It’s not a party without the ringing of a bell. A message in music that is able to mark the days and moments of sharing in a community. We take it for granted but it is not taken for granted. There are small villages, often in the mountains, where that unmistakable rhythm is on the verge of extinction. In Torrette, a village at the entrance to the municipality of Casteldelfino, in the province of Cuneo, a spontaneous group of people took to heart a family’s desire to pass on the melody of that bell tower so that it is not lost.
Let’s go in order. The sound of the festive bells typical of small churches and mountain chapels in lower Piedmont takes the name of “baudetta”. It indicates a particular rhythm obtained by ringing, with a hand hammer, one or at most two bells. There are no more of them in the bell towers of small villages and so on each country has handed down its special soundtrack of the festival from father to sonconceived by the sensitivity of players of other times who worked hard to reproduce multiple notes from one or two bells.
Dino Murazzano, who spent the last twenty years of his working career building bells, told the story of an ancient art in Saluzzo, during the Craft Exhibition. Near him, Amilcare Gallo, owner of one of the five foundries that make bells in Italy todayEcat Foundries in Mondovì. “The baudetta consists of striking the bell in various points – explained Murazzano before making the melody of a four-kilogram bell resonate in an ancient eighteenth-century room –. It is a musical instrument that has only one fundamental note: by hitting in the right place, different octaves and harmonies are obtained.” As part of Alevè Libre (a proposal for meetings, training courses between arts and craftsmanship organized by the Municipality of Casteldelfino in collaboration with local associations), on 26 May and 2 June Paolo Marchetto will teach those who want it the melody that has always been synonymous with the patronal celebration in Torrette. A simple gesture, that of passing on, which can guarantee a future for the country. Because without baudetta there is no celebration, and without celebration there is no community.
If the melody of a bell is a sense of belonging for the inhabitants of a place, for those who build it it is an exercise in patience. “It takes training and perseverance to make a bell, an age-old art”. Speaking is Amilcare Gallo, owner of Fonderie Ecat Campane, the company that in 1995 took over the precious know-how of the Antica Fonderia Achille Mazzola. “The bell is made up of a fundamental note which, when vibrating, creates a set of harmonics which gives voice to the bell – explains Gallo -. Experts are able to identify the manufacturer from the sound”. The average life of a bell that rings twice a day is 150-200 years. It takes approximately thirty days to build one and the result will be a unique piece of craftsmanship: “What characterizes each bell is its profile, the main factor that will determine its sound. Bells are generally defined according to the basic note they emit, their diameter and weight. The production process begins with the construction of the ‘core, a brick structure created with the help of a rotating template which will serve as a support in the subsequent processing phases and will allow it to withstand the enormous pressure generated by the liquid bronze during casting”. Once the procedure is finished, the bell must be tuned, “often to an already existing concert with which it will have to be in tune: once this operation was entrusted to the ear of a musician, now digital technology allows us levels of absolute precision”.
The chimes born in Mondovì resonate today throughout the world: from small high-altitude villages to very ancient churches, up to the States, where every September 11th, in the Millburn Fire Department, a bell remembers the colleagues who fell in the attempt to save the victims of the attack on the Twin Towers.
