Torre dei Conti

The tower began as a fortified nucleus raised in 858 by Pietro dei Conti di Anagni, in the pontificate of Nicholas I, on top of one of the exedrae of the portico that belonged to the Temple of Peace within the Imperial Fora. Its builders faced it in travertine carried off from the ruins of the Imperial Fora around it.

The tower's great enlargement is dated two ways. One account puts the work in 1203, on the initiative of Pope Innocent III and for his own family the Conti di Segni, finishing in 1216, the year that pope died; another gives the commission to his brother Riccardo, count of Sora, and dates the main building campaign to 1238. The design is attributed to the sculptor and architect Marchionne Aretino, an attribution that rests on Giorgio Vasari, who named him in the Lives while writing about Arnolfo di Cambio. Both accounts agree on what was built: a fortified residence for the Conti, standing on the border with territory held by the rival Frangipani.

At an original height of roughly 50 to 60 metres, it became known as the Torre Maggiore, the major tower. It struck Francesco Petrarca enough for him to call it "Turris illa toto orbe unica", that tower unique in all the world.

The tower lost its upper floors to a run of earthquakes culminating in the shock of 1349, which left it uninhabitable, and it was abandoned. In the sixteenth century its travertine skin was stripped away in turn, for the building of the Porta Pia, designed by Michelangelo. The abandonment ended in 1620, when the Apostolic Camera rebuilt it.

Further earthquakes followed in 1630 and in 1644. That damage was repaired at the end of the seventeenth century under Pope Alexander VIII, who had two buttresses added to hold the structure.

The cutting of the Via Cavour at the end of the nineteenth century, and of the Via dei Fori Imperiali under the Fascist regime, left the tower standing on its own, detached from the buildings that had surrounded it. In 1937 Mussolini gave it to the Federazione nazionale Arditi d'Italia, the body of the Italian stormtroopers, which held it until 1943. In 1938 the hall of the Temple of Peace, on whose perimeter walls the tower rests, was fitted out as the mausoleum of Alessandro Parisi, the Arditi general who presided over the federation and who died that year in a road accident; his remains were laid there in an ancient Roman sarcophagus and have stayed in the hall since.

The tower housed city hall offices until 2006, when it was cleared and left derelict. In 2022 the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali began a programme of restoration and refitting to turn it into a museum and service centre for the Imperial Fora area, funded through Italy's national recovery and resilience plan at 6.9 million euros. The tower carries protection as Italian national heritage.

On 3 November 2025 the tower partially collapsed while that work was under way. Two separate collapses came within ninety minutes of each other and left heavy damage inside. Four workers were in the building at the time. Firefighters brought three of them out; the fourth, Octay Stroici, was freed from the rubble after eleven hours and taken to the Policlinico Umberto I, where he died. He was one of the Romanian workers on the site, and another of the men was injured.