d’Accursio: Torre dell’Orologio

A busy day of sightseeing = multiple footprints. This is the first one.

Our morning DIY tour was to the d’Accursio Tower, to which a clock and a carousel with wooden figures were added in the 15th century. The figures were unfortunately removed in 1796 … but we did get to see some of them in the museum later in the day.

We arrived at Palazzo d’Accursio with time to spare before the 10:00a time slot for climbing the tower … the first one of the day. Skipping the elevator, we used the 16th century cordonato staircase attributed to Bramante. The staircase is a brick ramp with slightly raised marble strips all along its length. The distance between the strips make for an awkward gait going up and down … for humans … not for horses. The ramp, after all, was designed for the triumphal descent of city representatives who did so on horseback!

At the top of the stairs, we joined the eight or so other people who also had tickets for the climb and waited a few minutes for the doors to Sala Farnese to open. Fittingly, the salon is also known as the Royal Hall. Definitely a WOW moment. But I will skip over that for now and go directly to the tower climb.

We’ve climbed many a-tower in our travels. Most much taller. Most reachable via uneven steps on narrow, circular staircases. This one, about 167 ft tall as measured to the tip of the cupola topping the balcony, was easy by comparison… only the last little bit up to the balcony at the top being a tight squeeze.

Set up as a museum, on each level of the climb there were panels explaining the history of the tower. In the first room, we also saw a set of five small bells of varying sizes, with signage that explained that since the 16th century, the city has maintained the distinctive tradition of ringing church bells, and that the ‘Bolognese style’ of ringing requires a minimum of four bells of different sizes and pitches … usually tuned in a major chord.

The stairs up to the next floor gave us access to an interior balcony … a chance to see remnants of the old frescoes that used to decorate the now whitewashed walls. A surprise here was a door that took us out to an outdoor terrace from which to enjoy the views overlooking Piazza Maggiore.

Since the views would be the same from the top balcony, the most important reason to go out on this balcony is to see the clock face. I think many might have missed this … at least at first, as it requires standing back and looking up at the tower instead of the view.

The current clock, which replaced the original astronomical-astrological clock, dates back to 1774 and has the numbers and two hands with which we are familiar. An interesting factoid … back in the day, the clock hands followed ‘Italian time’ … meaning that they used to strike the 12th or 24th hour as calculated from sunrise to sundown. After the French took over the city towards the end of the 18th century, the hour count was changed to midday and midnight in the manner of today’s clocks.

Our climb next took us up to the room where the clock mechanism is located … housed in a glass-paneled cabinet of sorts. Here, we were asked by an attendant to sign a waiver before continuing up to the top of the tower … the reason for this became clear when we went up the last little bit of the stairs. More on that in a minute.

Having signed the waiver, we spent a few minutes checking out the mechanism that operates the clock. Interestingly, the clock was historically calibrated using a sundial … with the noon hour corresponding to the time when the sun hits the meridian line in Basilica di San Petronio … which Stella showed us yesterday.

Finally, it was time to negotiate the stairs for which we had signed the waiver. Ascent/descent traffic on the uneven wooden steps, which becomes progressively narrower at the turn, is managed by attendants at the bottom and top of the stairs. They radio each other the number of people going up or down and stop visitors from proceeding to the stairs if others are already using them.

The balcony afforded us 360-views. Laid out below us was the city’s red-tiled roofs … which give Bologna one of its nicknames … La Rossa (though the red, is also significant with respect to the city’s political leanings). Looking across the city, the scenery against a backdrop of blue skies ranged from historic buildings … easily identified by the red shade panels in the windows; to the ancient towers that still remain standing … leaning or not; to copper clad church domes; to the distant green hills of Bologna … with Il Santuario di San Luca topping one of them. We also had a good view of the Basilica di San Petronio, but the glare from the sun in that direction was quite bad.

When we were ready to go down, we followed the instructions of the attendant to take our turn. I found that negotiating the old, uneven steps was best accomplished by going down backwards and then continuing down normally the rest of the way.

By 10:45a, we were back in the Farnese Hall to continue our sightseeing … coming up in subsequent footprints.Read more