o be seen, and originally rose from
the old brick pavement of the Piazza; but the gradual subsidence of the
soil--which is calculated as proceeding at the rate of nearly a meter
per 1,000 years--caused two and a half of these stepped courses to
disappear, and only two and a half emerged from the present pavement.

Thus the structure upon which the brick shaft of the Campanile rested
was composed of (1) the base of five stepped courses, (2) the
foundations of seven courses almost perpendicular, (3) the platform of
oak beams, and (4) the piles. The height of the foundation, including
the base, was 5.02 meters, about 16 ft., or one-twentieth of the height
they carried. Not only is this a very small proportion, but it will be
further observed that the tradition of star-shaped supports to the
foundations is destroyed, and that they covered a very restricted area.
In fact, the foundations of the Campanile belonged to the primitive or
narrow kind. The foundations of the Ducal Palace, on the other hand,
belonged to the more recent or extended kind. Those foundations do not
rest on piles, but on a very broad platform of larch beams--much thicker
than the oak beams of the Campanile platform--reposing directly on the
clay. Upon this platform, foundations with a distended escarpment were
built to carry the walls, the weight of which was thus distributed
equally over a wide area.

Little of the old foundations of the Campanile will remain when the work
on the new foundations is completed. The primitive piles and platform
are to stand; but new piles have been driven in all round the original
nucleus, and on them are being laid large blocks of Istrian stone, which
will be so deeply bonded into the old foundations that hardly more than
a central core of the early work will be left ...

In a peculiar fashion the Campanile of San Marco summed up the whole
life of the city--civil, religious, commercial, and military--and
became the central point of Venetian sentiment. For the tower served the
double needs of the ecclesiastic and the civic sides of the Republic.
Its bells marked the canonical hours; rang the workman to his work, the
merchant to his desk, the statesman to the Senate; they pealed for
victory or tolled for the demise of a Doge. The tower, moreover, during
the long course of its construction, roughly speaking, from the middle
of the tenth to the opening of the sixteenth centuries, was contemporary
with all that was greatest