Exploring Bologna from above
Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 meters, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. “I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,” he tells me when I visit. “It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.” It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower.
