The Roman enceinte of Augusta Praetoria still frames the centre of Aosta, and along it stand towers that the Middle Ages rebuilt, raised and inhabited. Two of them carry names that have entered the city's imagination. The Leper's Tower takes its name from the man confined there in the eighteenth century, whose solitude inspired Xavier de Maistre's novella and made the building a place of literary pilgrimage; today it hosts exhibitions. The Tower of Bramafam, a heavy round mass at an angle of the walls, belonged to the seigneurial system that grew inside the Roman shell, and its name — commonly read as a cry of hunger — has attached itself to legends of siege and famine. Filmed in 4K, the programme follows the line of the ancient walls, examines the masonry where Roman courses meet medieval work, and shows how one city was built out of the bones of another.
