The Margani complex was composed of a three and four story mansion packed with residential spaces and a walled courtyard likely filled with a luscious garden. Beyond its imposing size, architectural decorations testified to this family’s status as nobility. A portico propped up by slender columns and Ionic capitals—examples of valuable Roman spolia—embellished the façade. A partial Roman cornice (band of decorative molding that projects off of a façade to frame an architectural feature) also ornamented the complex’s main entrance.

Of all the Margani mansion’s extant features, however, the brick tower is perhaps the most important. In the medieval period, the Margani tower would have been one among countless family towers looming over the Roman cityscape. Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, towers sprang up across the abitato and disabitato as a result of a rise in city-based living and noble settlement within the Aurelian walls. In addition to profoundly altering the city’s skyline, towers played prominently into local power dynamics by demarcating zones of influence and serving as fortified spaces during armed conflicts. Though the Margani tower no longer stands at its original height, it still serves as a fruitful reminder of this remarkable urban process. As you walk throughout the modern city keep an eye out for remnants of the great family towers that dominated the Roman landscape during the medieval period, as well as the large decorated mansions and complexes that encompassed them.]]> Place]]> 1300s]]>
As Ann Priester points out, the arched openings from the lower three stories with double bifore window openings are very differently constructed here than in most Roman bell towers as they are described by Ann Priester. The lowest bifore level has Gothic arches, and in the next two stories the colonnettes (thin columns) are doubled, a practice with origins outside of Rome and dating from the mid-thirteenth century, after most Roman bell towers were built. Most of the tower was completed in the 1370s, a century after the original campanile craze had died down. In fact, the tower was one of the few major ecclesiastical building projects in Rome during the Avignon papacy. Between 1445 and 1483 Cardinal Guillaume D’Estouteville completed the top story and add the pyramidal spire to the top of the roof, completing one of the rare examples of Romanesque-style campanile construction after the thirteenth century.]]> eitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996): 498-522.

Priester, Ann. “Bell Towers and Building Workshops in Medieval Rome.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (1993): 199-220.]]> Place]]>