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Sonic Armatures

Niall Atkinson

To cite this article: Niall Atkinson (2012) Sonic Armatures, The Senses and Society, 7:1, 39-52,
DOI: 10.2752/174589312X13173255802030

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Sonic Armatures
Constructing an Acoustic Regime
in Renaissance Florence

Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson Abstract  This article traces the
is the Neubauer

Senses & Society  DOI: 10.2752/174589312X13173255802030

Assistant Professor
in the Department
of Art History at the
University of Chicago.
His research focuses
on urban experience,
the social construction
of space, and the
literary imagination of
the city in late medieval
and early modern Italy.
He is currently working
on a book-length study
of the soundscape
and communicative
urban networks of the
Renaissance city.
nsatkinson@uchicago.edu
construction of an acoustic regime in
Renaissance Florence that was based
on the casting, placement, and ringing of
civic bells. In confronting the formidable
but mute power of the defensive towers
that dominated the city’s skyline in the
late middle ages, successive republican
governments regulated these private
towers with legislative restrictions while
transforming them into a speaking
architecture. The new civic bell towers
played a crucial, if hitherto neglected role
in the struggle to create the Florentine
republic, which was the political ground
upon which the cultural phenomenon of the
Renaissance was founded. In contrast to
the more antagonistic urbanistic policies
that Florentine governments used to
combat their enemies, however, the ringing
of civic bells exploited the unifying power
of religious bells – a power embedded in
39

their role in uniting people into spiritual

 Niall Atkinson

communities – to integrate its ideals, laws, and

institutions into the soundscape of the city. As a
result, the sonic armature created by these bells
can be read as an evolving attempt to bind the
social body to its architectural environment and to
create a universal civic society that transcended
more localized loyalties and whose existence
guaranteed the legitimacy of its ruling bodies.

Keywords: Florence, Renaissance, bells, towers, soundscape,

bell ringing, civic justice, architecture, urbanism, medieval, Italy

+
The cityscape of the late medieval central Italian com-
mune presented a dense vertical configuration of private
towers. They were the concrete signs of a system of fort-
ified neighborhoods dominated by networks of familial clans. Florence
was no exception to this urban phenomenon, where as many as 173
such towers have been documented between the twelfth and four-
teenth centuries (Fanelli 1973: 30–31). Such towers presided over
the struggle to control the horizontal axes of the city, made up of the
multiple and intersecting urban territories of labor, family, commerce,
politics, prayer, song, gossip, declarations of enmity, and contracts
of peace. Unadorned, the towers of these powerful family alliances
– tower societies, consorterie – projected a mute and faceless profile
onto an urban skyline plainly visible from the surrounding territory
and countryside. Fortified, they stood defiantly as a symbolic image
of defensive military and political power and of direct spatial control
over the tumultuous ground beneath them. Outfitted with temporary
balconies, they stood as a testament to the constant threat of urban
violence. As vertical topographical nodes, they continually redrew
legislated public jurisdictions with a contentious topography of pri-
vate alliances, feuds, vendettas, and pacts.1 These towers were
the architectural hinge around which the experiments and conflicts
that constituted the urban development of republican Florence were
played out. As such, they recast urban planning policies as the lead-
ing edge of a sustained political and social battle to control bodies
and buildings, the social and the physical order of the city.
Amid the ominous architectural silence of these towers, therefore,
an emerging communal public identity responded with a speaking
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architecture, an architecture of sound, a network of sacred and

profane bell towers – campanili – that were the principal sonic mark-
ers of the dense urban soundscape. In the central Italian skyline their
more decorative profile and necessary openness contrasted visually
with the mute, blank facades of those private defensive towers
(Figure 1).
Bells had for centuries been an integral part of the liturgical calen-
40

dar and throughout Europe bells rang to mark the passage of the day
 Sonic Armatures: Constructing an Acoustic Regime in Renaissance Florence

Figure 1
Left, the Torre del Leone,
a private defensive tower
in the neighborhood of the
Amidei family; center, bell
tower of the Bargello; right,
bell tower of the Palazzo
Vecchio, Florence.

