Why Medieval Bologna Was Full of Tall Towers, and What Happened to Them

Image by Toni Pecoraro, via Wikimedia Commons

Go to practically any major city today, and you’ll notice that the buildings in certain areas are much taller than in others. That may sound trivially true, but what’s less obvious is that the height of those buildings tends to correspond to the value of the land on which they stand, which itself reflects the potential economic productivity to be realized by using as much vertical space as possible. To put it crudely, the taller the buildings in a part of town...