Why do people attempt to use "stories" as a measurement of height? There is no universal agreement for what a "story" is. 97 meters is in fact 97 meters.

Because it's evocative, it's easier to imagine what it looks like.

Except that at some point one story was twice as tall as they are now.

I think the universal agreement is actually to measure things in football fields

Now if we could only agree if we should use soccer or handegg field sizes.

Handegg, because there’s an actual standard size for them.

Which is a worse decision for a sport but makes them better for measurement.

Soccer’s trying to make their sport worse by standardizing, but they’re not there yet.

It will be more appealing to nerds when they could say "transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom"

The number of atomic transitions a cesium 133 atom makes when fired across a football field at the speed of sound.

... in dry air at STP.

Which handegg field size though? There is not just one standard. I think we should use the Canadian size, since they created it.

which is also not normalized. A referee once told me that - in theory - football fields can be square. I think it was 80m x 80m since 80m is the minimum length and the maximum width. Correct me if I am wrong.

If you’re Australian, they can be circular.

Field size for American football is definitely standardized: 100 yards between goal lines and 160 feet wide. Lots of Americans will have an intuitive sense for how long something like "three football fields" is.

But that intuitive size would in fact be wrong. The size we associate with an American football field is more commonly going to be the distance including the end zones.

with a banana for scale

Going to play the pedantic card and mention that there's also no universal agreement on how to measure a building's height. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat on its own has three different methods and not everyone accepts those as being the correct and true way of measuring the building's height.

I think everything in the illustration is at least twice too high. The walled part of Bologna was ~1 km in diameter at that time, and the tallest towers were ~10% of that.

The model in Google Earth looks about right, at least if you compare it to this: https://static.bolognawelcome.com/immagini/ac/57/95/5d/20220...

The illustration is modern, by an artist.

Really? I zoomed in on the Towers of Bologna and then used the "measurement" tool to draw a 97m line on the ground. The line seems about as long as the tower is high. If you try that, do you get the same result?