through the medium of sacred song and prayer. However, the rise
of popular governments in Florence from the mid-thirteenth century
through the republican regimes of the fifteenth century, allows for a
specific historical interrogation of how relations between authority
and space, church and state, government and citizens were negoti-
ated in critical ways through the construction and maintenance of
an aural regime built upon a concrete foundation of towers and
a complex orchestration of bells. Consequently, it was this sonic
armature, through which Florentines constructed and maintained a
range of urban collective identities that provided the basis on which
civic bonds could be formed above and beyond the local matrices of
family, class, and neighborhood.
As Carol Symes has pointed out, “[b]ecause bells and their towers
were instruments of publicity – that is, of power – their possession
was carefully regulated, as was their size and the heights of their
towers that increased their range and sphere of influence” (Symes
2010: 297). The strategic deployment of sound and architecture in
the service of establishing both a conceptual and concrete public
sphere in pre-modern cities has long been neglected by architectural
historians and this is not surprising – trained as we are in analyzing
the visual culture of the past, often through the literal and meta-
phorical silence of images. However, we cannot afford to neglect this
emerging dialogue since listening to the sounds that a city made was
Senses & Society

a crucial component of urban experience. Interpreting those sounds

was a necessary critical tool for contemporaries and the historian
can learn a great deal by investigating the struggle to shape and
control a distinct body public and analyzing the spatial territories that
struggle brought into being.
Both documentary and literary sources are full of references to the
way a city might have sounded in the past. Therefore, reconstructing
41

the conventional rhythms of an urban soundscape provides a means

 Niall Atkinson

of understanding architecture and urban space not as static concrete

components of an urban topography, but as polyvalent protagonists
in a dynamic dialogue. In the argument outlined here, my intention is
to analyze the foundational acoustic armature of the city of Florence
as it was developed through statutory law under successive republi-
can governments. The goal is to provide a basis upon which further
studies of urban communicative networks can be integrated into a
more complex historical analysis of the sensorial experience of the
pre-modern city, an analysis crucial for understanding the city as
simultaneously a sociological and architectural entity.2
In a world where large numbers of people were still not fully
literate, where movement was largely pedestrian, and where long
open vistas were rare, the sound of bells represented a medium of
global communication that spoke meaningfully to the entire urban
population. Urban communities were constituted by the ringing of
bells, which brought them together in prayer, work, commerce, civic
defense, celebration, and mourning. Therefore, it is no wonder that
the artisans and merchants that were struggling to gain control of
Florence in the thirteenth century constructed a recognizable aural
identity through the casting, placement, and ringing of bells. In 1250,
before they had a permanent home, civic representatives of the first
popular government, who were trying to discipline an unruly elite cul-
ture of factional families, legitimated their authority and marked their
territory through what would become a recurrent tripartite strategy of
producing texts, images, and sounds – or to put it another way, they
made new laws, instituted new military flags, and cast a bell. They
placed that bell on a tower located on one of the busiest and oldest
thoroughfares of the city and strictly limited the height of all present
and future private towers (Figures 1, 3; Villani 1990: bk. 7, ch. 39).
This tower – the Torre del Leone – belonged to one of the city’s most
powerful family clans, who represented, in the popular imagination,
all that was wrong with the private culture of violent vendetta that
continually threatened to disrupt the free flow of goods and com-
merce in and out of the city.3 The sound of the bell, which assembled
the city’s councils, transformed the private, inward-looking face of
factionalism into a public acoustic transmitter that ritually cleansed
the silent spaces of insult and bloodshed. In such a way, sound
both maintained and transformed such urban narratives within the
collective memory of the city.
As successive republican regimes struggled to retain control
Senses & Society

of urban spaces and the body politic through the construction of

public buildings, they continued and expanded this pattern of con-
verting private towers into public campanili. Both the thirteenth-
century communal palace, now known as the Bargello, and the city’s
­fourteenth-century town hall, the Palazzo Vecchio, were built around
pre-existing private defensive towers, which were then heightened
and crowned with belfries (Giorgi and Matracchi 2006).4 Over the
42

course of the next two centuries, these new civic towers and their
 Sonic Armatures: Constructing an Acoustic Regime in Renaissance Florence

