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.

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.

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Until that point in time, the Britons had held control of post-Roman Britain, keeping the Anglo-Saxons isolated and suppressed. After the Romans were gone, the Britons maintained the status quo, living in towns, with elected officials, and carrying on trade with the empire. After AD 536, the year reported as the "death of Arthur", the Britons, the ancient Cymric empire that at one time had stretched from Cornwall in the south to Strathclyde in the north, all but disappeared, and were replaced by Anglo-Saxons. There is much debate among scholars as to whether the Anglo-Saxons killed all of the Britons, or assimilated them. Here we must consider that they were victims of possibly many overhead cometary explosions which wiped out most of the population of Europe, plunging it into the Dark Ages which were, apparently, really DARK, atmospherically speaking.

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