The Ghirlandina Tower soars skyward beside the cathedral. Almost 90 metres high, it is an attractive combination of two architectural styles: the square base section is the same age as the cathedral and is in Romanesque style, while the octagonal and pyramidal upper parts are later and more clearly Gothic in taste (work on them started in 1261 to a design by Arrigo da Campione, and they were completed in 1319). The Ghirlandina, which perhaps takes its name from the two rows of garland-like balustrading which crown it, is proudly viewed by the people of Modena as the symbol of their city. This is no coincidence: although this fact is no longer retained in the collective memory, the Ghirlandina did not only have the religious function deriving from its status as cathedral tower, but was also a defensive tower used to store important civic documents and charters. One important symbol of the way the tower is bound up with Modena's identity is still preserved in the first room of the Ghirlandina: it is a wooden bucket which is actually a kind of trophy stolen from the Bologna army by the Modena forces during the war between the two cities in 1325. It provided the inspiration for the mock heroic poem written by Alessandro Tassoni in 1622, entitled "La secchia rapita", or "The Stolen Bucket".

The monument to the north of the Tower, overlooking the Via Emilia, is dedicated to Tassoni. Every so often, the bucket returns to the headlines when young people from Bologna stage an attempt to steal it back again. However, the one to be seen here is only a copy, since the original is stored in the Palazzo Comunale. The Museo Lapidario del Duomo in via Lanfranco, beneath the Ghirlandina, contains the original antefixes by the Maestro delle metope, figures which are rather disturbing in many ways, laden with symbolic allusions to peoples far from Europe. In Piazza della Torre, between the monument to Tassoni and the Ghirlandina, a small plaque known in the local dialect as "Al tvajol ed Furmajin" is dedicated to the memory of the eminent Jewish publisher Angelo Fortunato Formiggini, who committed suicide by flinging himself from the Ghirlandina in protest against the racial laws during the Fascist period.