Description

The Torre Sanguigna is a medieval tower on a corner north of the Piazza Navona. Despite the large number of towers, territory markers of noble families, that once filled Rome, it is today (in Krautheimer’s words) one of the “ill-documented and few” towers that still survive from the inhabited city center of the Middle Ages. An article on medieval masonry is one of the few English-language articles to mention it, and this source as well mentions little more about it than its proximity to the Piazza Navona. It does, however, provide a date for the construction of the Torre Sanguigna: the alternating rows of brickwork and small bricks of tufa (a local stone) visible on its lower section suggest a twelfth or thirteenth century date of construction.

In discussing the surviving medieval towers of Rome, Krautheimer bemoans the separation of some from the fabric of the city and their treatment as museum pieces, but the Torre Sanguigna is an exception. It is still integrated into its block of buildings, even if the fortified house—domus—that would have originally been connected to it and housed the noble family that built it is no longer standing or at least visible. Despite the great changes to the city since the Middle Ages, including the widening of the streets and the greater height of the surrounding buildings, the Torre Sanguigna as currently situated provides a view of the original place of the tower as part of a larger building complex. Antonio Tempesta’s seventeenth century map of Rome provides a perspective of the tower midway between its construction and the present day, and it is depicted, then as now, as part of the surrounding city block.

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Source

Barclay Lloyd, J. E. “Masonry Techniques in Medieval Rome.” Papers of the British School at Rome 53 (1985): 225-277.

Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City, 312 - 1308. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 

Tempesta, Antonio. Plan of the City of Rome. From The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1645.

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