 22 remain.

One of the possible explanations for the vertical construction craze is that rich families used the towers as a symbol of wealth and status, as well as for defensive purposes to guard their land. Some of the smaller structures were built as dwellings.

© Patrick Clenet

Garisenda Tower and Asinelli Tower

© Talkin monkey

Looking down on Garsenda Tower from the top of Asinelli Tower

The exact number of towers built in medieval Bologna is not clear. It was suggested that up to 180 towers were present in the city as of the 13th century, but a more realistic amount is probably around 100, which is still very impressive considering how difficult it was to built such tall structures with the limited resources of medieval Italy.

After the 13th century, some towers were demolished, others collapsed, and many were destined to different uses, such as residential or commercial buildings, or as prisons. The last demolitions occurred in the early 20th century, along with the 14th-century city walls.

Of the towers that remain today, the most famous are the "Two Towers": the 320-foot Asinelli Tower and the truncated Garisenda Tower, both of which are leaning.

© Public domain

Bologna 11th Century panorama

Comment: Wiki provides a few more details on these unusual buildings:

The last demolitions took place during the 20th century, according to an ambitious, but retrospectively unfortunate, restructuring plan for the city. The Artenisi Tower and the Riccadonna Tower at the Mercato di mezzo were demolished in 1917.

Construction

The construction of the towers was quite onerous, the usage of serfs notwithstanding. To build a typical tower with a height of 60 m would have required between three and ten years of work.

Each tower had a square cross-section with foundations between five and ten meters deep, reinforced by poles hammered into the ground and covered with pebble and lime. The tower's base was made of big blocks of selenite stone. The remaining walls became successively thinner and lighter the higher the structure was raised, and were realised in so-called "a sacco" masonry: with a thick inner wall and a thinner outer wall, with the gap being filled with stones and mortar.

Usually, some holes were left in the outer wall as well as bigger hollows in the selenite to support scaffoldings and to allow for later coverings and constructions, generally on the basis of wood.

There are records of similar buildings even in the Roman era, as noted on SOTT radio's Behind the Headlines: Julius Caesar - Evil Dictator or Messiah for Humanity?:

Jason: So Caesar is growing up in this situation and the other thing is, is you have to understand how people in Rome lived. These people were in abject third world poverty at most, or worse. They lived in these things called insulae which were basically tenement housing that were stacked 10 stories high, made of very shoddy construction, they very often collapsed. In fact at one point Cicero, who was very famous, was an owner of one of them and two of his collapsed and he was actually happy about that. He was very happy about it because he would be able to rebuild and charge higher rate.

Laura: Without a word for the thousands of people who were killed.

Jason: Yeah, he doesn't say anything. So all these people are living in abject poverty, tenement housing, very very poor, the big whodoos in the government are coming in, different factions and each time one of them comes in and takes charge he posts proscription lists and everybody is getting killed. This is what he was growing up in.

See also:

• Archaeologists at Oxford have unearthed vast discoveries which reveal what life was like in medieval times
• The dancing plagues that struck medieval Europe
• The Medieval warm period and how grapes grew where polar bears now roam
• Mystery of alien-like skulls from medieval Europe revealed after 50 years