Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 metres, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. ‘I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,’ he tells me when I visit. ‘It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.’

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It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower. Sleeping there at night, working weekdays in his family’s homeware business, he devoted weekends to what became a years-long renovation. He installed lights and sanded and painted the stairs. Centuries-old graffiti came to light as he scrubbed the walls. He consulted with engineers and architects, and hired tradesmen who rappelled like alpinists from the top of the tower to replace crumbling mortar.

What emerged is a bed and breakfast where guests know they are bedding down in the long-ago haunts of not only the eponymous Prendiparte family, which built the tower as a 12th-century urban citadel, but also other occupants brought here by the turns of history. Evident to this day, for example, is the misery scrawled on a wall during the years when the tower served as a prison: sepolcro dei viventi, meaning tomb of the........

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