The tower is a civic building of octagonal plan, originally part of the fourteenth-century fortified circuit of the Borgo Nuovo, and it stands in the old centre of Avigliana. Its medieval character is plain: arcades, capitals and a loggia.
What to see
The name, in all likelihood, is not its own. It comes from a nearby tower, built in 1330, which housed the town hall and with it the first public clock in Piedmont, the second in Italy after the one at Sant'Eustorgio in Milan. That tower was probably destroyed by Catinat's French troops in 1691 and demolished altogether towards the end of the nineteenth century; the clock went with it, and the name stayed attached to the octagonal building you see today.
Visiting
You look at it from outside, in a few minutes, and it is a natural stop on a walk through the old town: it sits within the fabric of the Borgo Nuovo, among the houses and the surviving medieval gates. The octagonal shape makes it recognisable from a distance and is the reason it ended up in the surveys of Piedmontese medieval architecture.
Our editors' tip
Anyone who has been to the Borgo Medievale in Turin has already seen it without knowing: there is a faithful reproduction of it there, built when people went out to copy the real buildings of Piedmont and stage them again at the Valentino. Comparing original and copy works better in Avigliana, because here the tower still stands where it was meant to.