Torre del Mangia

Stand still for a moment on the warm brick of the Piazza del Campo. The ground slopes gently under your feet, tilting down towards one point, the way water runs into a basin. Pigeons lift and settle. Voices bounce off the curved row of palaces around you. And at the lowest point of the square, a thin tower of dark red brick rises straight up into the sky. This is the Torre del Mangia, and for almost seven centuries it has watched over Siena.

Before we climb into its story, look at the square itself. The Campo is shaped like an open shell, or a fan. Pale stone lines divide the brick paving into nine sections. Those nine slices are usually linked to the Government of the Nine, the council of merchants who ruled Siena in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Every line of that paving points down towards the town hall, and towards the tower. The whole square was designed to lead your eye here.

The building at the foot of the tower is the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena's town hall. It is still the seat of the city government today. Notice its curve. The facade bends slightly inward to follow the shape of the square, and the upper windows are split into three narrow arches. People call this kind of window Sienese Gothic. Gothic is the medieval style of pointed arches and tall, light forms. The tower grows out of the left side of the palace, as if the building simply reached for the sky.

Construction of the tower began in 1338, and the work took roughly a decade. The shaft was built by two brothers, Muccio and Francesco di Rinaldo. The crown at the top, with its pale stone and overhanging battlements, is linked to the painter Lippo Memmi. That detail surprises many visitors. In medieval Siena, a painter could design architecture too. The same eye that shaped altarpieces helped shape the most visible silhouette in the city.

Now, the height. The tower reaches close to ninety metres, and taller still if you count the lightning rod on top. When it was finished, it was one of the tallest towers in medieval Italy. But height here was not only about pride. A popular explanation says the city wanted the town hall tower to match the bell tower of the cathedral. Church and state would stand at the same level. Whether or not the builders planned that exactly, the idea says a lot about how Siena saw itself.

And there is a second layer to that idea. Look at where the tower stands. It rises from the lowest point of the square. Because the Campo sits in a hollow, the builders had to go very high to compete with towers built on the hills around the city. So this slim shaft is taller than it first appears. It had to climb out of a valley before it could even begin to rise above the rooftops.

So why is it called the Torre del Mangia? The name does not come from a saint or a noble family. It comes from a bell ringer. The first man paid to ring the tower bell was Giovanni di Balduccio. Locals gave him the nickname Mangiaguadagni, which means something like eat-the-profits. He apparently spent his wages as fast as he earned them. The nickname stuck to him, and then it stuck to the tower. In a city of saints and bankers, the tower carries the name of a spendthrift.

The bell ringer was remembered in another way too. A statue of Mangia once stood on the tower. Today a stone figure known as Mangia can be found inside the palace courtyard. Many people walk past it without knowing who he is. Look up at the top of the tower and you will also see the great bell hanging in its iron frame. The Sienese call this bell Sunto. Its name comes from the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the patron of the city. For centuries, the bells marked the working day, called citizens to meetings, and warned them of danger.

Now look down to the very base of the tower. There is an open stone chapel, with tall columns and a carved canopy. This is the Cappella di Piazza, the Chapel of the Square. It was built as a vow after the Black Death, the plague that swept through Europe in 1348. That year is also when the tower was being completed. Siena lost a huge part of its population. So at the foot of this tower of civic pride, you find a quiet promise made in grief.

If you decide to climb, prepare for narrow stairs. There are around four hundred steps, and in places the passage is so tight that two people can barely pass. Only small groups go up at one time, so the climb feels close and personal. The walls get closer. The air gets cooler. Small windows give you sudden flashes of the city. Then you come out at the top, into wind and light, with Siena laid out below you.

From up there, the shape of the city makes sense at last. You see the red roofs of the old town spread across three ridges. You see the striped marble of the cathedral. Beyond the walls, the soft hills of the Tuscan countryside roll away in green and gold. And straight below, the Campo looks exactly like the shell it is named after. Twice each summer, on the second of July and the sixteenth of August, horses race around that shell in the Palio. The Palio is a fierce bareback race between the city's neighbourhoods, and the tower is its silent judge.

Back down in the square, look across to the Fonte Gaia, the Fountain of Joy. The marble panels you see today are a copy of the fifteenth-century originals by the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia. Water still arrives through old underground channels that brought it into the city centuries ago. Inside the palace, the Sala dei Nove holds famous frescoes of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. They show a well-ruled city and a ruined one. The tower, the fountain, and those frescoes all came from the same proud, ambitious age.

Before you move on, find a spot on the warm brick and sit for a minute. Watch the shadow of the tower move slowly across the square. In the morning it falls one way, and by evening it stretches long over the paving towards the cafés. People have sat here like this for centuries — eating, arguing, waiting for news, waiting for the race. When you walk away, turn back once. The tower will still be there above the rooftops, thin and red, the bell ringer's name still attached to it.