THE FALL OF THE CAMPANILE

The Campanile was the most famous bell tower in Venice. It was a square shaft built of brick, forty feet square at the base, and it rose to the height of three hundred and twenty-five feet. Graceful in its architectural lines, its soft tones of reddish yellow aided in harmonizing it so perfectly with its environment that without it the beauty of the Piazza seems almost destroyed. It was begun 888 A.D., restored in 1329, provided with its open lantern and pyramidal roof in 1417, and crowned with its gilt bronze angel, sixteen feet high, in 1517. It saw the rise, if not the birth, of Venice, the most famous of medieval republics; its glories, and its decline; its extinction by that other republic which had already felt the strong hand of the Corsican; its days of Austrian domination, and its final return to united Italy.

We are told that in the old days there were four bells rung from the tower for different purposes. The first sounded at dawn to call the laboring classes to their work; the second announced the opening of the official bureau; the third called the councilors to their duties; and the fourth, called the bell of the malefactors, was the knell that tolled during executions. About 1670 a fifth great bell was brought from Candia, which was

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heard only on Ascension Day, when the Doge espoused the Adriatic.

Monday morning, July the fourteenth, 1902, was bright and clear, warm in the Italian sunshine, but fresh with the pure southwest breeze drawing up over the lagoons. As we were finishing our breakfast of cherries, coffee, rolls, and honey, some one told us of an ominous crack in the side of the Campanile and the fears expressed in the morning newspaper that its condition was serious.

'Come," I said to my little daughter, "let us go round to the Piazza and look at it."

So we set off at once, passing through the narrow alleys back of the hotels, over the bridge, past San Moise, and so through a narrow street of shops to the archway at the southwestern angle of the Piazza. Advancing up the square towards the Campanile, we found a space around its base had been roughly fenced off by a railing of planks, and looking up, saw a wide crack in the brick work of the tower, starting just over the roof and extending vertically upwards six stories in height.

The impression it gave me was a sense of the necessity of taking down and rebuilding that entire angle of the tower. The idea that the tower itself would fall never occurred to me. Standing where I could view it plainly, I sketched in my note-book the tower and the fatal

crack, as it stretched up the side, breaking through the sill and caps of a window, just missing the window above it, and so on until it seemed to lose itself in a number of small fissures near the top.

My daughter said, "Please let me feed the pigeons,' and by way of answer I gave her some coppers to buy corn for the purpose. Fifteen or twenty minutes later my little girl was still feeding the pigeons in the center of the square, - as I recollect she was the only person in the Piazza outside the arcades. As I walked over to her the tame pigeons fluttered away from her shoulders, where they had perched to peck the corn, then we went to take another look at that crack. I noticed that the rails around the base of the tower had been spread out much farther to take in a larger space at its foot.

A sense of uneasiness filled me, there seemed to be "something in the air" - something unusual, a strangeness in the deserted look of the Piazza and its unwonted quiet. It was the hush before the tragedy, though I did not then realize its meaning. After gazing a few moments at the Campanile we turned and walked together for a few paces down the arcades on the north side of the Piazza and then-!

A crashing, tearing, rending din in the air above me, a noise as I conceive an avalanche of rocks and stones would make pouring over some precipice, a wild yell of human voices suddenly drowned in the overpowering

roar of falling matter! One quick glance upward, and I saw the whole Campanile breaking and splitting into fragments from top to bottom. One immense piece, surely a hundred feet long, cracked off the injured side and dropped vertically downwards. The pointed top, unsupported at that angle, bent over a little as if bowing in a breeze. Down came the whole proud tower, like a house of cards or children's blocks, but with a noise and din that was appalling, and that rings in the ears of memory even yet.

That first glance showed me that the tower was collapsing, that is, dropping downward; it was not toppling to one side. Fearing that we might be struck by falling bricks, I pushed my daughter ahead of me, and hastened across the pavement to take refuge in the open doorway of a picture shop. In an instant we were enveloped in a dense, black cloud of blinding dust, so thick that one could scarcely see three feet ahead.

We both stood quietly waiting. A young man in the shop behind the counter turned his back to the Piazza and his face to the wall, and with clasped hands uplifted, prayed audibly, shivering from head to foot as if afflicted with ague. His terror was so pitiable that it aroused my little girl's sympathy and she repeated to him again and again, "Va bene!" "Va bene!" meaning all right the only Italian phrase she could think of. Then all was still. A profound silence succeeded the