What happened to Italy's Skyscrapers?

0:00 Maybe you've seen this picture before.

0:02 I know I have.

0:04 It's posted all over the internet.

0:06 This old town with an insane amount of towers.

0:10 Many around a hundred meters tall.

0:12 Twice the size of the Tower of Pisa.

0:15 And it's not just this image.

0:19 Cultural influencers love this town.

0:21 And I get it.

0:23 This medieval skyline seems out of place.

0:26 It looks more like modern New York.

0:28 It is impressive.

0:30 It is futuristic.

0:32 It seems almost...

0:34 unbelievable.

0:34 There are 179 towers in this image.

0:39 And it's supposed to be of a real place.

0:42 The Italian city of Bologna.

0:44 But nowadays you'll find just a handful of towers there.

0:47 Online no one seems to agree on how many towers there used to be.

0:52 This got my historian senses tingling.

0:54 Are these images actually real?

0:56 I wanted to find out one thing.

1:00 What happened to these towers?

1:03 To answer that question I knew I had to go there.

1:10 I'm on my way to Bologna.

1:12 I'm meeting Lorenzo Caravaggi.

1:13 A lecturer in medieval history from Lancaster University in the UK.

1:16 Who might be the Italian with the most impressive English accent alive.

1:20 Indeed.

1:20 It's gonna take some time to get there.

1:22 But I hope I will get some rest with the help of today's sponsor, Manta sleep.

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2:29 And we can go back to Bologna.

2:31 I started with reading up on the history of Bologna's towers.

2:35 Many were built 800 years ago.

2:38 You might know Italy as this unified country.

2:40 Italy at the time was different.

2:42 It was a mess of small states.

2:45 In this area they think cities should not be ruled by popes or emperors.

2:50 But ruled by its citizens.

2:52 Independent city states like Venice,

2:54 Florence and Bologna become the hubs of trade and culture.

2:57 By some estimates Bologna becomes one of the largest cities in Europe.

3:02 It's a time of huge ambitious projects.

3:04 Cities build cathedrals, town halls and public squares.

3:08 And some people build towers.

3:11 In Bologna I found towers in different shapes and sizes.

3:18 Some are big, others are crooked.

3:22 This one is actually a bed and breakfast.

3:25 You can sleep here.

3:26 But of potentially hundreds, now there are just 22 left.

3:30 These two are the most famous.

3:32 The Asinelli tower is the largest.

3:35 It's almost 100 meters tall.

3:36 But as I walked through the city I found something strange.

3:40 Some towers are just a few stories tall.

3:44 Nothing like this image.

3:46 So what's going on?

3:48 In order to understand what's going on with all these towers,

3:51 we actually need to leave the city and go to the countryside.

3:54 But before we do that we need to do something really really important.

3:58 We need to have breakfast.

4:00 Andiamo?

4:01 Perfect.

4:01 Let's go.

4:02 This is a croissant, yes.

4:05 It's a cornetto, it's a specialty they make here.

4:10 Lemon cream.

4:10 Great way to start the day.

4:13 It's the hearty breakfast we all need.

4:15 Indeed.

4:16 Before people build towers, they build castles.

4:20 Now we know Italy is a world of cities.

4:25 It is the most heavily urbanized area in Europe at this time.

4:29 But Italy, like the rest of Europe, is also made of aristocracy.

4:33 And the aristocracy, they build castles and they live according

4:37 to the lives of knighthood and chivalry,

4:40 which often translates into using violence

4:42 and showing that you're good at fighting.

4:46 Noble families would often be fighting each other.

4:50 When they moved to Bologna, their traditions are taken over by local elites.

4:55 But the city is no place to build castles.

4:58 These noble family feuds are really like Romeo and Juliet.

5:01 And we have a story of a young woman and a young

5:04 man from rival families that fell in love with each other,

5:07 had a secret wedding, and their relatives got quite mad.

5:10 The relatives of the young woman especially.

5:12 And they stormed the houses of their enemies, killed a young man,

5:15 and then strangled the young woman who had married their enemy.

5:18 With this kind of violence happening, nobles build towers for protection.

5:22 Families actually don't live in them.

5:24 They live in townhouses.

5:25 Towers are more like panic rooms.

5:27 They're only used when they're needed.

5:29 But these times are not only defined by violence.

5:32 This image shows two families making peace.

5:35 Families also want political stability.

5:38 And priests tell them that if they want to go to heaven,

5:41 they have to stop fighting.

5:43 People start describing towers.

5:44 Pictures of them start to appear.

5:46 But they all look different from this image.

5:49 So where is it actually from?

5:52 If you do a reverse image search, you land up on Wikipedia,

5:57 where it says it's made by this artist Tony Pecoraro.

6:00 I found his book with beautiful artwork

6:03 of these magical cityscapes and of Bologna.

