The bell tower of the Santo Stefano Cathedral, Biella

The bell tower of the Santo Stefano Cathedral in Biella is Romanesque, with a square plan, has eight floors, of which six are adorned with double mullioned windows and two of mullioned windows, surmounted by a slender pyramid-shaped cusp with an octagonal base and four terracotta pinnacles. The bell tower is 52.6 m high; the cusp is 10.4 meters high; the pinnacles, with a square base ending in a pyramid, are 3,88 meters high. The floors are divided by rows of hanging arches. The windows are of different types: loopholes on the ground floor, single-storey windows on the following two floors, mullioned windows on the remaining floors. The wall structure is made of pebbles and bricks bound by mortar, the thickness of the walls varies from 1.40 m (bottom) to 0.6 m. The wall structure of the bell tower has at least three different types of masonry from different eras: The lower area seems to belong to one of the towers of the walls and consists of masonry in pebbles and fish bones and wider angular pilasters; in the two floors that follow the pebbles disappear almost entirely and is mainly masonry in stone remnants with thick layers of mortar; starting from the fourth floor, while remaining the masonry in stone remnants, the states of lime between one course and another are thinner. These differences have led to the conclusion that the lower part of the tower may be considered the second quarter of the eleventh century; that the two floors above may be attributed to some slightly later time; finally the higher orders and completion can be considered of the end of the eleventh century.