Editing Modena (section)

===The Cathedral and the Ghirlandina===
{{Main|Duomo di Modena|Torre della Ghirlandina}}
[[File:-6007_IMG_1913_4_5_fused_copy-aL.jpg|thumb|View from Piazza Grande with detail of the statue of La Bonissima and the [[Ghirlandina tower]] in the background]]
The Cathedral of Modena and the annexed campanile are a [[UNESCO]] [[World Heritage Site]]. Begun under the direction of the Countess [[Matilda of Tuscany]]<ref name="EB1911" /> with its first stone laid 6 June 1099 and its crypt ready for the city's patron, [[Saint Geminianus]], and consecrated only six years later, the Duomo of Modena was finished in 1184. The building of a great cathedral in this flood-prone ravaged former center of [[Arianism]] was an act of [[urban renewal]] in itself, and an expression of the flood of piety that motivated the contemporary [[First Crusade]]. Unusually, the master builder's name, [[Lanfranco]], was celebrated in his own day: the city's chronicler expressed the popular confidence in the master-mason from [[Como]], Lanfranco: by God's mercy the man was found (''inventus est vir'').

The sculptor [[Wiligelmo|Wiligelmus]] who directed the mason's yard was praised in the plaque that commemorated the founding. The program of the sculpture is not lost in a welter of detail: the wild dangerous universe of the exterior is mediated by the Biblical figures of the portals leading to the Christian world of the interior. In Wiligelmus' sculpture at Modena, the human body takes on a renewed physicality it had lost in the schematic symbolic figures of previous centuries. At the east end, three [[apse]]s reflect the division of the body of the cathedral into nave and wide aisles with their bold, solid masses. Modena's Duomo inspired campaigns of cathedral and abbey building in emulation through the valley of the [[Po River|Po]].

The [[gothic architecture|Gothic]] [[campanile]] (1224–1319) is called ''[[Torre della Ghirlandina]]'' from the bronze garland surrounding the weathercock.