If a Bell Tolls in Italy, It’s Likely a Marinelli

AGNONE, Italy —  You may wonder for whom the bell tolls, but if you hear it ringing in Italy, the chances are it was forged by the Marinellis of Agnone.

The Marinelli family was making bells in this mountaintop town near Naples before the Black Death ravaged Europe, before Gutenberg invented movable type, before Columbus discovered America.

By 1624, when English poet John Donne wrote the immortal line: “ . . . Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” the Marinelli’s were nearing their fourth century in business.

For the last 651 years they have been making bells, huge and small, pretty much the same way Nicodemus Marinelli first forged them here in 1339, founding what is perhaps Italy’s oldest business dynasty.

They are still jealous custodians of a world where technology is suspect and tradition is gospel.

In fact, if Nicodemus were to walk into the dark and cavernous earthen-floored foundry today, he would probably feel comfortable enough to sit right down and get to work.

Oak from nearby forests still fires up the coal to melt bronze. Bricks, clay and wax are still used the same way to make casts and molds. The molten bronze is still hand-poured by workers using pots on long poles.

The only concessions to the 20th Century are an air compressor replacing bellows to help heat bronze to 2,200 degrees and a motor to help lift big bells, which can weigh as much as five tons, out of the casting pit.

“High technology leads us to products that are repetitive,” Pasquale Marinelli, 69, the current family patriarch, said.

The procedure begins with a solid, bell-shaped brick core covered by a thin layer of clay to create a smooth surface.

A “false bell” is created with a second layer of clay molded in the exact shape of the intended finished product. Wax decorations in relief, such as saints’ images or commemorative lettering, are applied.

This is covered by another, much thicker, layer of clay called a mantle. After it has dried--and has assumed the negative impressions of the decorations on its inside--the mantle is lifted intact.

The “false bell” layer is chipped away and the mantle is lowered over the original inner core. Everything is buried in a sand pit and molten bronze is poured into the space once occupied by the “false bell.” The whole thing is then allowed to cool for days.

To help everything go just right, the workers recite a litany to the Madonna as they pour the blinding bronze. They laud her with 50 different titles, starting with “Holy Mary” and ending with “Queen of Peace.”

Thus were born some of Italy’s great bells, such as those of the Abbey at Montecassino, Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul, the Sanctuary of Pompeii and Orvieto Cathedral.

Countless smaller ones have called Italians to baptisms, marriages and funerals in medieval and modern churches throughout the country. As Shakespeare put it in Macbeth, the sound of a bell “is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.”

To reward them for service to the Church, Pope Pius XI in 1924 decreed that the Marinellis, who have exported bells to five continents, could call their business a pontifical foundry.

The standard-bearers of all this tradition, who will take the Marinelli name into the next millennium, are Pasquale’s nephews, Armando, 29, and Pasqualino, 19.

“We are born with this in our blood. It’s almost supernatural. It’s bigger than you,” said Armando.

“One person does not have a right to interrupt a tradition that has been going on for so many centuries,” he mused while supervising the casting of several small bells in the foundry, which has a dozen workers.

One of them, foreman Antonio Delli Quadri, 52, represents the fourth generation of his family to work for the business, a tradition within a tradition.

In the 1960s and 1970s many newly-constructed churches opted for tape recordings and speakers. But this backfired, Armando said, when parishioners demanded real bells. The backlash resulted in a mini-boom for his business.

“What’s a church without a bell,” he said, wrinkling his nose.