Asinelli and Garisenda
The Two Towers
Asinelli and Garisenda might sound like two doomed lovers plucked out of a medieval fairy tale but they were really two families competing for dominance. The way you did that in the Middle Ages was to build a tall tower. The higher the tower wins, it’s as simple as that. And in Bologna everyone was doing it, there are lots of old etchings you can see of Bologna with hundreds of towers poking out like asparagus all over the city. One of my guidebooks referred to this period of Bologna’s history as being a Medieval Manhattan.
I don’t really know how many are left but in my opinion there are still more than they need.
Asinelli is the taller one and Garisenda is the shorter one leaning at a dramatic angle. For 5€ you can test your poor little heart and climb the 450 steps of Asinelli to the lookout at top.
In preparation for this trip I pretty much convinced myself that 450 was too many steps for anything. But today I stood looking at these two towers and thought of the regret I would feel not to have done it, not just for the views on this overcast and drizzly day but just to prove that I’m not too old to still do stupid things.
The views are really rather beautiful, Bologna is famously monochromatic: red ochre to be exact. But the jumble and sprawl of these red rooftops looks wonderful from this height and the distant hills shrouded in mist — if a portal swallowed me up and spit me out in the middle it the 1400’s I would hardly notice the difference.
The stepmeter in my phone recorded the flight as the equivalent of 25 floors which is 5 times the apartment building I live in.
