What do you see in this engraving or painting? It looks like some kind of area with skyscrapers like Manhattan or something in New York! Well, this is definitely some kind of urban area of a modern city.
Will it surprise you if I say that this is medieval Bologna of the 12th century. How did it happen?
Bologna is a city of towers. They are one of the main attractions of the city. Unfortunately, not so many towers have survived to this day. But in the Middle Ages, the city imagined a real forest of towers, and looked something like this:
The main heyday of the "Bolognese towers" came about the 12th - 13th centuries, when their number reached over 180. The reasons for the construction of such a large number of towers are still not clear. According to one version, wealthy families used them for attack / defense during the struggle for investiture.
In addition to the towers, one can also see the fortified gate (torresotti) corresponding to the 12th century fortress wall (Mura dei torresotti or Cerchia dei Mille), although the wall itself was almost completely destroyed.
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In the 13th century, many of the towers were demolished, while others simply collapsed. Several of the surviving towers have been used in various ways, serving as a prison, city tower, shop, or even a residential building. The last demolitions occurred in 1917, when two towers were torn down for an ambitious but unsuccessful plan for the city's redevelopment.
So the current landscape of Bologna looks completely different:
No more than 20 such towers remain in Bologna today. The most famous of these are Asinelli and Garisenda, whose iconic form is a famous symbol of the city. Both towers are named after the names of their owners. The Asinelli Tower is 97 m taller, but the 48 m Garisenda has a more visible slope with a deviation of 3 m Both towers had an initial height of approximately 60-70 m, but when the Garisenda began to tilt, its height dropped. The Asinelli Tower, on the other hand, was raised in height in the fourteenth century, when it was converted into a city prison and housed a small citadel.
During this period, a wooden structure was added around the Tower at a height of 30 meters, with an aerial pedestrian bridge leading to the Garisenda Tower. The pedestrian bridge was destroyed in a fire in 1398.
You can even climb some of the towers to admire the panorama of the city, although most of them are still closed to tourists.
It must be said that for a medieval city with its limited resources, the construction of the towers was not an easy task. The construction of a 60-meter tower usually took 3 to 10 years. At the same time, slaves and prisoners of war were mainly involved in the construction. There is a version that the main towers of Bologna - "Two Towers" - from the very beginning they were built at an inclination, therefore they are also called falling towers. According to another version, this is still a construction defect. The towers were located in the very center of medieval Bologna, in the place where all the roads from the city gates intersected.
These towers are named after the main sponsors of the construction. The Asinelli Tower was often used by Italian scientists to carry out various kinds of experiments. During the Second World War, the tower was a civil defense post, whose task was to detect fires in Bologna during the bombing. After the war, a television antenna was installed at the top of the tower. We also add that "The Two Towers" were quoted several times by Dante in his "Divine Comedy".
Such houses were built in the form of a quadrangle - a truncated trapezoid. The base, extending 7-10 meters into the ground, consisted of selenite blocks, and the walls were double - and the inner wall was much more powerful than the first. The gap between the walls was filled with cement, as well as rubble or stones. The thickness of the walls sometimes reached 2 meters.