Church bells in Rome go electric

The centuries-old tradition of ringing church bells by hand has died out in Rome, where parish priests in only three of the city's churches still use ropes to call parishioners to prayer or mark deaths and marriages.
Instead, almost all of the capital's 1,500 church bells are now operated by computerised electric motors, including those in St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.
Fabio Angelici, who installs bell motors, says that since 2003 he has changed the traditional rope-rung bells to those run by electric mechanisms and gears in at least 40 churches each year.
There are fears that the traditional bells will eventually stop ringing altogether, as new churches in the city are increasingly built without bell towers and use taped recordings of pealing bells.
The capital's last bell foundry, Lucenti, closed its doors in 1993, since when Rome churches have replaced old bells with those made by the Marinelli foundry near Isernia and two other foundries in Sicily.
The Marinelli foundry, which is the Vatican's official bell-maker, has been operating since the early 11th century and is thought to be the oldest company in Europe.
The three churches in Rome that continue to ring bells by hand are San Giuseppe da Copertino, San Ottavio e Compagni Martiri (where parishioners take turns at the ropes) and Nostra Signora della Trasfigurazione - all of which are located outside the city's historic centre.
In the Lazio countryside bells are also still rung in the traditional way, and while in Rome the death of a parishioner is signalled by three slow tolls, in Lazio parishes bells are rung with different speeds to signal whether the parishioner was a man or a woman.