Torre dei Conti

It is fascinating as a fact - as soon as people did not make their housing and where. And the streets around :)

Let's say that the place the location the beauty of the structure would be 5 stars unfortunately once again in the capital we have to content ourselves with imagining how the initial state could have been. In total state of neglect the tower is not well cared for and is left to rot in the heart of Rome. I do not know exactly who is always to blame with me 190 and the Ministry, however, some government agency But I can imagine that the money to fix it was certainly in the past 2000 years allocated and ended up in some other Italian-style pocket

Unfortunately, it has not been possible to visit the interior for about fifteen years

Imposing and majestic still today, despite being reduced to a third of its original structure, the Torre de 'Conti is a beautiful example of the tower-houses of medieval Rome, residences and fortresses of baronial families and ecclesiastical authorities. Mentioned even by Francesco Petrarca in his letters and also known as Torre Maggiore or Torre Secura, due to its grandeur and its impregnability, it had been erected on the remains of one of the four exedras of the Temple of Peace, perhaps as early as the ninth century. In 1203, based on a design by the architect Marchionne Aretino, the tower was certainly enlarged by Pope Innocent III for his family, the Counts of Segni, and covered with travertine slabs from the Imperial Forums, then removed in the late sixteenth century on the occasion of the construction of Porta Pia. In the intentions of the pontiff, the tower was to represent the ecclesiastical power and protect the papal processions from San Pietro to the Laterano. The approximately 29 meters that we see today constitute only the base of the tower which originally had to exceed 50-60 meters. To reduce it to its current state were the earthquakes that followed one another throughout its history, especially those of 1348, 1630 and 1644. At the end of the seventeenth century, the tower underwent an important restoration under the pontificate of Alexander VIII, and the two sturdy reinforcement buttresses still existing today. In the following centuries the tower, dilapidated and abandoned, was used as a barn and as a coal depot. The demolitions carried out between the end of the nineteenth century and the thirties for the opening of via Cavour and the current via dei Fori Imperiali led to its isolation and the destruction of the maze of alleys that surrounded it. Today the tower overlooks Largo Corrado Ricci (named after the general director of Antiquities and Fine Arts during the excavations of "via dell'Impero") which has taken the place of the old "piazza delle Carrette", a toponym that descends from the wagons who stopped here, on the edge of the Roman Forum, then a market area

As a tour guide it is always pleasant for me to pass by this apparently anonymous tower, explaining, however, to my tourists how it is a vivid testimony of a very turbulent period for Rome, that Middle Ages often mistreated but which actually left a lot as a legacy. also from an architectural point of view. Built around the twelfth century, in fact, the Torre dei Conti (from the name of the baronial family that had it built, a family from which a couple of popes of the time also came) was originally the highest tower in all of Rome, at least according to some documents. Then, due to various vicissitudes (looting and earthquakes above all), a large part of the building was lost. Despite this, the Torre dei Conti tells us how dangerous the atmosphere was in the city of those centuries, when a multitude of noble families used to wage among themselves to take power, often aiming to decide which Pope to elect in order to have full control. on Rome. The city had hundreds of towers, like many other Italian cities, most of which disappeared as early as the thirteenth century during the spread of an architectural and urban plan aimed at making Rome a modern city (for the time), and definitely a little quieter. In the Fascist era, then, the Torre dei Conti became the seat of an association linked to Italian veterans.