Tor San Michele

The Tiber flood of 15 September 1557 shifted the river northward and pushed the coast near the delta forward by more than a kilometre, and the tower belongs to the review of the coastal defences that Pius IV then entrusted to Francesco Laparelli. It was built on a design attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti; the building's own article records that the attribution has never been established. Roma Capitale gives the work as begun in 1559 and finished in 1568, under Pius V, by Giovanni Lippi. it.wikipedia, citing Colonna 2013, instead has Nanni di Baccio Bigio taking over on Michelangelo's death in 1564 and, on his own death in August 1568, his son Alessandro completing the work in 1569. The two accounts are not reconciled here. Pius V consecrated the finished tower to Michael the Archangel, the saint whose name he had taken on entering the Dominicans. In August 1589 Saracen vessels passed it because its artillery was in poor condition, and a 1592 inventory in the Archivio di Stato di Roma lists half a culverin, a falcon and a falconet, five arquebuses, powder, and iron and lead shot. With the opening of the Ostia seaplane base in 1928 the tower fell inside its perimeter and served as a radio beacon; windows were cut in the outer walls in 1930. In the Second World War it was used by Italian and German forces and later by Allied ones. It was consigned to the Soprintendenza in 1994, opened exceptionally on 28 May 2017, and reopened during 2021 by the Associazione Culturale Quattro Sassi, which had won the management tender in 2018.