bells integrated themselves into the sonic landscape of the city’s

sacred institutions to create a dialogue between church and state
that expressed the interconnected spatial jurisdictions of bodies,
souls, and communities. As a result, a new civic soundscape would
stage the political ascendancy of a regime that sought to ground its
legitimacy in one of the most deeply ingrained symbolic domains of
urban life.
A sense of the new strategy can be gleaned from the legal stat-
utes concerning the proper use and meaning of civic bells, which
grew increasingly complex throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The earliest of these established the basis of what would
become a pattern of communal bell ringing. They required that the
Capitano del Popolo, the city’s chief military and judicial official,
should ring his bell in the evening after hearing the third ringing
sequence of the bell of the commune, located in the tower of the
Bargello (Caggese, Capitano 1999: 35). Another law established that
fines for crimes would double after the ringing of this bell, until the
day bell was rung to signal the end of the night (Caggese, Podestà
1999: 184). Thus was the day divided at its extremes, between
darkness and light, by two civic bells. This is the framework around
which authorities built an increasingly pervasive acoustic regime that
organized space and attempted to govern the movements of its
inhabitants.
In the 1355 statutes, two bells are named for each commu-
nal tower. On the Palazzo Vecchio are the Leone and the bell of
the Popolo. On the Bargello are the bell of the Podestà and the
Montanina (Figure 1). The Leone and the bell of the Podestà were
involved in a progressively more elaborate sequence of rings that
marked the beginning and the end of the day, while they are also de-
scribed as regulating and accompanying the public functions of the
state, civic rituals, the assembly of militias, and the dissemination of
information. By 1415, however, the acoustic regulation of the urban
environment had become an intricate proliferation of rings spanning
the length of the day and the breadth of the city. The following is an
attempt to reconstruct the sonic framework of Florence in order to
show how sound bound communities to urban space and to the
social ideals the government claimed to represent.
Therefore, in brief, the Florentine day sounded something like this
(Figure 2).5
It began, sometime around daybreak, with three strikes of the bell
Senses & Society

of the Badia, the city’s Benedictine monastery, followed by six strikes

of the Leone in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the city’s largest
communal bell. Around the same time, the bell of the Podestà rang
and was answered by the bell of the Popolo, while the morning
prayer of the Angelus rang from the cathedral (Manetti 1994: 193).
Some time before Terce,6 which was rung by the Badia and by the
cathedral for a duration of one half hour (Davidsohn 1956–68: I,
43

1069),7 the so-called “tocchus iuris” (ring of justice) was heard: a

 Niall Atkinson

Figure 2
Locations of named bells in
Florentine towers according
to documentary sources.

six-ring sequence rung by the Leone. The Montanina was required

to anticipate this sequence with a single ring before the first and last
strikes of the justice bell, which opened the city’s tribunals at the
Bargello. After Terce, the Toiana rang continuously, a distesa, for
one hour.8 Midday, likely somewhere between Sext and None, was
also rung by the Badia, and the sonatores (the commune’s trumpet
players) played to announce that the city’s executive council was
about to eat lunch. After None, which was rung from the Badia, and
before Vespers, the Bell of Justice (the second tocchus iuris rung by
the Leone) and the Montanina opened the afternoon session of the
courts in the same way they did in the morning. The dinner of the pri-
ors was sounded by trumpets towards evening and soon afterwards
the sound of the evening prayer of the Ave Maria was heard, rung
by the Leone. Finally, as the sun set, the bell of the Podestà, just as
it did to begin the day, rang to end it. It was answered this time by
the Leone, whose reciprocal triple sequence marked the cessation
of daytime sounds as they were muffled by the silent regime of the
night.
This was only the foundational sonic matrix that gave Florentine
urban spaces, like any comparable city, their particularly dense
cadences. This daily rhythm served to highlight the contrast with
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more infrequent events, such as the ringing of all the commune’s

bells a martello for the entrance of new government into the Palazzo
Vecchio,9 the ringing to assemble the city’s advisory councils – when
the bell of the Popolo rang one hundred times or, for about an
hour – in addition to the rings announcing the election and death of
popes, preparations for war, the inspection of communal security
forces, military victories, insurrections, homicides, murders and
44

