What happened to Italy's Skyscrapers?

Maybe you've seen this picture before. I know I have. It's posted all over the internet. This old town with an insane amount of towers. Many around 100 meters tall. Twice the size of the Tower of Pisa. And it's not just this image. Cultural influencers love this town. And I get it. This medieval skyline seems out of place. It looks more like modern New York. It is impressive. It is futuristic. It seems almost unbelievable. There are 179 towers in this image. And it's supposed to be of a real place. The Italian city of Bologna. But nowadays you'll find just a handful of towers there. Online no one seems to agree on how many towers there used to be. This got my historian senses tingling. Are these images actually real? I wanted to find out one thing. What happened to these towers? To answer that question I knew I had to go there. I'm on my way to Bologna. I'm meeting Lorenzo Caravaggi. A lecturer in medieval history from Lancaster University in the UK. Who might be the Italian with the most impressive English accent alive. Indeed. It's gonna take some time to get there. But I hope I will get some rest with the help of today's sponsor Mantasleep. I've been using Mantasleep past... Jochem? Hey Jochem. Let's see. VPN? No. Website? No. Ah, Mantasleep. Mantasleep makes the world's best sleep mask and accessories. All Mantas masks completely block out any light and are highly adjustable. They have big cups so there's no pressure at all on your eyelids. Jochem is wearing the Mantasleep Pro. This mask has C-shaped cups. Which is perfect for side sleepers like Jochem. I just spent the night sleeping on the floor of this Greek ferry. Which generally I would not recommend. But with the Mantasleep mask and some earplugs it was actually fine. I got way more sleep than I was expecting. The mask fits. I didn't really feel it when I was sleeping. And they kept the lights on the entire trip. So it was nice to have a mask that completely blocked that out. So if you also want to use Mantasleep you can use my code PRESENTPAST for a 10% discount at the link below. And we can go back to Bologna. I started with reading up on the history of Bologna's towers. Many were built 800 years ago. You might know Italy as this unified country. Italy at the time was different. It was a mess of small states. In this area they think cities should not be ruled by popes or emperors. But ruled by its citizens. Independent city-states like Venice, Florence and Bologna become the hubs of trade and culture. By some estimates Bologna becomes one of the largest cities in Europe. It's a time of huge ambitious projects. Cities build cathedrals, town halls and public squares. And some people build towers. In Bologna I found towers in different shapes and sizes. Some are big. Others are crooked. This one is actually a bed and breakfast. You can sleep here. But of potentially hundreds. Now there are just 22 left. These two are the most famous. The Assinelli tower is the largest. It's almost 100 meters tall. But as I walked through the city I found something strange. Some towers are just a few stories tall. Nothing like this image. So what's going on? In order to understand what's going on with all these towers we actually need to leave the city and go to the countryside. But before we do that we need to do something really, really important. We need to have breakfast. Perfect. Let's go. This is a croissant, yes. It's a cornetto. It's a specialty they make here. Lemon cream. Great way to start the day. It's the hearty breakfast we all need. Indeed. Before people built towers they built castles. Now we know Italy is a world of cities. It is the most heavily urbanized area in Europe at this time. But Italy, like the rest of Europe, is also made of aristocracy. And the aristocracy they build castles and they live according to the lives of knighthood and chivalry. Which often translates into using violence and showing that you're good at fighting. Noble families would often be fighting each other. When they move to Bologna their traditions are taken over by local elites. But the city is no place to build castles. These noble family feuds are really like Romeo and Juliet. And we have a story of a young woman and a young man from rival families that fell in love with each other, had a secret wedding and their relatives got quite mad, the relatives of the young woman especially. And they stormed the houses of their enemies, killed the young man and then strangled the young woman who had married their enemy. With this kind of violence happening nobles build towers for protection. Families actually don't live in them. They live in townhouses. Towers are more like panic rooms. They're only used when they're needed. But these times are not only defined by violence. This image shows two families making peace. Families also want political stability. And priests tell them