6:06 But this book is from 2008.

6:09 So I sent the artist an email and I got a reply.

6:18 (man speaking in Italian) So this is an artist interpretation.

6:27 It's exaggerated.

6:28 The real height should be lower.

6:30 He based himself on a real source, this Angelo Finnelli.

6:34 I've heard that name before.

6:36 Connected to this image.

6:37 This already looks a lot older.

6:39 I found it here on eBay.

6:42 These are postcards of Bologna.

6:43 Postcards from the early 20th century.

6:45 So not from medieval times.

6:48 They are also based on a work of Angelo Finnelli.

6:54 Who is this guy?

6:56 Here he is with a map of the city behind him.

6:59 And this is the model of Bologna in front of him with a lot of towers.

7:03 It's in a communal art museum.

7:05 If this model is the basis for the pictures, I have to go and see it.

7:11 And hopefully I can find out how many towers there really were.

7:16 The glory of men was to be rich in arms and horses.

7:21 That of nobles was to have lofty towers.

7:24 As towers become popular, they move into the mainstream.

7:27 You have merchants, you have bankers, you have people who come into a lot

7:31 of money who also want to start building towers.

7:33 Towers become status symbols.

7:35 Families are competing to build the tallest.

7:37 Not always because of defensive purposes.

7:39 Imagine having to carry stones for a catapult all the way up 100 meters tower.

7:44 And it's not just Bologna.

7:45 In Italy, it seems like everyone is building towers.

7:48 In Siena, Florence, Pisa, San Gimignano, towers become part of cityscapes.

7:54 And Bologna's story will inspire a simple shoemaker.

8:01 I found that museum that has the work of Angelo Finnelli.

8:05 This is him.

8:05 He's described as a shoemaker by trade,

8:08 but also a strange self-taught artist scientist.

8:11 He made this model of Bologna.

8:14 This is the model I've seen posted online.

8:17 It's actually a hundred years old.

8:19 This amazing work shows all these towers dominating the city.

8:22 It's responsible for all the pictures on the internet.

8:25 But in the museum, they told me

8:28 it's not the original source for Bologna's towers.

8:31 So what does that source tell us?

8:35 And where did all these towers go?

8:40 Considering as we have the ancient disease of pride,

8:44 which has daily caused innumerable homicides,

8:47 we have agreed that no other house should

8:50 be built higher than the tower of Stephen, son of Balduinus and Lambert.

8:55 Some nobles say the length of towers matters.

8:58 Others say it's what you do with it.

9:01 But all towers become associated with noble violence and public disorder.

9:05 City governments decide to act.

9:07 We have an image from a manuscript from Genoa that shows the civic governor

9:11 of the city ordering the destruction

9:13 of the tower of a nobleman who committed murder.

9:16 It's absolutely forbidden to build on top of a destroyed tower.

9:19 So they will leave the ruins as a perpetual memory of your shame,

9:22 like your family would be shamed.

9:24 But it wasn't just the demolishing of towers that ended them.

9:26 So the wealthy get bored of building towers at some point.

9:31 In the 14th century,

9:32 it's not as fashionable as it used to be 100, 200 years before.

9:37 So instead, they're building palaces where they can hold banquets and feasts.

9:41 For the rest, towers were demolished,

9:43 other collapsed in earthquakes, and some were shortened.

9:46 The idea of a Bologna dominated by towers faded from memory.

9:52 Until one man made it his mission to remember.

9:55 I found the original source that inspires the model,

9:58 which inspires the postcards,

10:00 that inspires an Italian artist almost 150 years later.

10:04 Count Giovanni Gozzadini,

10:05 it's descended from one of the tower-owning noble families.

10:09 He wrote this, the first account of the history of Bologna's towers.

10:13 It's actually a really solid historical work, but he identifies 194 towers.

10:19 194.

10:19 Recent research shows he might have accidentally counted some towers twice.

10:25 It's not just a mistake though.

10:27 Count Gozzadini is a proud man.

10:29 There is a sense of, in a way,

10:32 boasting about the power and the wealth and the beauty of Bologna.

10:36 But he also sees them as warning signs for a modern Italy.

10:40 Because they're associated with violence, with infighting.

10:43 So in the wake of the Italian unification, in the 19th century,

10:47 towers should also stand as warning signs

10:50 not to have divisions again in the future.

10:52 So how did Bologna actually look in the 1200s?

10:55 At the museum, they told me there's actually

10:57 a second model that can show us this.

11:06 You can clearly see the outer walls, with roads leading to the center,

11:10 leading up to towers towering over the city.

11:13 How many exactly?

11:15 We will probably never know.

11:17 Modern sources say 80 to 100 towers.

11:19 I know this doesn't look as impressive as those other pictures,

11:23 but imagine for someone coming to the city and seeing all those towers.