violent crimes, executions, excommunications, fires, parliaments,

 Sonic Armatures: Constructing an Acoustic Regime in Renaissance Florence

the passing of laws, the announcement of victories, treaties, rebels,

news from abroad, or any time that the people were called both to
arms and to celebration. So much depended on the sounds that
bells made that ringing them at the wrong time, for the wrong rea-
sons, was occasion for the most severe punishment, such as exile.10
In light of all these signals, then, what can the formal characteristics
of such an acoustic regime tell us about the relations between archi-
tecture, sound, and power?
As a general liturgical practice, dawn was accompanied by a
series of sounds, as the prayers and songs of Matins and Lauds
greeted the arrival of the day. This seems to have been followed
by a dawn mass, which, in turn, would have been followed by the
recitations of the short holy office of Prime, the first hour of the day.
It was the conclusion of this dawn mass, celebrated “sotto voce,” or
“submissa voce,” according to the statutes, that was the signal to
ring the Leone in the Palazzo Vecchio with six strikes (tocchi), which
were, in turn, answered by the sound of the bell of the Podestà at
the Bargello.11
What is immediately apparent is how the arrival of the day was
marked by a dialogue between bell towers, between church and
state, voices and bells, across the sacred and profane territories of
the city. Bell ringers were not marking time through temporal cal-
culations, they were listening and responding to a city whose ritual
practices were, in a loose collaboration, aurally enacting time. Time
did not govern the city. Time was a product of the city. It was created
and suspended across the gradual intensification of light. In contrast,
preoccupation with temporal precision is a modern phenomenon.
Time measured to the second and beyond tends to reduce the
experience of the present to a single point that constantly flees from
the future into the past. Modern time is incessantly passing by in a
relentless flow that makes losing it and wasting it necessary features
of the anxiety built into it. By contrast, time marked by a series of
bells from various towers opened up a “space of time,” which could
be filled and animated with meaningful social exchanges. As a result,
the break of day did not suddenly intrude upon the city only to vanish
in an instant. Instead, it opened up a transitional zone permeated
and circumscribed by a network of sounds emanating from the
centre of the city that accompanied the duration of certain activi-
ties, such as waking and crossing the city to work, eating, praying,
socializing, getting married, going home and to bed. Like space,
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according to historian Christian Bec, time was not considered a thing

in and of itself, but as a function of gestures, of something that was
done within and across it (Bec 1967: 319). In fact, it was just such
gestures, movements, and acts that linked space to time.
The beating of time mimicked the way that darkness faded slowly
into light, as prayers gave way to the sound of bells and the civic
authorities took legal possession of the secular regime of the day,
45

acoustically linking themselves with the salvific power of the mass.

 Niall Atkinson

Figure 3
Detail of the Bonsignori
map of Florence, 1584
Source: Harvard Map
Collection 

This dialogue was an acute acoustic condensation of the way that

the official urban soundscape of Florence was imagined: as a series
of exchanges between sacred protection and secular authority, the
one always intimately intertwined with the other.
It was precisely the spaces that separated the Badia, the cathe-
dral, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Bargello that formed the network
of this spatial dialogue that began the day, and it registered the deeply
felt common bonds between sacred and civic sounds (Figure 3).
In the morning sequence, a civic bell, the Leone, responded
to the early morning religious mass, as the secular government
Senses & Society

of the city acknowledged, incorporated, and finally superseded

the religious marking of time by transferring this exchange to one
between the juridical and legislative centers of civic power. In a
similar mix of holy sounds and profane activities, it was the morn-
ing liturgical offices ringing from the Badia that officially began the
workday.12 This manifested an ideal aural expression of the harmonic
relations of power where the architecture of a tripartite authority
46