that if they want to go to heaven they have to stop fighting. People start describing towers. Pictures of them start to appear. But they all look different from this image. So where is it actually from? If you do a reverse image search you land up on Wikipedia. Where it says it's made by this artist Tony Pecoraro. I found his book with beautiful artwork of these magical cityscapes. And of Bologna. But this book is from 2008. So I sent the artist an email and I got a reply. So this is an artist interpretation. He based himself on a real source. This Angelo Finelli. I've heard that name before. Connected to this image. This already looks a lot older. I found it here on eBay. These are postcards of Bologna. Postcards from the early 20th century. So not from medieval times. They are also based on a work of Angelo Finelli. Who is this guy? Here he is with a map of the city behind him. And this is the model of Bologna in front of him. With a lot of towers. It's in a communal art museum. If this model is the basis for the pictures I have to go and see it. And hopefully I can find out how many towers there really were. The glory of men was to be rich in arms and horses. That of nobles was to have lofty towers. As towers become popular they move into the mainstream. You have merchants. You have bankers. You have people who come into a lot of money who also want to start building towers. Towers become status symbols. Families are competing to build the tallest. Not always because of defensive purposes. Imagine having to carry stones for a catapult all the way up a 100 meters tower. And it's not just Bologna. In Italy it seems like everyone is building towers. In Siena, Florence, Pisa, San Gimignano. Towers become part of cityscapes. And Bologna's story will inspire a simple shoemaker. I found that museum that has the work of Angelo Finelli. This is him. He's described as a shoemaker by trade. But also a strange self-taught artist-scientist. He made this model of Bologna. This is the model I've seen posted online. It's actually a hundred years old. This amazing work shows all these towers dominating the city. It's responsible for all the pictures on the internet. But in the museum they told me it's not the original source for Bologna's towers. So what does that source tell us? And where did all these towers go? Considering as we have the ancient disease of pride. Which has daily caused innumerable homicides. We have agreed that no other house should be built higher than the tower of Stephen, son of Baldwinus and Lambert. Some nobles say the length of towers matters. Others say it's what you do with it. But all towers become associated with noble violence and public disorder. City governments decide to act. We have an image from a manuscript from Genoa. This shows the civic governor of the city ordering the destruction of the tower of a nobleman who committed murder. It's absolutely forbidden to build on top of a destroyed tower. So they will leave the ruins as a perpetual memory of your shame. Like your family will be shamed. But it wasn't just the demolishing of towers that ended them. So the wealthy get bored of building towers at some point. In the 14th century it's not as fashionable as it used to be 100, 200 years before. So instead they're building palaces where they can hold banquets and feasts. For the rest, towers were demolished. Other collapsed in earthquakes. And some were shortened. The idea of a Bologna dominated by towers faded from memory. Until one man made it his mission to remember. I found the original source that inspires the model. Which inspires the postcards that inspires an Italian artist almost 150 years later. Count Giovanni Gozzardini. It's descended from one of the tower-owning noble families. He wrote this. The first account of the history of Bologna's towers. It's actually really solid historical work. But he identifies 194 towers. 194! Recent research shows he might have accidentally counted some towers twice. It's not just a mistake though. Count Gozzardini is a proud man. There is a sense of in a way boasting about the power and the wealth and the beauty of Bologna. But he also sees them as warning signs for a modern Italy. Because they're associated with violence. With infighting. So in the wake of the Italian unification in the 19th century. Towers should also stand as warning signs not to have divisions again in the future. So how did Bologna actually look in the 1200s? At the museum they told me there's actually a second model that can show us this. You can clearly see the outer walls. With roads leading to the center. Leading up to towers towering over the city. How many exactly? We will probably never know. Modern sources say 80 to 100 towers. I know this doesn't look as impressive as those other pictures. But imagine for someone coming to the city and seeing all those towers. It must have been a breathtaking sight.