It could be a scene from the Middle Ages: firewood piled high on the floor, clay bells dangling from the ceiling, white plaster reliefs of Madonnas and saints lining the walls. Sunlight streaming through a window illuminates a priest as he sprinkles holy water and chants a litany to the Virgin Mary, the others in the room repeating in response prega per noi – “pray for us.” The priest’s gold stole mirrors the fiery molten bronze he is blessing as it runs down a brick channel and into a mold buried under the dirt floor.  

It feels as though we’ve traveled back in time, but in fact it’s 2017. We are in Agnone, Italy, to witness the birth of a bell – a process in which a millennium of tradition culminates in two tension-filled minutes. When it’s over, Armando Marinelli will say a few words and walk around the room shaking hands with those present at the latest bell-casting in the Italian foundry’s 1,000-year history. Armando and his brother Pasquale are the 26th generation to run the foundry, which is the second-oldest family business in the world.  

From Rome, it’s about a three-hour drive to Agnone. It’s a spring day, sunny and warm, and we zip past cacti and palm trees before beginning our winding ascent through the hills of south-central Italy. Deeper in the mountains, the air turns crisp, and sheep and cows graze along the side of the road. We’re traveling to this village of 5,200 people to attend the birth of a bell that’s being cast to celebrate the centennial of The Rotary Foundation. 

“Everything is more artisanal here,” Armando Marinelli, a member and past president of the Rotary Club of Agnone, says about his town over a lunch of cheese, dried sausage, and pizza con i cicoli (focaccia with pork rinds, a regional dish). We’re at a baita – a homey mountain lodge where patrons walk back to the kitchen to get their own food. Agnone is most famous for the bell foundry (that night another restaurant serves us bell-shaped ravioli), but it’s also home to cheesemakers whose operations stretch back 400 years and bakeries so specialized that Marinelli can identify which one made a particular bread just by looking at it. 

“The foundry attracts tourists. They come here and buy the cheese and eat at the restaurants,” says Luigi Falasca, 2013-14 governor of District 2090, who lives in Agnone and like Marinelli is a member of the Rotary Club of Agnone. “This is a beautiful town. It’s a medieval town, it has history. But it’s because of the bell foundry that people find out about it.”

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