VENICE BELLS - Getting to know the author

Mario Panizzut was born in Venice on July 22^nd 1968.

As a little child he was already interested in bells and at the age of three he went for the first time up the Saint Mark’s Bell Tower along with his father Giuseppe.

Since that time his great passion for bells starts. To his eyes those bells look at once magnificent and spectacular and he gets on with each one of them in a special way. As he says: “it is as any of them has always something new to tell every time I hear it ringing”.

Graziano, Gianni, Stefano, Maurizio, Alessandro, Massimo, Davide, Gina and Felice are the guardians taking turns at the bell tower during the eighties. Among them and Mario a special friendship develops.

It is school time for Mario and he often goes to the bell tower after school and starts his observations and recordings, first primitive, then more precise, with the help and support of the guardians.

Thanks to their reciprocal confidence he can climb up to the top of the bell tower to let the bells ring, especially during holy days. He also studies ancient works, placed at his disposal by the “Procuratoria di San Marco” and the “Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana”.

During this period Mario starts to write his first book where he gathers all his notes, to be improved and updated as time goes by. He is also not short of fantasy and he can also draw quite well, so he enriches his texts with free-hand drawings, sketches and schemes, all of which in pencil or hardly ever pastels.

His interest is not limited to Saint Mark’s bells, but he also expands his studies to other bells in Venice, always asking the priests (even if some of them were often reluctant) to climb up the bell towers to detect some information or inscriptions.

This was a reciprocal favour because Mario, being the only one to get to the belfries not as a tourist but as the friend of bells, could constantly keep the priest updated about the condition of bells and their mechanic in general.

At the end of the eighties Mario learns about two very important activities, the only bell foundries operating in Veneto: Foundry “Colbachini” in Padua and “De Poli” in Vittorio Veneto.

Thanks to the collaboration of the respective owners (Mr. Giovanni Aldinio-Colbachini for the former and Mr. Ettore Marchesin for the latter) and workers, his knowledge improved considerably, by discovering even some secret peculiarities to such an ancient and fascinating work as the art of melting is.

Now that this activity of analysis and classification is considered complete and thanks to modern technologies, the whole material has been digitally transferred to make the approach to this original and unusual argument more accessible to anyone.