Venice Bells and Bell Towers: A Striking Source of Knowledge

The project compiled, updated and blended into a single database all previous information collected by the Venice Project Center on the bells and bell towers of Venice, Italy in the years between 1992 and 2004. The project team visited a few previously inaccessible bell towers and captured improved quality video and sound recordings of bells and bell towers in the city. Finally, the project proposed templates and specific pages linked to the city’s 109 bell towers and numerous bells for the specialized online encyclopedia: Venipedia.org, modeled after Wikipedia. The project also contributed information to the UNESCO Venice Public Art mobile application, a demo of which can be found at www.preservenice.org. An interactive website was created as part of this project to show the ringing times of the bell towers of Venice using a Google Maps image, as well as to provide a tool that allows users to play the sounds of the bells that were recorded using improved sound recording equipment. The website is available at bells.veniceprojectcenter.org.