Chapter 11: View from the Belltower I

Note:
I have made a small addition to the end of Chapter 10:

As he crosses one empty street after another, the cathedral’s broken drum peeks out from over rooftops, regarding him for the first time. Beside her, Giotto’s Campanile rises — a slender column of marble reaching for the sky, a bell tower that the cathedral clasps close to her side as if it is a staff to lean upon, steadying herself — wrought of the self-same stone.

Chapter 11: View from the Belltower

A string of gems winds along the old Roman road on a caravan of oxcarts, oxen straining uphill and kicking red dust into the air. From Siena in the south, great blocks of stone the colour of baked clay wrestle in their ropes warmed from the sun. From Prato in the north, another caravan approaches the city walls — this one, a necklace of green-grey serpentine cooled on the foothills of the Apennines, and carrying the scent of mountain air. From the northwest, bone-white marble is dug from the distant mountains of Carrara and hauled down the high quarry road that overlooks the sea — a procession of glinting vertebrae curving inland, still flecked with salt spray.

From every horizon they have come, making their slow approach — marble in the hues of rival cities converging upon Florence. Here, the builders stack the stones one atop another, pressing them into an unlikely peace: a patchwork rising beneath a Tuscan sun. The harsh light casts along the tower’s edge, the burned reds softening to rose and blush, the Prato green fading into the tender shoots of sage.

At the base of the Giotto’s Campanile, the patterns are bold and plain — a doorway framed by bands of solid colour and simple design. Inside, a stair coils upward along the inner wall, the steps smoothed by the endless feet of bell-pullers, climbing every hour. Outside, scenes carved in hexagonal panels of stone and higher still, statues retreat into their hollowed niches as the restless light plays across the façade. With every storey the stonework gathers itself into finer work: marble twisting into floral patterns that dance in the light, drinking in more and more of Carrara’s pale light until, at the belfry, the whole seems spun into lace. The bells hang there, bronze darkened with age, hot where the sun pours through wide filigreed openings.

Florence, 2010

“Would you like to see the view from the top” A man gestures upward, to where the top of Giotto’s Belltower disappears into the glare. The voice is brusk, hurried, ‘Four hundred and fourteen steps’, and then he smiles, adding quickly. ‘and there’s no lift.’ His eyes glance to my worn sneakers as he taps his ticket book “There’s a group leaving in five minutes.” and he points to where a line of tourists snakes around the tower.

I laugh too quickly. “Oh — no, I’m with a tour group.” and I look around as if to prove it, but I don’t recognise any of the faces around me. In the piazza, There are four tour groups all crossing over one another their bright flags bobbing in different colours —none of them the royal blue of my tourguide. None of them, I think horrified, as I squint through a sea of caps and umbrellas of every other colour.

I must have drifted off again.

Up close, the marble had been far softer than I imagined — not the blinding white I had expected, but a warm cream, well-worn, textured and shadowed with soot. The air smells of stone and sunscreen, and the cobblestones uneven beneath my feet.

A knot of students stumbles out from the tower doors, spilling out into the square, flushed and breathless from the descent. They circle one another searching for a space to spread out, laughing as they come to rest, hands cupped on their knees for a moment, before straightening again, lifting their faces into the light.

They talk over one another, their words indistinct. Then from among them, a young woman’s voice bubbles up through the deafening sound of chatter on the square. “C’est Incroyable!” she laughs, turning to the young man beside her. Lifting her arm, she stretches her hand out before her, fingertips undulating as though tracing the Tuscan hills hazy on the horizon, grazing the dips and valleys in her mind’s picture.

Incroyable. The word echoes in my ear, catching and looping — the nasal in, the lifted croy, and the soft able, that dissolves into silence the way that so many French words do. What she has seen is impossible to hold, and already slipping from her grasp.

For an instant, it flickers across her face — or else I have imagined it — a trace of frustration as she lowers her hand. That seeing weaves itself to the present and fades so quickly, already the picture as thin and delicate as gossamer, coming apart like dandelion in the noise of the crowded piazza.

I blink and look around for my brother’s cap, his oversized blue t-shirt, a saturated royal blue cutting through the mottle of black and beige. At last I spot them, Dylan walking beside my father, my mother a little off to one side, and I hurry to rejoin them as they round the corner of the cathedral, coming to the Tower’s western face.

‘Giotto’s Belltower’, the guide is saying ‘Completed in 1359. Giotto began it, but did not live to see it finished.’

I move closer, folding back into the group, and try to imagine it — the tower as it would have stood then, with its colours new and impossibly sharp. I tilt my head back, squinting to see where our guide is pointing.

Her fingers trail high above her head, pointing to the hexagonal sandstone panels on the façade of the tower. “Carved by Pisano,” she says. “1338. In the first panel, God creates Adam, In the second, God creates Eve, and in the third panel — The Labours of our first parents — they are banished from the garden.” The scenes stand high upon the west face of Giotto’s tower, looking out over every visitor who has passed by here for six hundred years.

For a moment I shift my feet, casting a sudden glare at the tour guide, my eyes darting to her as if it might be her fault. Not even one panel, I think, for the Garden itself. As if it had all happened so quickly. As if the dream could have faded so soon.

Image Credit:
Catedral, Florencia, Italia, Photographed in 2022 by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC BY-SA