Description
The Clock Tower closes off one side of St Mark's Square and opens the Merceria, the shopping street that leads to Rialto: a Renaissance tower 24 meters tall, with a great arch and a blue and gold dial. At the top, two bronze giants strike the hours on a great bell.
The Senate wanted it in 1493: a new clock, with automata and elaborate mechanisms, to show that Venice was at the forefront of technology. It entrusted it to two clockmakers from Reggio Emilia, father and son. The tower was inaugurated on February 1, 1499.
The dial, 4.5 meters wide, shows the hours from I to XXIV, the day, the phases of the moon and the zodiac. At the center is the Earth, because it was built when the Copernican revolution was not yet known. In the 1700s a restoration simplified the original version: it had eight circles, and five held the planets.
At the top are the Moors, so called for the dark color of the bronze, but they are two shepherds about two and a half meters tall. They strike the hours together, but not at the same time: the old one, with the beard, two minutes early, for the time gone by. The young one two minutes late, for the time to come.
On Epiphany and Ascension Day, every hour from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., the procession of the Magi comes out of a little door: an angel with a trumpet and the three kings file past the Madonna and Child, bow, and go back in through the other door. The statues are made of wood.
Higher up, the winged lion is not in the center: next to it stood the statue of Doge Agostino Barbarigo, who inaugurated the tower. It was destroyed in 1797, when the pro-French Jacobins had the symbols of the doges torn down, and many lions too.
The tower has four floors: the clock mechanism and that of the Magi are in the rooms on the square side, and the others served as the keeper's home. Inside is a cast-iron spiral staircase of 72 steps.
The bell, cast in 1497, weighs about 25 tons together with the Moors. At noon and at midnight two hammers join in, which cannot be seen from the square.
The Senate wanted it in 1493: a new clock, with automata and elaborate mechanisms, to show that Venice was at the forefront of technology. It entrusted it to two clockmakers from Reggio Emilia, father and son. The tower was inaugurated on February 1, 1499.
The dial, 4.5 meters wide, shows the hours from I to XXIV, the day, the phases of the moon and the zodiac. At the center is the Earth, because it was built when the Copernican revolution was not yet known. In the 1700s a restoration simplified the original version: it had eight circles, and five held the planets.
At the top are the Moors, so called for the dark color of the bronze, but they are two shepherds about two and a half meters tall. They strike the hours together, but not at the same time: the old one, with the beard, two minutes early, for the time gone by. The young one two minutes late, for the time to come.
On Epiphany and Ascension Day, every hour from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., the procession of the Magi comes out of a little door: an angel with a trumpet and the three kings file past the Madonna and Child, bow, and go back in through the other door. The statues are made of wood.
Higher up, the winged lion is not in the center: next to it stood the statue of Doge Agostino Barbarigo, who inaugurated the tower. It was destroyed in 1797, when the pro-French Jacobins had the symbols of the doges torn down, and many lions too.
The tower has four floors: the clock mechanism and that of the Magi are in the rooms on the square side, and the others served as the keeper's home. Inside is a cast-iron spiral staircase of 72 steps.
The bell, cast in 1497, weighs about 25 tons together with the Moors. At noon and at midnight two hammers join in, which cannot be seen from the square.