Two Towers of Bologna
— the lean the city kept upright.
Not only on a wall.
“Two leaning brick towers in central Bologna. The Asinelli rises to 97 metres and still has a staircase up, 498 steps wound through the dark. The Garisenda is shorter, leaning harder, and Dante stopped to look up at it in the early 1300s. Bologna once had almost a hundred of these towers, neighbourhood ambition cast in brick. Most came down by the fifteenth century. These two stayed. They lean at angles that should not still be standing, and they are.
Two Towers of Bologna, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Two Towers stand at Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, the convergence point of several medieval streets in the old centre of Bologna, the capital of Italy's Emilia-Romagna region. The taller of the pair, the Torre degli Asinelli, rises 97.2 metres and was built between 1109 and 1119 by the Asinelli family during the city's tower-building boom. The shorter Torre della Garisenda stood nearby, slightly later, and was deliberately reduced in the fourteenth century after the soil under it began to give way. Bologna sits on the Po Valley alluvial plain, and at the medieval peak the city held more than a hundred private towers. Roughly twenty still stand.
Both towers are built of brick on a base of selenite stone, the standard combination for Bologna's medieval towers and part of the reason so few survived. The Asinelli leans about 2.2 metres off vertical at the top; the Garisenda, shorter at roughly 48 metres, leans nearly 3.2 metres. The Garisenda's lean grew so pronounced in the early fourteenth century that the upper courses were taken down to keep it standing. Dante had already passed beneath it and recorded the impression in the thirty-first canto of the Inferno. The Comune di Bologna has monitored both towers continuously since the 1990s, and the Garisenda was closed off again in 2023 for a long stabilisation campaign with scaffolding wrapping the base.
The Torre degli Asinelli has historically welcomed visitors up a wooden staircase of 498 steps to a panoramic platform at the top, with timed tickets sold through the Bologna Welcome tourism office. Closures for safety work have become routine, and in recent years both towers have been wrapped in scaffolding during phases of conservation. The Torre della Garisenda has not been open to the public for decades. The square below, Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, sits within the UNESCO-listed Porticoes of Bologna designation inscribed in 2021, and is reached on foot from Piazza Maggiore in under five minutes.