The missing Civic Tower of Torino (1375-1801)

Friday 12th April, 2024 - Bruce Sterling

The “Tower of Saint Gregory” stood in downtown Turin since the 1300s, and was the grandest and tallest building in town for many centuries. It was demolished by Napoleon.

I’m inclined to think that the tower ought to be restored — mostly for the sake of the Turinese heritage-tourism industry. It’s annoying that “heritage tourism” lacks any avant-garde. Restoring buildings to a brand-new condition when they’ve been missing from the city map for two hundred years, that would be a serious social invention.

This .pdf of an urban history book about the Tower is really quite beautiful. One can’t page through it without feeling the loss of that structure. The Civic Tower had a lot of different avatars; the Turinese worked on it for hundreds of years.

https://www.museotorino.it/resources/pdf/books/95/files/assets/common/downloads/publication.pdf