I climbed the tower here today. I'd been wanting to do it and it was sunny for part of the day, so it seemed a perfect activity for my last full weekday here.
There is only one tower available for climbing of the two famous ones that mark the town center, and it is the taller one. When you enter, it feels like you are going into a dungeon. It is dark and narrow and the walls are cold stone and everything is winding around and feels a little creaky (even though in reality, nothing creaked). Then you have to climb for a bit before you have to pay. So I guess fearful types can always change their minds and save the 3 Euros.
The tower is almost 500 steps to the top. I had a flashback to when my Mom and brother and I climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty when we were kids. I remember the narrow winding stairs and I think they were metal and a light green patina color. These were wood, and not always well-placed. Like they were deep but they were stacked in a way where there wasn't always enough room for your whole foot because too much of one step was under (or over) the next one. Hard to explain, but the result was that your foot could get a little caught as you moved it to the next step. My first thought was that in the States, there would have been a liability waiver to sign when you paid.
I saw some children and some older people and a woman carrying a big shopping bag from a store - all categories that should be extra careful.
Also, as you neared the top, the stairs narrowed and became even more overlapping. Going up was okay, but having this kind of construction on the way down was a lot harder. You basically had to walk semi-sideways at least with one foot or you would slide a little. It actually felt more logical to do it going backward, like you would on a ladder, but for some reason I thought this and did not do it. All I can say is thank goodness the banisters were very sturdy.
At one point there was a large thin iron piece coming across one of the landings, and if you were tall and spacing out as you walked across to the next staircase, you would have been in trouble. Ditto for a similar one lying across part of another stairwell.
A man was coming down from the top as I neared it, and he said something to me in Italian. I did not understand so he repeated it but I still had no idea what he said. So I said, "Si?" and he said, "Si!" I just had to hope he had said something about the view, and not something like, "Don't go up there because there is a big hole you may fall into."
The towers were built between the 12th and 13th centuries, when there were many many of them in Bologna, probably about 180. Apparently, the more money and status your family had, the bigger you built your tower. But it is unclear why people built so many here. Over time, almost all were taken down or collapsed. There are about 20 standing now. The one I climbed is 97 meters tall (never learned the metric system, so let's just say it's very tall).
This is what Wikipedia says about how they were constructed:
The construction of the towers was quite onerous, the usage of serfs notwithstanding. To build a typical tower with a height of 60 meters would have required between three and 10 years of work.
Each tower had a square cross-section with foundations between five and ten meters deep, reinforced by poles hammered into the ground and covered with pebble and lime. The tower's base was made of big blocks of selenite stone. The remaining walls became successively thinner and lighter the higher the structure was raised, and were realised in so-called "a sacco" masonry: with a thick inner wall and a thinner outer wall, where the gap was filled with stones and mortar.
Usually, some holes were left in the outer wall as well as bigger hollows in the selenite to support scaffoldings and to allow for later coverings and constructions, generally on the basis of wood.
The view is great. Bologna is a very pretty city, and all the terracotta rooftops and very narrow streets make for pleasing patterns, a sense of the lifestyle here, and very nice images. (Again, you will see them when I upload pics back to the States in the next couple of weeks.)
I met a couple of women from CA while at the top. One of them was traveling around the world. She was doing the whole trip using Couchsurfing.com. For those of you unaware, this is a website where you can find people's couches to sleep on, for free, all over the world. There are reviews and ratings of each host, so you can choose wisely. So far she has had great experiences. And this means she is basically just paying for meals and transportation and saving a fortune. She said she was going home for the holidays and then going back. She had found a laptop on eBay that weighed under two pounds and was doing all her traveling with a knapsack that weighed about 12 or 13 pounds. She had saved up for almost 4 years to do this, and knew no other languages, which would be hard in South America, where she would be going in January.
When I exited the tower onto the street, I felt myself making the same face everyone had had whom I had seen exiting when I arrived. You sort of feel a rush, like you have been released from something and are out in the fresh air again. Even though on top it is all fresh air and the view is gorgeous. But something about being in the narrow, winding, dark, wooden, rickety, tube-like innards of the tower, and its Medieval vibe, make you feel like you survived something a tiny bit treacherous.
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