How Was Modena Built

The cathedral is the reason the city is on the World Heritage list. Begun in 1099 and faced in white marble reused from Roman buildings, it is a complete and coherent Romanesque design rather than an accumulation, with Wiligelmo’s Genesis reliefs running across the front — among the earliest monumental narrative sculpture of the Italian middle ages.

The Ghirlandina, the bell tower, rises about eighty-six metres and leans visibly. It was built in stages over two centuries, and it belongs to the city rather than the church — a civic statement as much as a religious one.

The Palazzo Ducale is a seventeenth-century baroque block closing the top of the old town, built for a court that had just lost a better capital. It has been the military academy since 1862 and is only partly open.

The genuinely distinctive local structure is domestic: the acetaia, an attic fitted with racks of barrels and left deliberately unheated and uninsulated. The building is the process. Many are in ordinary houses, and a family battery is passed down as an inheritance.