(church, monastery, state) each spoke out in turn in a ritual dialogue

 Sonic Armatures: Constructing an Acoustic Regime in Renaissance Florence

of deference and respect. The statutes clearly separate civic sounds

from sacred ones, inserting the former into the temporal gaps of the
latter – through phrases such as “after None and before Vespers.”
This rhythmic exchange extended throughout the day. The
Montanina that opened and closed the city’s courts had to integrate
its ring into the triple sequence of the afternoon bell of Justice (toc-
chus iuris), which was rung between None and Vespers.13 This ex-
change, where the Leone14 enveloped the sound of the Montanina,
acoustically separated justice – arguably the most important concept
in Florentine communal ideology – into political theory, on the one
hand, and its practical application, on the other. As the city’s largest,
loudest, and most politicized bell, the Leone expressed the regime’s
authority over the entire city. When it symbolically rang for justice,
the Montanina responded by announcing the opening of the courts
where justice was actually carried out. By subsuming the Montanina
into its triple sequence, the Leone made audible the promise and
the guarantee that justice emanated first and foremost not from the
courts, but from the civic regime and its seat of power that claimed
to represent the highest ideals of the republic. As a universal ideal,
justice was made present in a very concrete way, throughout the
city and beyond, acoustically reinforcing the contours of its spatial
jurisdiction, marking the limits of its application, embracing those it
protected, giving voice to those who were wronged, and damning
those who contravened its laws.
Nowhere was this sacred and civic exchange more intensely felt
than in the series of sounds that made up the evening bell. It began
after Vespers with the Leone, which announced the evening prayer
of the Ave Maria, struck and recited three times in unison. It was fol-
lowed by the bell of the Podestà, which rang its own triple sequence
to announce the time of double fines.15 This was answered by an-
other triple sequence, again by the Leone, which actually ushered in
the night and the time when no one was allowed to be out in the city
until the sound of the campana del dì the next morning (ASF Statuti
19, III, lxxxxviii). It repeated precisely the spatial choreography of the
morning, with bells ringing in dialogue from the Badia to the Palazzo
Vecchio, the Bargello and back to the Palazzo Vecchio.
Given the fact that this whole process began sometime after
Vespers, the constituent elements of the evening bell, like the day
bell, rang in a succession of sequences that accompanied Florentines
as they engaged in the activities that that led them through the city
Senses & Society

from spaces of labour to space of urban sociability and evening

repose. It accompanied their ritual acts of praying, singing, attending
mass, storytelling, playing, eating, drinking, courting, seducing, and
cheating. Such sequences gave a spatial and temporal complexity
to the beginning and the end of the day, as neither could ever be
reduced, in the experience of Florentines, to a single point in time
with only a before and an after. It was an acoustic and spatial ritual
47

where prayers and legal sanctions, spiritual solace and secular

 Niall Atkinson

warnings enfolded the city in a complex aura of collective calm

mixed with social anxiety over the fearful potentialities brought on by
darkness. Even as the Leone evoked the threatening space of the
night, however, its familiar sound would also have comforted those
whose loyalty bound them to the regime, reassuring them that urban
time and urban space were firmly in control. However, instead of the
closed and muted mass of the morning made audible by the sound
of a bell, the Ave Maria in the evening was a public call to private
prayer, where a secular bell united its citizens to the indulgences
promised to those that answered the bell with their voices.16
Bells in Florence were emblematic of the way in which the bound-
aries between the sacred and the profane were both marked and
transgressed, defined and blurred by the city’s official soundscape.
Even though, as is commonly remarked, the civic government of
Florence was an urban configuration that was consciously isolated
in space from the jurisdictional reach of the church, it was sound that
conquered that spatial divide. What the ear heard was an intimate
dialogue between mutually reinforcing institutions that shared in the
construction of fluid sacred and profane topographies, while what
the eye saw was the space that separated and defined them as
distinct institutions. Consequently, what the architectural historian
learns is that in order to more fully understand the way in which social
relations were constructed and maintained in the pre-modern city,
the sonic armature on which they depended has to be accounted
for because it is only through such armatures that subsequent gaps
and silences, acoustic transgressions, and sonic variations can
be productively understood not simply as noise, but as historically
meaningful sounds.
In its sonic complexity and density, the Florentine soundscape
was hardly exceptional, representing a more localized variation of
near universal themes that stretched across Christian Europe.17
This implies that soundscapes can be studied historically, in a com-
parative manner, that would ultimately tell us a great deal about the
relationship between social bodies, institutions, and architectural
topographies that are not visible to the mind’s eye until they are
mapped onto the city’s spatial configuration. And it would allow us
to begin to understand what has been lost, and gained, by the great
structural transformation of the urban soundscape brought on by the
industrial revolution – its ceaseless noise, and its sleepless nights.
Senses & Society

Notes
1. For an overview of the culture of these elite urban families, see
John Najemy. 2006. A History of Florence, 1200–1575. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, pp. 5–34.
2. For sensory studies concerned specifically with the urban
contexts of pre-modern cities, see Cowan, Alexander, and Jill
Steward. 2007. The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since
48

1500, Historical urban studies. Aldershot and Burlington, VT:

