Torre Garisenda

One of Bologna's Due Torri, the Garisenda tilts over Porta Ravegnana beside the Asinelli. Shortened in the fourteenth century for fear of collapse and celebrated by Dante in the Inferno, it remains a defining part of the city's skyline.

Why it matters

Medieval Bologna's tower race produced dozens of family skyscrapers; the Garisenda is the one that went wrong in a way no one could forget. Built by the Garisenda family at roughly the same time as the neighbouring Asinelli Tower, it suffered subsidence of the ground and its foundations, and the tower developed the steep overhang that has defined it ever since. The city's response, cutting it down in the fourteenth century, preserved the structure but froze its failure into the skyline. Dante gave the leaning shaft a place in Canto XXXI of the Inferno, which fixed it in European literature; the official city portal notes that it remains a national icon precisely because the defect became its identity. It stands as a monument to both the engineering limits of the medieval city and the later conservation work needed to preserve it.

What to notice

The tower's brick mass leans beside the vertical Asinelli. Its base preserves masonry from the original taller structure, while the truncated top records the fourteenth-century lowering. Conservation work around the tower has included monitoring and restoration. Its brick profile forms part of Bologna's historic urban silhouette.

Context and history

The Garisenda and the Asinelli belong to the wave of private fortified towers raised by Bologna's noble clans from the late eleventh century onward, when such shafts combined lookout and defence with a blunt declaration of family power. The Garisenda's builders set it close to the Asinelli on the high ground where the Via Emilia arrived, but the soft ground under the tower had other plans: the foundations gave way and the structure began to rotate, prompting the drastic fourteenth-century reduction in height that saved the shaft at the cost of its pride. Dante, who knew Bologna, drew on the leaning mass in the Inferno, and the comparison travelled with the poem through every subsequent century of commentary. Conservation became a permanent duty: structural monitoring continued through the twentieth century, and the city has undertaken a major restoration programme around the base.