Bancroft Roundtable Discusses the Campanile

Photo By Keegan Houser

How tall is the Campanile tower? Did someone once catch a football dropped from the observation deck? Was the design really based on the Campanile San Marco in Venice?

When Steven Finacom started researching this topic over a year ago, he quickly discovered that many of the “facts” about the iconic tower aren’t necessarily true, and many have ambiguous and complicated origins.

Finacom, past President of the Berkeley Historical Society and columnist for the Berkeley Voice newspaper, will share his findings at the first Bancroft Roundtable discussion of Spring 2015, “The Campanile at 100: Researching What We Thought We Knew,” which will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12pm on Thursday, February 19.

While sleuthing out the actual, and intriguing, history of the Berkeley campus centerpiece, Finacom has relied on the collections of the Bancroft Library and the UC Berkeley Newspapers and Microforms Library.

Bancroft Roundtables are informal talks that offer the campus community insight into the collections and people who make The Bancroft Library such a great resource.