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Medieval Florence - The Towers

Despite the measures adopted in the thirteenth century for the reduction of all the towers, in the fourteenth century the central area of the city was still characterized by the specifically vertical development of the buildings in relationship to the extremely narrow streets.

A naive idea of this allover aspect appears in the mid-fourteenth century fresco in the Loggia of the Bigallo in Florence. The rhythm created by the openings distributed prevalently in vertical lines cannot be explained only by the lack of proper perspective in the representation.

The fresco constitutes the first known attempt of a 'view' of the city as a whole, but the artist fails to stress the differentiated relationship between Arnolfo's structures and their context and still sees the city as an early medieval homogenous jumble.

The attempts of the noble families to impose their might and to defend themselves from rival families led to the construction of the early medieval towers.

Five towers are documented at the end of the eleventh century. Around the middle of the next century they were going up everywhere with 35 documented in 1180, although historians think there were at least three times as many.
Originally the towers served purely military purposes, and were used as dwellings only exceptionally, in times of danger, when the family took temporary refuge there.
Indeed the towers generally rose adjacent to the house (or houses) of the families to which they belonged, and could be reached from the upper floors when necessary via openings set into the walls of the towers, without having to go out into the street.
Later (late fourteenth century) the towers were transformed into dwellings (they had already been lowered, included in restructurations, etc.).
Some belonged to a single owner, but in the twelfth century the 'societa delle Torri' spread.
As a result of this form of association the same tower belonged to a 'consorteria' or political association of aristocratic families, in which case it was called after the most important family in the association.
Sometimes they also had a nickname. With this system, a consorteria ended up by controlling whole building complexes. For example, all the buildings on the west side of Por S. Maria from Borgo SS. Apostoli to the Arno belonged to the Amidei and their associates; the constructions in the area where Piazza della Signoria is now belonged to the consofleria of the Uberti, etc.
The fact 'that more than one tower belonged to the same consorteria or the frequent fusion of several consorterie in one led to a particular organization of the urban space and in particular of the 'city block'.

The natural goal of these associations was to succeed in getting complete control of a block which then appeared as a unified structure with a common space in the center surrounded by the houses and towers of the memhers of the consorteria and continuous, rapid and safe passage from one building to the other was thus possible. Inside the block (often the old insula of the Roman layout) which consisted of buildings belonging to the same consorteria, the common services, the well,, etc. were situated on the common ground.

While the wooden galleries on the street side had to be easy to remove in the event of fighting, inside the towers they could remain as more or less permanent superstructures and therefore serve as continuous means of communication. The chapel was often inside the fortified block.

It has also been noted that the tower and the campanile appeared almost simultaneously in Italian architecture. It seems likely that the tower served as model for the campanile.
In those far off times the bell was an important means of communication to summon the people to assembly or for transmitting information. The bell of the church inside the city block may originally have been set in one of the towers.
And this may be why in 1038 emperor Corrado assigned the tower known as della Castagna, which still stands in the area of the monastery at the corner of Piazza di S. Martino, to the Badia of Florence.

Another interesting example of bell tower is that of S. Maria Maggiore.
The vaulted passageways which joined the houses to the towers explain the elongated rectangular shape of the openings on the upper floors of the towers, openings which were in fact, called doors in some documents.
The towers were often square in plan, about seven-eight meters per side; the thickness of the walls at the base was rarely less than a meter sixty.
The height varied from fifty to seventy meters (by way of comparison the bell tower of the Cathedral is 84 meters high).
The lower part of the facades was more carefully finished on the exterior with smooth or rusticated ashlars, set in courses. The parallelepiped structure of the tower did not look nearly as abstract at the time as it appears in the few extant examples. The holes and corbels still to be seen in the masonry served to support the movable structures as well as the wooden scaffolding and balconies where the combatants stood.

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