A traveller or pilgrim of the past must have gazed with enthusiasm at the panorama of Rome in the Middle Ages. In those times the city was completely enclosed within surrounding walls and animated by different tower structures, erected along the roads or at the sides of piazzas. This scenario is difficult to reconcile with the city of today. But an attentive traveller may still trace, in the territory around the metropolis, buildings soaring above meagre vegetation. They are the towers of the Campagna Romana, chapels of millennia of history, lookouts of an obscure and sketchy past, inert spectators of the history of Rome. In the Middle Ages, in fact, Rome had up to three hundred towers, counting bell towers of churches and the fortifications of the Aurelian Walls, which gave the city an aspect of verticality. They gave it a towering aspect. In the Middle Ages this type of building was most widely diffused among families of the gentry, because the tower played an important part in the medieval defence system. It is in this epoch that the model of the so-called tower house is developed - that is, a tower that can be lived in, which is at the same time a symbol of prestige and power, as well as a bastion against opposing aristocratic families.
Quite often the victory or the fall of one of these towers brought with it the building or demolition of corrisponding towers. It was for Rome a period of great insecurity and instability. All withdrew towards the Tiber, lacking the water supplied for centuries by the network of acquaducts. This left most of these territories at the mercy of powerful noble families, continually at war among themselves, which impeded real development and civil
In response to practical needs, simplicity of structure and construction, exploitation of the plot through its height, the tower become widespread overnight; often erected on existing foundations, for military purposes or those of control and observation of the surrounding territory, it ends by becoming the emblem of a noble house.
Only from the XVth century onwards, with the advent of gunpowder and the popularity of the renaissance palace, did towers begin to disappear. Today, only fifty survive. Some are famous, because isolated and visible; the majority are largely unknown, because incorporated in the rear of other buildings or camouflaged between buildings to which they are attached.
But from the end of ancient times this type of construction, with a square, rectangular, or circular plan, has been in constant use.
Its height varies, whether as an independent dwelling or part of an organic building complex. Besides those in wood erected during a seige, in classical architecture we find towers within walls, with or without crenellation, often joined with bastions in Etruscan style. During the Empire they existed as isolated stone structures, whether for defence or for signalling purposes, along the coasts, great roads, and as part of the boundary systems.
The towers in Roman walls are an authoritative testimony of a defensive system. The walls designed in the reign of the Emperor Aurelian included over 383 towers, positioned at regular intervals to repell the first assaults of barbarian peoples.
Later, the emergence of a certain ecclesiastical hegemony, due to a weakening of the authority of the eastern empire over its territories, led to the organization of the lives of the population around Rome, on many sites of ruined buildings. Fraction (local area) funds came more and more under the control of ecclesiastical authorities, through donations and alienations. The first were real gifts, while the second were forms of legal acquisition, by the Church, of lands managed by peasants who, due to conditions of uncertainty, were forced to yield them to religious institutions.
The practice of renting, known as enfiteusi, became more and more common. The small landowner, exempt from paying taxes, could discharge the task of work on, and custody of, lands being able guard them in places suited for defence (towers or small castles), being answerable to the Monastery from which he received the enfiteusi at a certain rate. In this way the first nuclei of settlements on the Agro Romano came into existence, as is indicated by the presence of towers for signalling and observation, called vigilae, that from a fortified centre spread out as far as the coast. Later, however, many of these disappeared, or were incorporated in new buildings and survive today, as in the case of Tor Vergata (that is a fasce), bearing the name of the locality where they arose. So there grew up an ancient network of properties, roads and defence systems.
Of these agricultural centres the most interesting and widespread type is that of the so-called domus culta (literally cultivated house, or place of cultivation), an institution of a social and religious character, created in the VIIIth century, thanks to the important administration of two popes, Zaccaria (741 - 752) and Hadrian I (772 - 795), who settled the fate of the countryside that, after the fall of the Roman Empire, had been in steady decline. They reconstructed its disconnected fabric and gave back security to the in habitants. These two popes founded, then, a system of agricultural centres defended by local militia, situated at about 15 kilometres from the city, which constituted a kind of shield around the city, corresponding more or less to the route of the Grande Raccordo Anulare, with defensive towers either just inside it or outside it.
Through such institutions and the suburbicarie diocese, the popes exercised a real temporal power, managing at the same time to spread Christianity in the countryside through people devoted to the Church and to improving agriculture. Later, the term "turris" came to mean, in the agricultural sphere, the title of a property, already centre of a large complex of properties and services, or reduced, after a process of parcelling out, to what was strictly connected with the tower and, in the first place, on a legal basis. This led to the diffusion of place names to indicate the different suburban zones of Rome. Such denominations survive, even today, in the place names of about 40 quarters and localities, besides many roads that run through these territories.
Thanks to this system, the Papacy was able to guarentee safety and well-being, and bring about an increase in the population in Lazio, after many years of neglect. From this moment on, towers and wells in the Campagna Romana have been prescribed to indicate farming settlements in various periods of reclamation and cultivation of the land. Towers, whether positioned on strategic heights or along main road routes, have later become the nuclei of more functional buildings, such as watch towers along the walls of the domus cultae, or masti for feudal castles. Even today, when travelling along some secondary routes of the urban network of Rome, we may easily be fascinated by the lure of these structures, even if in ruins, anchored to some height or miraculously isolated in the landscape.
Symbolically, towers have always represented the desire of man to communicate with the unknown and, at the same time, his anxiety for control and security in the face of the enemy or the unkown. Often in contrast with flat anonimous country, or with a different type of horizzontal kind of construction, the reservoir (with which it sometimes shared the same building space), the tower became a centralising focus in space, a symbol of distinction and of the idea it embodies - protection, ascent towards the Elsewhere, the Other world, the Eternal. That which is low down naturally tends towards what is high up, and the tower often serves as a junction, through a frontier; as in the biblical image of Babel and the dream of man to know and to distinguish thought.
So it rises, detaching, elevating itself itself, from its own condition and aspiring towards a greater knowledge of self and the world. In this setting, it aspires to perception and, let us say, mediates, becomes a catalyst, convergence, unicum, object of relief, opposed to the background, to the non-place of our surroundings, because remaining totally true to itself. Still today, traversing the much built up territory of Rome, this kind of signal of recognition for the city assumes the role of a bridge in the air. Perpetuating its type, it becomes a sort of millenary echo trasmitted through space reaching as far as us.
