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It’s hard to imagine an Italian town or city without a skyline of turreted church towers or the hourly clamor of bells ringing and chime in the air.
With the Vatican nestled in the heart of the country, the great bronze instruments literally resonated Christianity throughout Italy for centuries.
But just as the multitudes called to daily mass by the belfry toll have almost dried up, the ancient knowledge used to produce the giant bronzes is in danger of disappearing.
And that makes the survival of Italy’s oldest bell foundry, located in the small town of Agnone, in the southern region of Molise, a hilly and desolate region, a near miracle.
“It is a complex profession that involves a precise understanding of mathematics, physics, geometry and music,” said master piper Antonio Delli Quadri, 83, whose clients include the United Nations. in New York and the Vatican.
“From the rigor of numbers to the harmony of sound.”
LISTEN | The story of a bell foundry in a small town in southern Italy:
No machines, no production molds
Delli Quadri began helping to melt bells when he was only 15, starting with “the humblest chores” inside the bustling, light-speckled workshop run by the Marinelli family ever since. at least 1339. Until the 1950s, some two dozen bell foundries, all family-run, operated throughout Italy.
Today, the Marinelli foundry is one of the five survivors and is the official supplier of the Vatican bells.
“You could say that by sticking to these age-old methods we are now at the forefront,” said Pasquale, 50, the younger of the two Marinelli brothers who now run the foundry.
“We haven’t introduced any machines. We stayed in the same traditional workshop instead of moving to a larger factory. We refuse to work with soulless, mass-produced molds.
Indeed, the materials disseminated in the workshop – clay, wood, wax, bricks and bronze – are the same as those used by medieval craftsmen. The Marinellis also use the same techniques to design and cast the bells, including a geometric formula involving the height, diameter of the base, and the distance from the base to the top of the bell, with the thickest part of the bell still being a 14th in diameter.
While bells are an integral part of Catholic churches in Italy and elsewhere, bronze instruments have played an essential role in community life that dates back to before the time of the Middle Ages when they gradually ceased to be hung in the middle. above city gates and began to ring on church steeples. .
The “first mass media” in the world
Paola Patriarca, a foundry craftsman who runs the small bell museum above the Marinelli workshop, where more than 1,000 bells are on display, calls bells the “world’s first mass media”.
“The sound of the bells is now considered nostalgic, but remember, just 50 years ago, not everyone had a watch,” Patriarca said. “The bells served [as] essential services, such as warning when it was going to rain, or an hour before sunset, which was of particular importance to workers in the distance or in the woods under a thick canopy.
“Even to those who fished, when the sky was overcast, the sound was a message to return to shore. The bells protected the people.”
The bells are exploding online
While the original mass media of the world may be disappearing in Italy, the advent of new digital means of communication has allowed the Marinelli foundry to function.
Online orders from expanding churches in Africa, Asia and South America, not to mention Buddhist temples and musicians, helped offset declining orders from Catholic churches in Italy and Europe.
Yet the Catholic influence is as deeply ingrained in the bells as the golden rings that believers once threw in boiling bronze – both in their nomenclature and in their production.
Bells blessed by the priest
The Marinellis call the bells “sacred bronzes” and describe them not as formed but “born”, with the initial structure of wood and brick that gives shape to the interior called “anima”, or soul. To this day, a priest is called to the foundry to bless the bell, emitting a burst of Hail Mary at the time of melting, when the bronze liquid is poured into the mold.
“The bells contained parts of the community that they were ringing above,” said Armando, Marinelli’s older brother. “As an act of faith, people would cast their gold wedding rings or necklaces into the bronze as it began to set. So in a very material way, many bells contain pieces of our past. the bells are ringing, people hear the older generations ringing in them. “
Producing the desired ring remains a challenge. A small mistake can cause a rollback to the start of a process that can take up to three months. With large bells, some weighing up to 600 kilograms and costing tens of thousands of dollars, accuracy is imperative.
Delli Quadri said that any bell maker who boasts of never being wrong is lying. He said his own missteps were thankfully on smaller and less important bells.
Hopefully the tradition continues
Delli Quadri, who has spent his life inside the foundry and perched dangerously on belfries to mount the giant bronzes, prefers to remember his triumphs – his greatest, he says, being the jubilee bell of the Vatican in 2000.
“I saw this bell come into being,” he remembers proudly, “and followed it through to completion. From the first brick here in the workshop to mounting the bronze on a structure I own. – even built in the Vatican Gardens. “
He said he hoped that with the next generation of Marinellis committed to keeping the foundry in business, the age-old secrets will remain alive, at least for the foreseeable future.
“These are intergenerational businesses,” said Delli Quadri. “And if you don’t have a next generation ready to jump into bell making, this is the end of it.”
