A dinner in New York raising funds to straighten out the old Garisenda
by Iacopo Taddia, 2/5/2024.
A few years ago, I was walking through the center of Bologna with an American acquaintance.
As we passed under the Two Towers and headed down towards Via Zamboni, he looked up and asked me, genuinely surprised and somewhat concerned, why we didn't just tear down that leaning tower and build a new one, taller, more beautiful, and safer.
Caught off guard (since I had never really thought about it before), I found myself defending the gentle tilt of the Garisenda with little enthusiasm and weak arguments, making a rather obvious and clumsy comparison to the more famous (but less leaning) Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Realizing the inherent weakness of my architectural arguments, I resorted to what little Emilian humor I had left, borrowing the words of Théophile Gautier, who compared the towers to two men "who had gone out drinking outside the city gates and were returning, wobbling and leaning on each other."
I then cut the anecdote short, remembering just in time that making jokes about a pair of wobbly towers to a New Yorker born before 2001 might be in poor taste.
I admit that I was not very convincing. After all, I couldn't really blame my American friend: even Goethe had called the Garisenda "a disgusting sight," although I doubt that my critic was quoting the German poet, or even that he was aware of this prestigious shared disgust.
As is often the case when dealing with Atlantic pragmatism, I took refuge in numbers.
Manhattan has 421 towers. The oldest is from 1889. The tallest is the One World Trade Center, which, from the Financial District, dominates the most iconic urban agglomeration in the West with its (not at all coincidental) 1776 feet, or 541 meters, of height.
Bologna has 22 skyscrapers. The most modern is from 1920. The tallest is the Asinelli Tower, which, from its height of 97 meters, or 318 feet, watches the neighboring Garisenda Tower lean irremediably, more and more.
In 1950, there were 160 towers in New York. In 1150, there were 180 skyscrapers in Bologna.
In a strange game of anachronistic flashforwards, Bologna is posthumously called the medieval Manhattan. The 12th century skyline of Bologna is often associated with the Big Apple metropolis, without even having to mention the well-known analogies between the Paladozza of Piazza Azzarita and Madison Square Garden.
So what better city than New York, the city that never sleeps, to host a piece of Bologna, the city of the "Biasanot": in dialect, those who never want to go to bed.
The orchestra is conducted by Chef Michele Casadei Massari, who has been working for 15 years to shorten the distances, both physical and temporal, between the two cities.
Tonight, February 5th at 7pm, in New York, in the city of "I'll make it new and taller," the city that more than any other embodies verticality, there is a dinner that is also a journey, and also a fundraiser entirely dedicated to saving a leaning and lopsided tower.
The location is Lucciola, on the Upper West Side, Chef Massari's jewel, inspired by Pupi Avanti in his film "Festa di Laurea."
For one night, the arterial network of Bologna's porticos will be embedded in the urban jungle of New York, in a journey into the heart of Bolognese culinary tradition, in an attempt to explain why it is possible to strive for the high and the beautiful, even with a four-degree slope.
