176 LaCitadeSancta
Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians, could ring outside of the usual
order.^225 Some grumbled against the din. At Gubbio, a traveling Franciscan,
Fra Ricardo, labeled the ostentatious Dominican bell ringing that an-
nounced the vigil of Saint Peter of Verona offensive and a vanity. The Dom-
inican Saint Peter appeared that night to Fra Ricardo in a dream and
disabused him of the misconception.^226 God, his saints, and true Catholics
rejoiced in bell ringing; only demons objected. No, some Catholics did have
occasional problems. Fra Salimbene of Parma tells us that in Genoa the bells
of morning Mass at Sant’Onorato near the Franciscan convent annoyed the
friars engaged in silent meditations after their night Office. The friars turned
to Pope Alexander IV. The pontiff obliged by giving them the church.^227 In
the future, its bells rang in tandem with those of the Minorite convent. Per-
haps the noise bothered the friars less than the order in which the bells rang.
The secular day ran by ecclesiastical time.^228 At Ravenna, the evening
bells of the duomo marked the hours of the civil day and signaled the cur-
few.^229 San Gimignano in Tuscany was subject to Florence and had no
bishop or duomo, but it had a baptismal church, and its bells regulated the
communal day. The town had a special cadence for curfew. The pieve gave
three distinct tolls of its bell. The pause between each stroke lasted as long
as it took to walk from porta San Giovanni to Porta Nova San Matteo.
Sangimignanese who threw out night soil before that bell risked a fine.^230 In
most places, a church bell was also the commune bell. Modena did not buy
its own bell to announce secular events until well into the fourteenth cen-
tury.^231 At Bologna, where exceptionally the Palazzo Comunale already had
a bell in the 1200 s, the labors of bell ringing were apportioned between
palazzo and duomo. Curfew began when the palazzo rang its bell for night
guard duty. The duomo bell of San Pietro sounded the arrival of dawn.^232
The two custodians of the duomo, Savorotto Cavalieri and Nasimbene de’
Nasimbeni, had the duty and privilege of opening the Bolognese workday.
They did so by twenty distinct and solemn strokes, followed by five quick
taps. That signal at other times of day or night meant there was a fire.^233
The Church put its loudest bell in a city at the disposal of the commune
- Piacenza Stat. Cler., 532 ; the Carmelites were later granted a similar exemption: ibid., 17 ,p.
226 .Vita S[ancti] Petri Martyris Ordinis Praedicatorum,ed. Ambrogio Taegio, 8. 62 ,AS 12 (Apr.iii), 713
(text from ‘‘Miracula Berenguerii,’’ dated to 1310 s). On the text of Taegio’s vita and its components, see
Antoine Dondaine, ‘‘Saint-Pierre-Martyr: E ́tudes,’’AFP 23 ( 1953 ): 67 – 73.
- Salimbene,Cronica( 1248 ), 460 , Baird trans., 316.
- I find no evidence for the dichotomy between religious time and secular time detected by
Jacques Le Goff in ‘‘Au Moyen Aˆge: Temps de l’E ́glise et temps du marchand,’’Annales: E ́conomies—socie ́te ́s—
civilisations 15 ( 1960 ): 417 – 33. - Ravenna Stat., 156 ,p. 87.
- San Gimignano Stat. ( 1255 ), 3. 46 ,p. 711 ; 3. 64 ,p. 716 , on night soil.
- Modena Stat. ( 1327 ), 1. 180 ,p. 171.
- Bologna Stat.ii( 1288 ), 4. 7 , 1 : 175 ;( 1288 ), 2. 20 , 1 : 95 – 96.
- Ibid. ( 1288 ), 2. 20 , 1 : 95 – 96.