The bells of Assisi's churches have just rung noon. They ring for each Mass -- morning, noon, afternoon, evening -- and go off in an order they've long since settled upon among themselves, maybe formally, maybe not. There's no wild cacophony, but a set of short sequences, first down the hill, then up the hill, then behind the hotel, then down the hill again. Each church has its own bells and its own pattern, calling its own parishioners to Mass. What we hear today is just the larger churches, the ones that can still maintain and work their bells (though I doubt if any of these bell ropes are pulled by hand anymore). The smaller churches, of which Assisi has about seventy-two billion, each would have had at least one bell when it was built -- or, in a few cases, just dreamed of a bell even then, and so built a belltower which was never used. Church attendance is down now to the point where even in the Basilica of St. Francis Sunday Mass is in a side chapel. Some of the small churches have no congregation anymore, and some just a very tiny one. Some can barely afford to keep the rain off the frescoes. The bells in those churches are distant memories. I do wonder what Assisi sounded like four or five hundred years ago, at noon.