St Mark's Campanile is the
bell towerA bell tower is a tower which contains one or more bells, or which is designed to hold bells, even if it has none. In the European tradition, such a tower most commonly serves as part of a church and contains church bells. When attached to a city hall or other civic building, especially in...
of
St Mark's BasilicaThe Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, northern Italy. It is the most famous of the city's churches and one of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture...
in
VeniceVenice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
,
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, located in the
Piazza San MarcoPiazza San Marco , is the principal public square of Venice, Italy, where it is generally known just as "the Piazza". All other urban spaces in the city are called "campi"...
. It is one of the most recognizable symbols of the city.
The tower is 98.6 metres (323.5 ft) tall, and stands alone in a corner of St Mark's Square, near the front of the basilica. It has a simple form, the bulk of which is a fluted
brickA brick is a block of ceramic material used in masonry construction, usually laid using various kinds of mortar. It has been regarded as one of the longest lasting and strongest building materials used throughout history.-History:...
square shaft, 12 metres (39.4 ft) wide on each side and 50 metres (164 ft) tall, above which is a loggia surrounding the
belfryA bell tower is a tower which contains one or more bells, or which is designed to hold bells, even if it has none. In the European tradition, such a tower most commonly serves as part of a church and contains church bells. When attached to a city hall or other civic building, especially in...
, housing five bells. The belfry is topped by a cube, alternate faces of which show the Lion of St. Mark and the female representation of Venice (
la Giustizia: Justice). The tower is capped by a pyramidal spire, at the top of which sits a golden weathervane in the form of the archangel Gabriel. The
campanileCampanile is an Italian word meaning "bell tower" . The term applies to bell towers which are either part of a larger building or free-standing, although in American English, the latter meaning has become prevalent.The most famous campanile is probably the Leaning Tower of Pisa...
reached its present form in 1514. The current tower was reconstructed in its present form in 1912 after the collapse of 1902.
The tower is currently undergoing structural repairs in order to halt its subsidence.
History
The initial 9th-century construction, initiated during the reign of
Pietro TribunoPietro Tribuno was the Doge of Venice from 887 to his death. He was the son of Domenico Tribuno and Agnella, the niece of Pietro I Candiano, whom he succeeded as Doge following a brief period during which the elderly and infirm Giovanni II Participazio administered the city.Immediately after his...
and built on
RomanAncient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
foundations, was used as a watch tower or lighthouse for the
dockA dock is a human-made structure or group of structures involved in the handling of boats or ships, usually on or close to a shore.However, the exact meaning varies among different variants of the English language...
, which then occupied a substantial part of the area which is now the
PiazzettaPiazza San Marco , is the principal public square of Venice, Italy, where it is generally known just as "the Piazza". All other urban spaces in the city are called "campi"...
. Construction was finished in the twelfth century, during the reign of
Domenico MorosiniDomenico Morosini was the thirty-seventh doge of the Republic of Venice, reigning from 1148 until his death in 1156.Descendant of a noble family , Morosini succeeded in reconciling the two factions that had divided Venetian patrician families for years, thus ending a political conflict that had...
. Adjoining the base of the campanile is the loggetta built by
SansovinoJacopo d'Antonio Sansovino was an Italian sculptor and architect, known best for his works around the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Andrea Palladio, in the Preface to his Quattro Libri was of the opinion that Sansovino's Biblioteca Marciana was the best building erected since Antiquity...
, completed in 1549 and rebuilt in 1912 after it had been destroyed by the fall of the campanile. One of the models for the tower was the
St. Mercuriale's CampanileThe Basilica Abbey of San Mercuriale is the main religious building in Forlì, in Romagna ; the rather smaller cathedral was largely destroyed by fire in the 19th century.-History and overview:...
, in
ForlìForlì is a comune and city in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, and is the capital of the province of Forlì-Cesena. The city is situated along the Via Emilia, to the right of the Montone river, and is an important agricultural centre...
.
Repeated restoration
Seriously damaged by a fire in 1489 that destroyed the wooden spire, the campanile assumed its definitive shape in the sixteenth century thanks to the restorations made to repair further damage caused by the earthquake of March 1511. These works, initiated by the architect Giorgio Spavento, then executed under the direction of
Bartolomeo BonBartolomeo Bon was an Italian sculptor and architect from Campione d'Italia.Together with his father Giovanni, he worked in Venice: they finished the decoration of the famous Gothic Ca' d'Oro and the marble door of the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Frari...
of
BergamoBergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...
, added the belfry, realized in marble; the attic, on which was put the sculpture of the lion of Saint Mark and Venice; and the spire, in gold leaf. The work was completed on 6 July 1513, with the placement of the gilded wooden statue of the Archangel Gabriel in the course of a ceremony recorded by Marin Sanudo.
