The Ministry of Culture is preparing to send a formal warning to the City of Bologna over the management of the Garisenda Tower. At the center of the institutional clash is the failure to transmit monitoring data and technical documentation regarding the tower’s state of conservation, which have allegedly been repeatedly requested by the MiC and never received: this was made known by Undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni, who in a sharp-toned statement directly implicated Mayor Matteo Lepore and asserted the state’s prerogatives in the protection of cultural heritage.
According to Borgonzoni, the central element of the affair is not political in nature, but concerns the need to shed full light on the structural conditions of one of Bologna’s historic symbols. The undersecretary stresses that the Ministry’s interest, as well as that of citizens, is exclusively to understand what the real situation of the Garisenda Tower is, in light of the information that the city administration has long claimed to possess. Information that, however, would never be shared with the relevant department.
“I don’t understand whether the difficulty of the mayor of the City of Bologna Matteo Lepore is in dealing with a female institutional figure or, more generally, with an institutional figure of a center-right government,” Borgonzoni says. “In any case, I and the Ministry of Culture-as I believe all the citizens of Bologna-are only interested in one thing: to clearly understand the real situation of the Garisenda Tower. The city administration has long been citing the existence of their monitoring. Precisely for this reason, as a Ministry we have repeatedly urged the transmission of such data, requesting it both verbally and in writing, along with technical documentation. To date, however, nothing has arrived. It is good to remember a fundamental point: although the Tower is municipal property, it is a protected cultural asset, and protection is the responsibility of the state. The Ministry of Culture has the duty - and the power - to oversee the preservation and safety of the cultural heritage, regardless of who owns it. Institutional cooperation, in these cases, is not optional.”
The crux, for the MiC, is first and foremost legal and institutional. Indeed, Borgonzoni recalls that although the Garisenda Tower is municipal property, it is fully among the cultural assets subject to state protection. A competence that cannot be circumvented and that, according to Borgonzoni, imposes a duty of full and transparent collaboration on the part of the local authority.
It is precisely on this point that the decision to proceed with a formal warning is grafted. Undersecretary Borgonzoni announced that on Monday she will send an official communication ordering the administration to present itself to the MiC with all available documentation. The request explicitly concerns monitoring data, technical surveys and maps related to the Garisenda Tower, elements considered indispensable to assess the state of the monument and any critical issues in terms of safety.
The issue also takes on special importance in light of the delegations recently given to Lucia Borgonzoni. In fact, the undersecretary recalls that in September 2024 the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli expanded her responsibilities, entrusting her also with the delegation on the safety of cultural heritage. A responsibility that, as Borgonzoni points out, concerns exactly situations such as that of the Garisenda Tower, where historical-artistic protection is accompanied by questions related to the stability and safety of an asset of enormous symbolic value.
The Garisenda Tower, together with the Asinelli Tower, represents one of the most recognizable monuments of the capital of Emilia and a strong identity element for the city. In recent years, attention on its structural condition has grown, fueling a public debate involving institutions, technicians and citizens.
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| Garisenda, Ministry warns Bologna municipality: monitoring data missing |
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