Vicenza Church Completes Bell Tower After 30 Years Renovation
It took a full thirty years, but finally, the bell tower designed by architect Camillo Zucchelli has been completed, and the church of San Giuseppe in Rione Degasperi has, since yesterday morning, appeared as its “creator” had envisioned.
A huge crane was used to place the brushed steel structure, built by the company “Fagan Campane” of Torri di Quartesolo, in the province of Vicenza, which raised the temple’s bell tower from the 36.38 meters of the day before to 60 meters as of yesterday.
Immediately afterward, inside the “cage,” six brand-new bells were installed. It was just past seven yesterday morning when the massive crane from the company Santoni of Trento began lifting the steel structure weighing a full 190 quintals. This structure, fabricated on-site, had been vertically positioned the day before from the same equipment and placed at the base of the bell tower.
The technicians from the Vicenza-based company and the operator of the powerful elevator worked for a long time, under the watchful eyes of dozens of people who followed the operations with curiosity throughout the morning. These operations were much more complex and delicate than they might have appeared to outsiders, given that the enormous weight of the structure prompted the technicians to start work almost at dawn to avoid wind issues with the powerful crane, which has a daily rental cost around twelve million lire.
Many, on bikes or in cars, stopped along Viale Trento, drawing the attention of passersby. The “spectacle,” as we said, continued until shortly after 11:30 a.m., when the last of the six bells, the smallest, was hoisted onto the bell tower.
Completion of Work and Functional Updates
Thus, a true Odyssey for the church of San Giuseppe has come to an end, a journey that began when the Superintendence of Fine Arts halted the construction of the bell tower, deeming that a greater height would be excessive.
Beyond the purely aesthetic aspect, however, the update also has a functional significance: from next week (after completing electrical connections), the old and inconspicuous disc will be retired, and the six genuine bronze bells (totalling 1,946 kilograms) will call the faithful of the neighborhood to prayer.
In good news meantime, the beautiful church of Sant’Anna, built in the early 1930s by a group of World War I veterans, has been restored and officially returned to the Rivana community. The restoration was marked by a mass celebrated in the late afternoon of Wednesday by the same priest of Rione Degasperi, don Elio Bragagna.