In the following centuries numerous other interventions were made to repair the damage caused by fires. In 1653,
Baldassarre Longhenathumb|250px|Tower of the church [[Santa Maria del Soccorso]], [[Rovigo]].Baldassarre Longhena was an Italian architect, who worked mainly in Venice, where he was one of the greatest exponents of Baroque architecture of the period....
took up the restorations. More work was done after a fire on April 13, 1745, which caused some of the masonry to crack, and killed several people as a result of falling stonework. Finally, in 1776, the campanile was equipped with a lightning rod. In 1820, the statue of the angel was replaced with a new one by Luigi Zandomeneghi.
Collapse and rebuilding
In July 1902, the north wall of the tower began to show signs of a dangerous crack that in the following days continued to grow. Finally, on Monday, July 14, around 9:45 am, the campanile collapsed completely, also demolishing the logetta. Remarkably, no one was killed, except for the caretaker's cat. Because of the campanile's position, the resulting damage was relatively limited. Apart from the logetta, only a corner of the
Biblioteca MarcianaThe Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana is a library and Renaissance building in Venice, northern Italy; it is one of the earliest surviving public manuscript depositories in the country, holding one of the greatest classical texts collections in the world. The library is named after St. Mark, the...
was destroyed. The
pietra del bando, a large porphyry column from which laws used to be read, protected the basilica itself.
The same evening, the communal council approved over 500,000
LireLire is a French literary magazine covering both French and foreign literature. It was founded in 1975 by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber and Bernard Pivot.-External links:*...
for the reconstruction of the campanile. It was decided to rebuild the tower exactly as it was, with some internal reinforcement to prevent future collapse. Work lasted until March 6, 1912. The new campanile was inaugurated on April 25, 1912, on the occasion of
Saint Mark's feast daySt. Mark's Day , also known as the rosebud festival , is a festival in Venice held on 25 April celebrating Venice's patron saint, St. Mark...
, exactly 1000 years after the foundations of the original building had allegedly been laid.
Influence
The original Campanile inspired the designs of other towers worldwide, especially in the areas belonging to the former
Republic of VeniceThe Republic of Venice or Venetian Republic was a state originating from the city of Venice in Northeastern Italy. It existed for over a millennium, from the late 7th century until 1797. It was formally known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice and is often referred to as La Serenissima, in...
. Almost identical, albeit smaller, replicas of the campanile exist in the
SloveniaSlovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
n town of
PiranPiran is a city and municipality in southwestern Slovenia on the Gulf of Piran on the Adriatic Sea. It is one of the three major towns of Slovenian Istria. The city resembles a large open-air museum, with medieval architecture and a rich cultural heritage. Narrow streets and compact houses give...
and in the
CroatiaCroatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n town of
RovinjRovinj is a city in Croatia situated on the north Adriatic Sea with a population of 13,562 . It is located on the western coast of the Istrian peninsula and is a popular tourist resort and an active fishing port...
; both were built in the early 17th century. Other, later replicas include the clock tower at
King Street StationKing Street Station is a train station in Seattle, Washington. Located between South King and South Jackson streets and Second and Fourth Avenue South in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, the station is just south of downtown...
in
SeattleSeattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
;
Brisbane City HallBrisbane City Hall, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, is the seat of the Brisbane City Council. It is located adjacent to King George Square, where the rectangular City Hall has its main entrance. The City Hall also has frontages and entrances in both Ann Street and Adelaide Street...
,
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
; the Rathaus (Town Hall) in
KielKiel is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 238,049 .Kiel is approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the north of Germany, the southeast of the Jutland peninsula, and the southwestern shore of the...
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
; the
Daniels & Fisher TowerThe Daniels & Fisher Tower is a distinctive Denver, Colorado landmark. Built as part of the Daniels & Fisher department store in 1910, it was the tallest between the Mississippi and California at the time of construction, at a height of 325 feet . The building was designed by the architect...
in
DenverThe City and County of Denver is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is a consolidated city-county, located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...
; the Campanile in Port Elizabeth- South Africa;
Sather TowerSather Tower is a campanile on the University of California, Berkeley campus. It is more commonly known as The Campanile due to its resemblance to the Campanile di San Marco in Venice, and serves as UC Berkeley's most recognizable symbol. It was completed in 1914 and first opened to the public in...
, nicknamed the Campanile, on the campus of the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
;
14 Wall Street14 Wall Street, originally named the Bankers Trust Company Building, is a skyscraper on Wall Street in New York City, United States. It occupies the block along Nassau Street from Wall Street to Pine Street and is across from the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall...
; and the right-hand bell-tower of
St. John GualbertThe Cathedral of Saint John Gualbert is the co-cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, located in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.-Construction:The architects of St. John Gualbert Church were natives of Altoona, Louis and M. J. Beezer...
in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
The
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company TowerThe Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, also known as the Metropolitan Life Tower or Met Life Tower, is a landmark skyscraper located on East 23rd Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue South, off of Madison Square Park. in the borough of Manhattan in New York City...