 Sonic Armatures: Constructing an Acoustic Regime in Renaissance Florence

Ashgate. For studies related particularly to sound, see Smith,

Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England:
Attending to the O-factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Wilson, Eric. 1995. Plagues, Fairs, and Street Cries: Sounding out
Society and Space in Early Modern London. Modern Language
Studies 25 (3): 1–42; Kisby, Fiona. 2002. Music in European
Cities and Towns to c. 1650: A Bibliographical Survey. Urban
History 29 (1):74–82; Kendrick, Robert L. 2002. The Sounds of
Milan, 1585–1650. New York: Oxford University Press; Baker,
Geoffrey. 2008. Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial
Cuzco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Meier, Ulrich. 2004.
Die Sicht- und Hörbarkeit der Macht: Der Florentiner Palazzo
Vecchio im Spätmittelalter. In Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne:
öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, edited by
S. Rau and G. Schwerhoff. Kèoln: Bèohlau.
3. For a specific analysis of one of the most famous vendettas
in the Florentine popular imagination see Enrico Faini. 2009.
“Il convito fiorentino del 1216.” In Conflitti, paci e vendette
nell’Italia comunale. Andrea Zorzi, (ed.). Florence: Florence
University Press, 105–30; N.P.J. Gordon. 2006. “The Murder of
Buondelmonte: Contesting Place in the Early Fourteenth-Century
Florentine Chronicles.” In Renaissance Studies 20 (4): 459–77.
For legendary origins of the events that created the Guelf and
Ghibelline factions, which were used to explain and condemn
Florence’s vendetta culture, see O. Hartwig. 1875. Quellen und
Forschungen zur ältesten Geschichte der Stadt Florenz. Marburg,
N.G. Elwert, pp. 37–65. For an English translation, see Ferdinand
Schevill. 1963. Medieval and Renaissance Florence, New York:
Harper and Row, 106–107.
4. According to recent interventions, the first two levels of the tower
are believed to belong to this preexisting structure. See Luca
Giorgi and Pietro Matracchi. 2006. “Il Bargello a Firenze. Da
Palazzo del Podestà a Museo Nazionale,” in S. Maria del Fiore:
teorie e storie dell’archeologia e del restauro nella città delle
fabbriche arnolfiane, ed. Giuseppe Rocchi Coopmans de Yoldi.
Florence: Alinea Editrice, 132. On the building of the tower of
the palazzo Vecchio on the pre-existing tower of the Foraboschi
family, see Marvin Trachtenberg. 1988. “What Brunelleschi Saw:
Monument and Site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 47(1):14–44.
Senses & Society

5. This daily ringing schedule is actually a composite based on

a reading of the three redactions of Florentine statutes. See
Caggese 1999, vols. 1 and 2; ASF Statuti, 13 (Capitano 1355),
bk. I, clxxxi; Florence. 1778-83. Statuta populi et communis
Florentiae. Freiburg [Florence]: Michael Kluch, V, xlii (vol. 2, p. 545
ff).
6. The ecclesiastical day was divided into seven periods of prayer
49

(divine offices), which were reminders of the passion of Christ.

 Niall Atkinson

They corresponded, in a very mobile and local way, to dawn

(Matins), then the first (Prime), third (Terce), sixth (Sext), ninth
(Nones), and twelfth (Compline) hours of daylight. Note that
the liturgical day usually began with Vespers and Italian cities
began the new day at sunset. It is also important to emphasize
that that these hours were of a certain and variable duration
and were not precisely fixed points in time. On the complexity
and mobility of medieval canonical hours, see Gerhard Dohrn-
van Rossum. 1996. History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern
Temporal Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 29–35.
  7. Although the sources for the cathedral ringing would have
referred to the older structure which the current church and
bell tower replaced in the fourteenth century, there is no reason
to believe that the general structure of canonical ringing would
have changed in any fundamental way.
  8. I would like to thank Margaret Haines of the Opera del Duomo
of Florence for her invaluable help in deciphering the language
of these statutes. The term “a distesa” refers to a swinging bell
that is struck by an internal clapper.
  9. No doubt the ringing a martello – where a hammer strikes a
stationary bell in regular rhythms – was to highlight the solemnity
of an event that was at the heart of the regime’s ritual visual
performance.
10. The subversive nature of such actions is made clear by the
legal proceedings that condemned the leaders of the 1378
uprising, known as the Ciompi revolt, precisely for starting an
insurrection by ringing the bells of several churches indepen-
dently of those of the Popolo and the commune of Florence.
See Niccolò Rodolico. 1970. La Democrazia fiorentina nel suo
tramonto (1378–1382). Rome: Multigrafica Editrice. Original
edition, 1905, pp. 441–5.
11. “Ac etiam cum praefata campana leonis pulsetur in mane cel-
ebratis missis, quae dicuntur in aurora diei, submissa voce,
videlicet VI. Tocchi …” Statuta populi V, xlii (vol. II, p. 545). The
Italian translation from 1355 describes it this way: “E anche cho
la predetta campana del leone si suoni la mattina dette le messe
le quali si dicono nel aurora del dì com voce sottomessa sei toc-
chi …” ASF Statuti 13: I, CLXXXI. Masses celebrated submissa
voce appear to literally have been celebrated in hushed voices,
with no music or chants. I would like to thank Robert Kendrick
Senses & Society

