<i>> Bologna is famous for still having two intact towers</i><p>Famous fact but actually incorrect: there are many more, they're just a bit more difficult to spot than the two central ones.<p>In total there are 22 towers still standing in some form, and (iirc) about 7 of them are still their original height.<p><a href="https://www.bolognawelcome.com/en/blog/not-just-the-two-towers" rel="nofollow">https://www.bolognawelcome.com/en/blog/not-just-the-two-towe...</a>
Blog is by historian Ada Palmer, who also wrote some quite successful sci-fi that was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning</a> . How she finds the time while also teaching as a professor at Chicago I do not know.
Oh I could spend ages on this blog.<p>Interesting that the main reason they went away was coordinated effort to halt a race towards the bottom (or top, as the case may be). Medieval society was also able to work towards a common good.
>Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families<p>They needed some mini-fortresses, but why build them in the form of a tower? They could have built a secure, easy to defend structure less tall.<p>Maybe they've built them for showing off, the taller the building, the higher the prestige? At least, that is the reason we have skyscrapers.
Is there any historical data to support the height of the towers in the first image? It looks like at least some of that is leaning on an artistic license.
This is a commercial for the book at the top (and bottom) of the webpage. There’s nothing wrong with marketing, however this article is proposing and propagandizing -facts- about towers in renaissance Italy. The book markets itself to be an irreverent and witty take on historians’ tales about the Renaissance and its historical influence and how it has been propagandized. The top image in the article of towers is a modern fallacy（render）of what an Italian renaissance city might have looked like. In the third to last paragraph the author describes Bologna as the city of a hundred towers then describes Florence as having fewer but showing the same render. There are no actual references to infighting and burning described in the article. The author even alludes to a fictional Shakespearean story to enforce the point. So in which city when did this happen? The article also talks about the towers as being fireproof and for rich family’s ‚to then set your enemies homes on fire‘ later to say about Florence’s dozenish towers ‚Much to the despair of the city fire brigade‘ This reeks of creative history and perhaps much of history has been created, but others have far more references supporting their creativity. To quote Abe Lincoln ‚Don’t Believe everything you read on the internet‘