Host: Rocky Ruggiero
Date: March 23rd
This lecture traces the construction of a sonic 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 confronted 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, however, to the more antagonistic urbanistic policies that governments used to combat their enemies, the ringing of civic bells exploited the unifying power of religious bells, a power embedded in their role in uniting people into spiritual communities, to integrate its ideals, laws, and institutions into the soundscape of the city. By addressing four separate stories, this talk will show how noisy and silence in Renaissance Florence was an integral part of the experience of urban space.
