The foundry stands in a low building of ochre stucco a kilometre outside San Piero a Grado, the road shaded by umbrella pines. Inside, the floor is beaten earth in places, brick in others, and the air carries the faintly sweet smell of beeswax and the sharper bite of cooling bronze.
The Capecchi family has cast bells here since 1432. A wall near the door lists, in painted script, every bell tower they have supplied: parishes in Lucca, Pistoia, Volterra, two churches in Corsica, a monastery in Slovenia, and, in 1937, a mission school in Eritrea.
Lorenzo Capecchi is the twenty-first of his name to run the foundry. He is sixty-four, with hands stained green at the cuticles from copper salts. His son Tommaso, thirty-one, works alongside him. There is no third generation yet.
A bell begins as a drawing. Capecchi uses graph paper and a steel rule, sketching the profile in section: lip, soundbow, waist, shoulder, crown. The proportions are governed by a system passed down within the family and refined, he says, twice in six centuries.
The core is built up from brick on a vertical iron spindle, then plastered with a loam of clay, sand, horse manure, and goat hair. A wooden template called the strickle is swung around the spindle, scraping the loam to the exact inner profile of the bell.
Over the dried core goes the false bell, a layer of tallow and beeswax also shaped by the strickle. The wax surface is incised with the inscription, the saint, the date, the donor's name if any, and the small medallions the family has used since the seventeenth century.
Then comes the cope, another loam shell built up over the wax in successive coats, each dried before the next. A medium bell takes three weeks to build the mould. A large one can take two months.
“Then comes the cope, another loam shell built up over the wax in successive coats, each dried before the next.”
The mould is fired slowly in a brick kiln behind the foundry. The wax melts and runs out through channels at the base, leaving a precise hollow between core and cope. Capecchi monitors the kiln through a peephole, feeding olive prunings to keep the temperature steady.
The mould is then lowered into a pit dug into the foundry floor and packed around with damp sand. This buries the mould to its mouth and counters the outward pressure of the molten metal.
The alloy is seventy-eight parts copper to twenty-two parts tin, by weight. Capecchi buys copper in ingots from a supplier in Brescia and tin from a refinery in Cornwall through a Genoese broker. He weighs each batch on a beam scale older than Italian unification.
The melt happens in a reverberatory furnace fired with oak and beech. It takes about nine hours to bring six hundred kilograms of bronze to pouring temperature, which Capecchi judges by the colour of the surface skin rather than by pyrometer.
Pouring is done in near silence. Two assistants tilt the crucible with long iron tongs. The bronze runs into the mould through a clay-lined trough. Capecchi watches the rising metal at the air vents at the crown. When the bronze appears there, he signals to stop.
The cast bell cools in the pit for between four days and two weeks, depending on size. Breaking out the mould is the messiest part of the work. The cope is chipped away with hammers and the core is broken up from inside with a long iron bar.
The raw bell is hoisted onto a horizontal lathe built in 1903 by Capecchi's great-grandfather. The bell turns slowly while Capecchi shaves the inner profile with a hand-held scraper, taking off microns of metal at the soundbow to adjust the partials.
A bell, he explains, has five principal partials: hum, prime, tierce, quint, and nominal. They must sit in a particular relationship for the bell to sound, in his phrase, composto, composed. He tunes by striking the bell with a leather mallet and listening, sometimes for an hour, before taking off any metal.
He uses a tuning fork and, occasionally, an electronic analyser his son insisted on buying. The analyser confirms what his ear has already decided. He says this with neither pride nor irony.
A finished bell is polished with steel wool and beeswax, fitted with an iron clapper forged at a smithy in Pontedera, and inspected by the parish priest if the commission is liturgical. Some priests bring holy water. Some bring grappa. Most bring both.
The current commission is a set of three bells for a rebuilt church near Faenza, replacing originals destroyed in a 1944 air raid. Tommaso is leading the design. Lorenzo watches more than he intervenes, which he says is the most difficult part of the work he still has left to do.
