OrderingFamilies,Neighborhoods,andCities 175
nicknamed the ‘‘baptism of bells,’’ each bell had a living personality that
acknowledged saints and terrified devils. When Saint Torello died, the bells
of his parish church rang without a hand laid to their ropes. The priest
and townspeople ran to his cell. They knew that a consecrated bell rang
miraculously only at the death of saints or the approach of danger.^218 The
bell recognized a holy man, even when people did not. While on pilgrimage
to Santiago of Compostella, Saint Contardo arrived at Bruni, near Piacenza,
in 1242. He died that night in a peasant’s hut—the town’s innkeeper had
thrown the unknown vagrant into the street. The town’s bells rang in jubila-
tion to welcome the holy man into heaven, and the locals repented of their
blindness. They turned their old baptismal font into a reliquary for his body.
The pilgrim vagabond was a saint.^219
The first bell of a city belonged to the cathedral. Bologna chroniclers
recorded the casting in 1227 of the duomo bell, the work of Master Ven-
tura.^220 As Don Giovanni di Bolgare, dean of Sant’Alessandro in Bergamo,
explained in 1187 , bells rang each day during the opening chants of the
solemn Mass, that the townspeople would know the city’s principal act of
worship had begun. The duomo bell rang before all other bells of the city.
That his church rang first proved it to be the Mother Church of Bergamo,
Don Giovanni of Sant’Alessandro explained.^221 The bells of the duomo
spoke an intelligible language. At Siena, the order of peals of cathedral’s two
great bells—‘‘San Ansano’’ and ‘‘Santa Maria’’—along with a rank of
smaller bells, told the liturgical rank of the feast day and which Office the
canons were about to chant.^222 Morning and evening peals were the pivots
of the day, their order most carefully regulated.^223 Don Alberto di Scanzo,
Giovanni’s fellow priest in Bergamo, explained that San Vincenzo rang first
for morning Lauds, evening Vespers, and Masses of the dead, sharing, in
part, the privileges of Sant’Alessandro. Proper hierarchy had to be pre-
served. The cathedral clergy jealously guarded their bell-ringing privileges.
The first peal came from the duomo, and the other churches followed in
order of their rank and age. The cathedral not only rang first; other churches
of the city followed its cadences. But on the feast of a chapel patron, his little
church rang first, even before the duomo.^224 To deviate from this order was
criminal: in Piacenza the local synod punished deviant bell ringing by ex-
communication.
Only orders exempted from episcopal jurisdiction by the papacy, the
218 .Acta [B. Torelli Puppiensis], 2. 15 ,AS 8 (Mar.ii), 497.
219 .Acta [S. Contardi Peregrini], AS 11 (Apr.ii), pp. 444 – 48 ; on the baptismal font, see ibid., 2. 12 ,p.
447.
220. Matteo Griffoni ( 1227 ), 9.
221. ‘‘Instrumentum Litis,’’ 6 ,p. 216. On bell ringing’s legal status, see Valsecchi,Interrogatus, 94 – 95.
222 .Ordo Senensis, 1. 439 , pp. 393 – 94.
223. The ringing of the Angelus at morning, noon, and night is late: Piacenza Stat. Cler. ( 1337 ), 50 ,
pp. 554 – 55.
224. ‘‘Instrumentum Litis,’’ 1. 7 ,p. 141.