for his clarification of the liturgical cycle.

12. On this see Jacopo della Lana’s commentary in Dante, Alighieri,
Jacopo della Lana, and Luciano Scarabelli. 1866. Comedia di
Dante degli Allagherii. Vol. [38–40], Collezione di opere inedite o
rare dei primi tre secoli della lingua. Bologna: Tipografia Regia,
Paradiso 15, 97–99.
13. “Et quod campanella vocata la montanina existens in turri palatii
50

domini potestatis pulsari debeat in mane, & in sero post nonam,

 Sonic Armatures: Constructing an Acoustic Regime in Renaissance Florence

quando pulsantur tocchi iure [sic] secundum formam supra-

dictae provisionis iam firmatae singulis vicibus, videlicet ante
primam, & ultimam pulsationem ipsorum tocchorum …” Statuta
populi V, xlii (vol. II, p. 546).
14. This composite nature of the city’s acoustic choreography helps
to explain why references to bells are so confusing. Bells had of-
ficial names but were given different names depending on when
and why they were rung. As a result, references to the most
important bells such as the day (campana de dì) or evening bell
(campana serale), would be more productively imagined not as
specific bells rung at precisely defined times, but as a cluster of
sounds that together constituted the temporal transition.
15. According to the 1355 statutes, the double fine bell (campana
per doppia pena) was that of the Podestà, which sounded after
Vespers, though it does not specify how long after. This meant
that the double fine was instituted within the configuration of the
evening bell. See ASF Statuti 19, III, lxi.
16. This evening office of the Ave Maria was given a specific indul-
gence by John XXII in 1327. For city-dwellers, it sacralized time
and space as they made their way home. By the fifteenth cen-
tury, we know from Saint Antoninus’ Summa, that the Ave Maria
was announced both in the morning and evening, by three
rings of Florentine church bells. And if, as Charles Singleton
believed, Dante’s squilla da lontano was the evening bell rung
for Compline, then the space opened up at twilight was one in
which both civic and sacred time were acoustically united, were
overlaid upon each other, neither one reducible to the other,
nor ever fully distinct. The end of the day was full of sound
coming from all directions. The Ave Maria was re-appropriated
for civic purposes during the siege of 1529, when the govern-
ment of Florence ordered all those not fit to fight to stop and
kneel and pray for the Florentine forces. See Dante, Purg. VIII,
1–6; Novati, Francesco. 1899. “La ‘squilla da lontano’ è quella
dell’Ave Maria?” In Indagini e postille dantesche. Bologna:
Nicola Zanichelli, p. 140.
17. This is evident from R. Murray Schafer’s groundbreaking work on
formulating the soundscape as an object of study. See Schafer,
R. Murray. 1993. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and
the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. The
continuing centrality of bells in structuring the soundscape of
Senses & Society

European towns and cities, not only in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, but also right up into nineteenth-century France is
made clear in Alain Corbin’s important study of rural communi-
ties after the French Revolution. See Corbin, Alain. 1994. Les
cloches de la terre: paysage sonore et culture sensible dans
les campagnes au XIXe siècle, L’Evolution de l’humanité. Paris:
A. Michel, published in English as Corbin, Alain. 1998. Village
51

bells: sound and meaning in the nineteenth-century French

 Niall Atkinson

­ ountryside, European perspectives. New York: Columbia

c
University Press.

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