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The Mantellate bell
The bronze bell from the ex-women’s prison in Rome known as the Mantellate, housed in the old Convent of the Mantellate (Cloaked) nuns, an order founded by Giuliana Falconieri in Florence in the fourteenth century and so-called because of the long black cloak they wore.
For many centuries the bell marked the daily routine of prison life: it rang when it was time to get up, eat, work, pray and go to bed.
The Mantellate bell bears the date when it was made and the inscription CH-AS-AR-IT (Reverend Apostolic Camera). The bell was originally located in the seventeenth-century prisons in Via Giulia, known as the Carceri Nuove (New Prisons), built by Pope Innocent X in 1655. Subsequently the bell was transferred to the women’s prison in Via delle Mantellate, next to Regina Coeli Prison. The bell, in use until the 1950s, became the symbol of the former women’s prison in Rome.
The words of a popular Roman song refer to the former women’s prison and the Mantellate bell: “Le Mantellate so’ delle suore, ma a Roma so’ sortanto celle scure. Una campana sona a tutte l’ore, ma Cristo nun c’è sta drento a ’ste mura.” (The Mantellate are nuns, but in Rome they are only dark cells. A bell rings out every hour, but Christ is not to be found within these walls.)
