[HN Gopher] Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
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Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
Author : geox
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-05-23 12:08 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| jakub_g wrote:
| Nowhere as much and as tall, but villages in Georgian mountainous
| region of Svaneti also used to have many tall towers for
| defensive purposes. There's still a bunch remaining.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svan_towers
| novaRom wrote:
| Why did they build them? Any practical advantage to live so high?
| GaggiX wrote:
| Defense and prestige I imagine. Also the article reports that
| the towers were mostly "panic rooms", they were not lived in,
| only used in case of emergency.
| gumby wrote:
| The article asserts (plausibly, but does not justify it) that
| there is a correlation between land value and structure height,
| since a higher structure has more floor area to be used in that
| high value area, while in a low land-value area you can do the
| same thing by spreading out.
|
| The article is actually quite disappointing as it's really just
| clickbait content for a video that I have no interest in
| watching.
| peterlk wrote:
| When we stayed in Bologna for a month, we were told that it was
| used defensively. You can see a very long ways from the top of
| the central tower (I think it's closed at the moment). It would
| have been nearly impossible for an army to approach Bologna
| without several days for Bologna to prepare
| kratom_sandwich wrote:
| There's even a HN post about the closure! Indeed, the two
| most famous towers Garisenda and Asinelli are closed for
| renovations for the forseeable future. IIRC, they used to be
| the same height and had a wooden bridge connecting them at
| the top. From there, guards could oversee the marketplace and
| look out for riots.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38087256
| ant6n wrote:
| If you just need it to view far, then why build more than the
| primary tower, a backup, and perhaps a secondary backup (in a
| pinch, you don't want to be caught without a secondary
| backup).
| Tade0 wrote:
| I lived there for several years and the prevailing notion among
| the locals seems to be status.
|
| Then again part of being a true citizen of Bologna is to have
| incorrect information on some of the landmarks there.
| thesagan wrote:
| That particular illustration is an artistic interpretation of
| another older illustration. I wish I could place a link for
| reference right now but I'm using my phone and that's no fun.
|
| There's a YouTube video somewhere that explains all of this and
| shows a more accurate physical model (or as accurate as can be
| reasonably expected) that is located somewhere in Bologna, which
| suggests that there were quite a few towers but not that many and
| not that tall as shown here. In any case it still had an
| impressive skyline for its day.
|
| If I remember to do so, I'll come back here and post a link.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| The youtube video is embedded midway through the article:
| https://youtu.be/ikg3-GQLg3g
| Beijinger wrote:
| They looked like this (scroll down)
| https://www.fontanellestate.com/en/blog/visit-siena-italy-s-...
| timmaxw wrote:
| Note, those pictures depict the towers as about 5x bigger than
| they actually were.
|
| To get a true sense of scale, here's the same view on Google
| Earth:
| https://earth.google.com/web/@44.48152905,11.33820409,94.604...
| You can see the towers that are still standing. They visibly
| stick out from the shorter buildings, but they're nowhere near as
| big as in the picture.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| I think Google Earth might be more wrong than the illustration.
| One of the two Towers of Bologna is 97m. On GE it looks less
| than that. 97m is more than 33 stories.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Bologna
| contingencies wrote:
| Refuge from or assertion of banditry or other express or implied
| threat of physical assault is a powerful force underlying the
| development of much of technology, not only architecture.
|
| In architecture, some of the more interesting I have seen are
| Guangdong's _Diaolou_ (Diao Lou ) -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaolou - but of course we have
| castles, bridges, etc. IIRC John Young, architect and Cryptome
| maintainer, made some interesting studies in to public spaces as
| "the architecture of control". When you look at mass transit
| stations, for instance, there are so many control elements which
| we consider normal - lines, signage, threats of prosecution,
| physical barriers, choke points, hidden connections, video, etc.
| - but are actually explicit acknowledgement of risk, danger,
| threat and control.
|
| But something as simple as staple foods (deriving from settled
| agriculture and thus central control), or the entire field of
| logistics, operations research and indeed computing can also be
| linked directly to force projection.
|
| Truly, we are base creatures.
|
| _The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human
| hands. This is the comedy of science._ - Karel Capek (1921),
| inventor of the term 'robot'
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