Old Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro

When you stand outside this church on Praça Quinze, you are looking at a building that was reshaped almost every time the city around it changed its mind.

The three stone doorways on the lower level come straight from the eighteenth century. They were designed in the Lisbon style popular after the 1755 earthquake, carved around the time the church was consecrated in 1770 for the Carmelite friars. Above the central door, nestled in its niche, sits a stone statue of Saint Sebastian, the city's patron saint. If you could freeze time right there, you would have a classic colonial convent facade.

Then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries arrived with sledgehammers and grand ambitions. In 1875, city planners decided to extend Rua Sete de Setembro, and the original Baroque bell tower was simply torn down because it was in the way of traffic. For three decades, the church went without a proper tower, until Cardinal Joaquim Arcoverde hired an Italian architect named Rafael Rebecchi to design a replacement. Between 1905 and 1913, Rebecchi added the eclectic tower you see today, topped with a bronze figure of Our Lady of the Conception.

Yet inside that twentieth-century tower, the bells carry memories that go back much further. Two of them were cast in 1623, while another was cast right here in 1822 by João Batista Jardineiro, stamped with the royal coat of arms of Dom João the Sixth. It is an odd, charming mix: colonial portals, an Italian-designed bell tower, and bells that rang before this church even existed.