The first urban towers of Pavia are documented from the year 1018, also here as in much of
northern Italy, well before the spread of the noble castles in the countryside, which makes us understand how the spread of these buildings was not dictated by urbanization of the aristocratic classes of the district in the city, but they were a city creation, influenced by the turreted residences of lay and ecclesiastical power, in turn inspired by the royal palaces (such as the Royal Palace of Pavia) of the
Carolingian and
Ottonian age. In Pavia, as in other cities, the towers were not built with defensive intentions, the size and height in fact made them unsuitable for such purposes, but for representative and propaganda tasks, they were in fact the most direct expression of greatness and power of the various family clans. Most of the towers were built in the corners of the blocks into which Pavia was divided, often flanked by a vault, which guaranteed the structure the effect of counterthrust. Within the first urban walls (Pavia at the end of the twelfth century had three circles of walls, the first of which dates back to the Roman age) most of the main urban factions had palaces and houses close to each other, to symbolize the political and social solidarity of the nucleus, these buildings were flanked by a tower, while the same families enjoyed the patronage of at least one, or even more, of the churches in the neighborhood. An emblematic case is the tower, still existing today, albeit reduced in height, of the tower of the Pavese family of Catassi, located at the corner between piazza della Posta and via Galliano, near which stood, in addition to the houses of the family group, also the churches of Saint John of the Catassi and San George of the Catassi. Often the same families had similar artifacts built, of smaller size, on their farms and possessions in the countryside, such as the Torti, who at Porta Pertusi (based on the estimates of 1254) controlled a district, where in fact there were the churches of Santa Onorata dei Torti and Santa Maria dei Torti, while in the countryside they held the fortified farm of Torre de 'Torti, mentioned for the first time in 1259 and still existing today. With the affirmation of the
Visconti lordship during the fourteenth century, the symbolic value of the towers lost meaning, so much so that many of them were reduced in height, while the terminal part of others was transformed into a loggia. The following centuries saw the decline of the building model; concerns related to the stability of the buildings, especially between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, decreed the demolition or lowering of most of them. Pavia,
church of San Teodoro, view of Pavia, detail (about 1522) some of the numerous towers still present in the first half of the sixteenth century can be seen. The noble towers present in Pavia, on the basis of historical and iconographic documentation, must have been about 65, of which about twenty survive. == Architecture ==