FLORENCE, ITALY – It is the year 542 AD: the small Byzantine city of Florentia lies in ruins. It was burned to the ground; almost totally destroyed by the foolish trust of the population and the treachery of the Hun Totila. Even Florentia’s old Roman bridge has been reduced to piles of rubble on the bed of the Arno. And yet this city refused to die. Life stirred in the charred remains, and slowly the terrified survivors returned from the hills and the forests, and they began to rebuild their city.
It is the beginning of The Lost Tower of Florence eBook by Chris Dobson which describes how those now-vanished towers came to be built, and why they have almost entirely disappeared, although it does show how you can still get an impression of what these incredible buildings were like, if you know where to look.
At the end of the 6th Century the city fell under the control of a Germanic tribe called the Lombards, although initially it was deemed to be still too exposed to attacks from the Byzantine forces based in Ravenna to be developed as a major settlement. Instead, the Lombard kings put more emphasis on using the Via Francigena, away to west, as their principal north-south communication route, and Florentia languished as a city of secondary importance.
The walls of Byzantine Florentia had been largely destroyed by the Goths in 542, but the Lombards made use of some surviving parts of these defences close to the ancient Roman theatre (now beneath the Palazzo Vecchio) to create a fortified lookout post which they called the Gardingo. Further gardinghi were built as strongholds and watchtowers around the city, and in the surrounding countryside, in places such as Barberino in the Mugello, and Passignano in the Val di Pesa, and although these fortifications pre-date the medieval towers which are the subject of this book, they should be seen very much as their forerunners.

Like their medieval descendents, these gardinghi had rectangular towers, as opposed to the round towers of the Roman and Byzantine fortifications. Until recently it was thought that all these Lombard towers had long-since disappeared from the city, but recent examination by the author of a particular tower in Florence would now suggest that one solitary gardingo may indeed have survived, hitherto unrecognised for what it is.
Over time, and in particular with the patronage of the Emperor Charlemagne at the end of the 8th Century, and the reconstruction of the bridge over the Arno in the 9th Century, Florentia began to recover in earnest, and by the late 11th Century the city, by now called Fiorenza in the local dialect, and protected by a newer, larger circuit of walls (the fourth), had a population of some 20,000 inhabitants. Many houses within these walls were modest affairs built of wood and frequently prone to catching fire, but others were more substantial structures of brick and stone: taller, and fortified with high towers. Despite urban expansion, space was still at a premium within the city, which to an extent explains why the inhabitants of Florence built upwards for living space: they no other choice.
The historian Piero Bargellini has described these structures as tower-houses. But simple lack of space does not explain why these tall houses had even taller towers attached to them. In 1077, five such towers are documented, but by 1080 this number had already grown to thirty-five, although it is believed this is quite possibly only a third of the total number in existence by this time (Fig 4). These were not part of the fortifications of the city, but private houses, so why did the families that owned them feel the need to build houses designed as defensive structures?
Some of these powerful families, or casate, had ancient noble origins, whilst others may have risen from more humble beginnings in the 8th-9th Centuries, later acquiring land and a solid financial base in the countryside, but what they had in common was that they all migrated into Florence over the 11th -12th Centuries, buying up considerable tracts of property, and building houses and towers. They settled in the areas of the city closest to their rural roots, establishing networks of support within the city, whilst maintaining ties with their family retainers in the countryside outside the walls: the Scali for instance established themselves around the monastery of Santa Trinita, having come from Calenzano to the west, and later the Medici, coming from the Mugello to the north, settled around the mercato vecchio (the ‘old market’) and the church of San Lorenzo.

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