, a landmark skyscraper located at One Madison Avenue in the borough of
ManhattanManhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, USA, was designed by the architectural firm of
Napoleon LeBrunNapoleon Eugene Charles Henry LeBrun was an American architect. LeBrun is best known as the architect of several notable Philadelphia churches, including St. Patrick's Catholic Church, Twentieth Street ; the Seventh Presbyterian Church , the Scots Presbyterian Church , the Church of St...
& Sons, who based the external form and shape of the skyscraper on this Campanile.
Replicas of the current tower sit on the complex of The Venetian, the Venice-themed resort on the
Las Vegas StripThe Las Vegas Strip is an approximately stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard in Clark County, Nevada; adjacent to, but outside the city limits of Las Vegas proper. The Strip lies within the unincorporated townships of Paradise and Winchester...
, its sister resort
The Venetian MacaoThe Venetian Macao is a hotel and casino resort in Macau owned by the Las Vegas Sands corporation. The Venetian is a 40-story, $2.4 billion anchor for the 7 hotels on the Cotai Strip in Macau...
, and in the
Italy PavilionThe Italy Pavilion is a part of the World Showcase within Epcot at the Walt Disney World Resort.-Layout:The Italian Pavilion features a plaza surrounded by a collection of buildings evocative of Venetian, Florentine, and Roman architecture. Venetian architecture is represented by a re-creation of...
in the Walt Disney World's Epcot Park.
There is a mill chimney in Darwen, Lancashire which is modelled on the Campanile in St. Mark's Square, Venice, called India Mill.
Twin towers imitating the Campanile adorn the Plaça Espanya in
BarcelonaBarcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
,
CataloniaCatalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
,
SpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
.
Bells
Each of the five bells of the campanile had a special purpose. The
Renghiera (or the
Maleficio) announced executions; the
Mezza Terza proclaimed a session of the Senate; the
Nona sounded midday; the
Trottiera called the members of the Maggior Consiglio to council meetings and the
Marangona, the biggest, rang to mark the beginning and ending of working day.
Current Restoration Work
The Campanile is currently undergoing a major set of building works that are forecast to last a few years. Like many buildings in Venice, it is build on soft ground, supported by wooden piles. Due to years of winter flooding (Acqua Alta), the subsoil has become saturated and the campanile has begun to subside and lean. Evidence of this can be seen in the increasing number of cracks in the masonry.
In order to stop the damage, a ring of titanium is being built underneath the foundations of the campanile. The titanium ring will protect the campanile from the shifting soil and ensure that the tower subsides equally and does not lean.
It is still possible to climb the campanile during these works.
Gallery
In popular culture
Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
famously demonstrated his telescope to the
Doge of VeniceThe Doge of Venice , often mistranslated Duke was the chief magistrate and leader of the Most Serene Republic of Venice for over a thousand years. Doges of Venice were elected for life by the city-state's aristocracy. Commonly the person selected as Doge was the shrewdest elder in the city...
Antonio PriuliAntonio Priuli was the 94th Doge of Venice, reigning from May 17, 1618 until his death. Priuli became Doge in the midst of an ongoing Spanish conspiracy orchestrated by the Spanish Ambassador to Venice, Alfonso de la Cueva, marqués de Bedmar, a "spy war" that did not end until 1622.-Background,...
on August 21, 1609 from the Campanile. There is a plaque commemorating this event at the viewing area of the tower.
The 1902 collapse of the Campanile plays a role in
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist
Thomas PynchonThomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's 2006 novel
Against the DayAgainst the Day is a novel by Thomas Pynchon. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, and "one or two places not strictly...
, in which an aeronautical battle between ambiguously fictitious airships results in the spectacular fall of the structure.
The Campanile, along with much of the city of Venice, appears in the video game
Assassin's Creed IIAssassin's Creed II is a historical third-person action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It is the second video game installment of the Assassin's Creed series, and is a sequel to the 2007 video...
, in which the playable character, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, can scale the tower in the years 1480-1499 to view the city from on-high.
The
JapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese
mangaManga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
Gunslinger GirlGunslinger Girl is an ongoing manga by Yu Aida. It first premiered in the November 2002 issue of the monthly shōnen magazine Dengeki Daioh. The chapters are also being published in tankōbon volumes by ASCII Media Works. 13 volumes have been released in Japan as of April 2011...
by
Yu Aidais a Japanese manga author and illustrator best known for his work Gunslinger Girl. Aida has done character designs for the eroge visual novel, Bittersweet Fools.- Works :* Gunslinger Girl...
is set in Italy. Volume 11 of the series revolves mainly around terrorists taking over the Campanile and the subsequent battle with the authorities.
Venice-themed Japanese anime
Aria the OVA: Ariettais a utopian science fantasy manga by Kozue Amano. The series was originally titled when it was published by Enix in the magazine Monthly Stencil, being retitled when it moved to Mag Garden's magazine Comic Blade. Aqua was serialized in Stencil from 2001 to 2002 and collected in two tankōbon volumes...
depicts a walk to the top of St. Mark's Campanile, via the pedestrian ramp path, which is no longer accessible to the general public.
External links