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Comment by detritus | Hacker News Reader

The place I recently stayed at in Umbria, Italy for New Year helpfully tolled bells 1-to-4 times each 15 minutes to describe whereabouts in the hour we were. All night long.

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Pretty common for church bells in Austria too. 1-4 times for 15 min intervals, and then on the full hour, after the four chimes, the number of the hour.

When would it chime 4 times?

Sorry, I didn't make this quite clear. At the full hour it first chimes four times, to denote that it's a full hour, and then, after a small pause, the number of the hour.

But not during the night...

They used to at least. Since I live in the city now I can't tell personally but I just called my mother and she says the clock tower in her town also rings during the night.

Edit: From what I could gather in a couple of minutes it still seems to be pretty widespread. There have been some court cases about it, to get specific churches to silence the bells, but not in general.

From various anecdotes, I'd expect that the locals slept soundly. But if the bell mechanism somehow broke during the night - a fair number of them would wake up, wondering at the odd silence.

It’s the same here (our 2km² city center has 5 churches, so you are never far from one), and I can confirm. You sleep easily through those, and I only hear them subconsciously. When someone is visiting and complains about how loud it is, I sometimes have to ask what they are talking about.

And then in Ireland, the bells occasionally toll eleventy billion starting at 10 to the hour.

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