L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 10 L'Italo-Americano T he clock face on t h e T o r r a z z o , t h e b r i c k b e l l tower over Cre- m o n a ' s m a i n square, measures close to t w e n t y - e i g h t f e e t a c r o s s , which makes it a good deal wider than the dials on Big Ben and, by common reckon- ing, the largest astronomical clock face in the world. It is not the oldest, whatever gets said about it: Prague has been running one since 1410 and Cremona's dates from the 1580s. Size is the record it h o l d s , a n d i t h a s n e v e r stopped working. The face is painted as the vault of heav- en, a blue ground with the constellations of the zodiac set out in a ring, with the sun a n d t h e m o o n t r a v e l i n g around them on hands long enough to be read from the paving stones below. Five hands, to be precise, do the work, or four with one of them doubled, and they divide the sky between them: the sun's hand goes round the zodiac in a year, the moon's comes round in twenty-nine and a half days and shows the phase as it travels, and a third marks the hour. The inter- esting one, though, is the f o u r t h . K n o w n a s t h e dragon, it is a single arm with a head at one end and a tail at the other, which turns once in a little over eighteen years to track the two points where the moon's orbit cross- es the sun's path across the sky. When the head or the tail comes into line with the sun and moon hands, there is an eclipse somewhere. Francesco Divizioli and his son Giovan Battista built the mechanism between 1583 and 1588, based on the s k y a s P t o l e m y h a d described it, with the Earth in the middle and everything else going around it. Coper- nicus had been in print for f o r t y y e a r s b y t h e n a n d Galileo was a young man in Pisa, but a tower clock is built for a town square, and geo- centric arithmetic predicts an eclipse perfectly well. Nobody h a s e v e r c o n v e r t e d t h e machine to a newer universe and, in the end, it goes on being right about the eclipses. The tower under it, the beloved Torrazzo, is older by three centuries: Cremona began it in the early 1200s, carried it up through the cen- tury in brick, and closed it with an octagonal crown, the ghirlanda, and a spire fin- ished in the first decade of the 1300s. It stands just over 360 feet, the tallest bell tower in Italy and among the tallest brick towers anywhere, and it is built as two shells, one inside the other, with the staircase running up the gap between them: 502 steps, p a s t f i v e s u p e r i m p o s e d chambers. From the top, the Po plain runs flat to the hori- zon in every direction. At its base, the Torrazzo is joined to the cathedral by the Bertazzola, a Renaissance loggia designed by Lorenzo de Trotti in the early six- teenth century. Together with the octagonal baptistery, the two buildings form the reli- gious group on Piazza del Comune, with the town hall standing opposite. Work on the cathedral began in 1107; it was badly damaged by the earthquake of 1117 and even- tually consecrated in 1190, w h i l e i t s m a r b l e f a ç a d e , including the rose window by Giacomo Porrata of Como, w a s a d d e d f r o m 1 2 7 4 onward. Outside Italy, how- ever, Cremona is not known for this remarkable piazza so much as for its violins: the Amati, Guarneri and Stradi- vari families all worked with- in a few streets of it. In the chamber near the T o r r a z z o ' s s u m m i t h a n g seven bells, cast in 1744 by the Milanese founder Bar- tolomeo Bozzi and tuned, as the town likes to say, to the seven notes. The bell that strikes the hours is older than any of them, and older than the clock it answers to, hav- ing been cast in 1581, two years before the Divizioli began work. Back to the clock, it's sad to think that neglect nearly finished the dial off: by the 1940s, the painting had gone to pieces, and a city councilor r e m a r k e d t h a t t h e c l o c k marked only "the hour of c o m p l e t e a b a n d o n m e n t , " w h i c h w a s q u i t e t r u e . A restoration committee was eventually formed in 1970, and the face as it now looks, designed by Achille Leani, executed by Piero and Vin- cenzo Ferraroni and painted by Mario Busini, was com- pleted on June 29, 1974 and unveiled the following day. Busini died a few days before the unveiling and never saw it in place. Since November 2018, the climb through the Torrazzo has also been a museum visit. The Museo Verticale occu- pies four of the five rooms encountered during the 502- step ascent, each devoted to a different aspect of timekeep- ing: the dial, the clock mech- anism, the history of measur- ing time and astronomy. In the Sala del Meccanismo, visitors come close enough to watch the gears and descend- ing weights that keep the g r e a t a s t r o n o m i c a l c l o c k moving; higher up, inside the octagonal ghirlanda, a wood- en spiral staircase continues toward the Camera delle Ore and the terraces near the summit. O n t h e a f t e r n o o n o f August 28, 2026, a violent supercell crossed Cremona, bringing powerful winds and hail that caused severe dam- age within a few minutes. The top of one of the three small towers on the north side of the cathedral col - l a p s e d , w h i l e h a i l b r o k e panes in the thirteenth-cen- tury rose window, which had been repaired only weeks earlier after another storm in July. Part of the roof on the town hall's civic tower also gave way. Ten churches were damaged; windows were bro- ken at the bishop's palace and the seminary; and Cre- mona's hospital treated forty- t h r e e p e o p l e , m o s t l y f o r injuries caused by falls or by attempts to shelter from the hail; around ten thousand cars were damaged. The Tor- r a z z o i t s e l f e s c a p e d unharmed, and both it and the cathedral remained open while the affected areas were secured and the full extent of the damage was assessed. T h r o u g h a l l t h i s , t h e clock's daily routine has con- tinued because its mecha- nism has neither a motor nor a b a t t e r y . S o m e o n e m u s t climb the tower and wind it b y h a n d e v e r y d a y . T h e machine can calculate where the moon's shadow will fall eighteen years from now, but it cannot get through tomor- row morning on its own. C r e m o n a ' s T o r r a z z o a n d t h e s k y a s Ptolemy drew it GIULIA FRANCESCHINI ALL AROUND ITALY TRAVEL TIPS DESTINATIONS ACTIVITIES The Torrazzo's astronomical clock in Cremona, with its zodiac signs and celestial display; inset, a detail of the mechanism that has kept it running for centuries (Photo: Retrosesos/Dreamstime; inset image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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