Full disclosure: this is an edited, partially-rewritten version of a post I penned three years ago for the Steemit platform. I'm re-running it because it's a series I had fun researching, but also because I have a slew of new followers who might appreciate it. Upvotes are appreciated, but not required, and I'm using the #sbi-skip tag so as not to double-dip on rewards.
Shit happens. We're used to it. It's a daily occurrence. Sometimes, though, the world isn't content to merely dribble shit on you. Oh no. Sometimes the world unleashes a streaming, heaping torrent of shit on everyone and everything in a given area, and one of the nastiest ways it does this involves stuff blowing up. There's literally no spectacle of disaster that can't be made worse by adding explosions -- just ask Michael Bay -- but what's awesome on screen is considerably less awesome when it happens in real life. Need proof? Look no further than...
The Church of San Nazaro, 1769
The next time you think about your job being thankless and/or dangerous, you can take comfort you weren't employed as a bell ringer for a European church. For centuries church bells served as a warning that danger approached. If you were the designated ringer, your job was to scramble up to the steeple and ring that giant hunk of polished metal until the priest got tired. While this was an act of courage in the face of an invading army, it was sheer lunacy during a thunderstorm. Considering the church steeple was almost always the tallest point in the town, and given lightning's propensity to take the shortest route between sky and ground, the turnover rate for this job was outlandish: in France alone, 103 bell ringers lost their lives to this dangerous occupation between 1753 and 1786.
Despite this, churches not only continued to employ bell ringers during storms, but also convinced local governments that their sacred spaces were the safest place to store anything dangerous. In the case of the church of San Nazaro in Brescia, Italy, 'anything dangerous' amounted to a bunch of gunpowder. “Lightning rods?” scoffed the clergy. “Why would we need one of those heretical devices? God would never permit lightning to strike a church!”
Seems like some clergy were lagging in their bible study: there is no scriptural guarantee that bell ringing wards off lightning, and Jesus's instructions about not tempting God are laid out in very simple, easy-to-understand, monosyllabic terms no matter which translation you consult.
Alternate theory: Jupiter was tired of being sidelined in favor of Yahweh.
Regardless, in 1769, in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm, lightning hit the bell tower of San Nazaro, traveled through the steeple, down the walls, and into the basement where it found the gun powder stored there, ahem, 'safely' by the Republic of Venice.
All 200,000 pounds of it.
The resulting explosion Ultra Kamehameha-ed one sixth of Brescia. Fallout and debris devastated structures for miles in all directions, and the blast wave shattered every door and window in the city. Accounts vary on the death toll; 3,000 lives lost is the most commonly reported figure, but others put it at only 400 dead and a further 800 injured. No matter what, it's safe to say the Italians heard the message loud and clear.
In the aftermath of the Brescia Explosion, two important lessons were learned. First, people should probably stop storing hundreds of thousands of pounds of gunpowder in church basements. Second, lightning rods were suddenly no longer seen as heretical under Roman Catholic doctrine. This was 18th-century Italy's version of, "Trust Jesus, but lock your doors anyway."
And, of course, I was only kidding about that first one. The Turks were still harboring explosives in church basements almost a century later, which led to the 1856 obliteration of the Church of St. John in Rhodes, Greece (which occupying Turkish forces had converted into a Mosque), along with two hundred or so of the surrounding buildings, owing to Thor's righteous anger.
Some people never learn.
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