Many older buildings in Italy have iron bars fixed on the sides of them, sometimes flat and sometimes at an angle. What are they? You can see several of them in this photo from Florence, on the lighter colored building. My best guess is that they somehow are holding the bricks together in a weak spot.
I only know them as Ezio's handholds from Assassin's Creed 2!
Correct. Threaded rods extend through the walls from inside the building, or sometimes from one wall to the other. The plates on the outside keep the exterior walls from bulging and eventually collapsing into the street.
By the 19th century, "mill" construction often used decorative anchor plates as part of the building design.
