The Two Towers
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
The Asinelli and Garisenda towers are Bologna’s most efficient rebuttal to the idea that medieval skylines were modest. Wealthy families built towers across the city, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their exact functions varied — defence, prestige, lookout, fortified residence — but status clearly mattered.
The Asinelli is the taller survivor. Garisenda leans so dramatically that Dante mentioned it in the Inferno. That literary reference is documented; the countless stories about why every individual tower was built are not all equally secure.
Here is the civic joke written in brick: a family proves it is powerful by building upward, then the commune spends centuries making the resulting city usable. Bologna once had many more towers than survive today, although the often-repeated claim of exactly one hundred or more at a single moment is difficult to establish with precision. So keep the image — a bristling competitive skyline — and be suspicious of suspiciously neat totals.
Medieval Bologna was not quaint. It was loud, litigated, commercial and occasionally fortified against the neighbours.