Italian Prisons / St. Angelo; the Piombi; the Vicaria; Prisons of the Roman Inquisition

by Arthur Griffiths

He was not, however, treated with much severity. The constable of the castle was a fellow countryman, Ugolino, and this worthy Florentine put him on his parole, suffering him to go freely throughout the castle. Neither was Cellini debarred from working at his business; his shop remained open in the city and his servants came and went, seeking and carrying out his instructions. But a fellow prisoner pestered him with insidious and dishonourable counsels, and urged that while imprisoned he was not bound to keep his word. Cellini declined to be led astray, but was next invited to explain how he would proceed if kept a close prisoner and not upon his parole. Full of vain glory, he boasted that he could open any lock whatsoever, and especially those of St. Angelo, which he could force as easily as he could eat a bit of cheese. His companion laughed at his pretensions and Cellini, to make them good, showed him how to fabricate false keys. The lesson was so quickly learned that the monk copied them in some wax which he stole from the goldsmith who had been using it to make models of little figures and specimens. The attempt to counterfeit keys fell into the hands of the governor of the castle, who blamed Cellini and withdrew from him the privilege of free passage which he had hitherto enjoyed. Cellini, resenting this more rigorous treatment, so unjustly imposed, began to think seriously whether he could not compass escape. He set to work in the conventional manner with the manufacture of a rope to help him in his descent from the high tower of his prison house. He ordered his servant to bring him fresh sheets and did not return the soiled ones, when asked for them, replying that he had given them to the poorer soldiers of the garrison, who must not be betrayed or they would be committed to the galleys. This process being frequently repeated, in due course he provided a great length of rope sufficient to reach from the top to the bottom of the great tower.

At this stage his difficulties were multiplied by the constable, with whom he had a discussion, which ended in his being more closely confined. This Ugolino was subject to a strange affection at a certain period of the year. He went completely out of his mind and was the prey of extraordinary delusions. At one time he thought he had been metamorphosed into a pitcher of oil; at another he fancied he was a frog and jumped about; again, he firmly believed he was dead, and it became necessary to humour him by mock burial. The next mad notion was that he had been changed into a bat, and he made gestures with his hands and moved his body as if he were going to fly. He greatly delighted in a visit from Cellini, who talked with him for hours indulging all his crazy whims. Once he asked his prisoner whether he ever wanted to fly and was answered in the affirmative. Cellini said that he had studied the methods of the several creatures that took wing, and believed that he could imitate a bat. This fitted in with the constable’s mad fancy, and he at once agreed that Cellini could fly if he tried. “But I hope you won’t try,” added the governor disconsolately, “I should like to see it but the pope has enjoined me to watch over you with the utmost care, and I know that you have the cunning of the devil, and would avail yourself of the opportunity to make your escape. I am resolved to keep you locked up with a hundred keys that you may not slip out of my hands.” This did not suit Cellini and he besought the governor to make his condition no worse than it had been, but all to no purpose, and he was carried off into the closest confinement.

The prisoner was goaded now into greater determination to get away. He completed his rope and then turned his attention to the door of his cell chamber. This was protected by iron plates fastened in with nails, to extract which Cellini used a pair of pincers he had purloined from the carpenter and cooper of the castle. The holes thus made he filled in with a paste made of rusty iron filings mixed with wax, but two nails, one at the top and one at the bottom, he drove in a short way to keep each plate in its place. All his tools and the nails he extracted he secreted in the tick of his bed which he allowed no one to touch, declaring that they were unworthy to handle any of his belongings. He also swept out his room himself, for the same reason, that no one should discover what he was about. When he threatened those who would have interfered with his bed and they reported him to the constable, the latter took Cellini’s part. There was no fear of his prisoner’s escape, he said, if he got out of the castle, for he (Ugolino) as the bat flew so well, that he would be sure to catch up with the fugitive. But Cellini made short work of the descent, only to find that two newly built walls shut in the inner gate and he must surmount them before he went free. A sentinel approached at the last moment, but sheered off at the sight of Cellini’s dagger and his murderous looks. He was now on the top of the last wall and hitching his rope to the niched battlement he began to let himself down. He relates: “Whether it was preparing to give a leap or whether my hands had lost their power, I do not know, but being unable to hold on any longer I fell and in falling struck my head and became quite insensible.

“When I recovered after an hour and a half as nearly as I could guess, the day was beginning to break and the cool breeze that precedes the rising of the sun brought me to myself, but I had not yet regained my senses and I conceived the strange notion that I had been beheaded and was then in purgatory.... I clapped my hands to my head and found them all bloody, and I found that my leg was broken, three inches above the heel. The hurt had been caused by the scabbard of my dagger, which I now threw away and cutting the part of my rope of sheeting that still remained, I bandaged my leg as well as I could. I then crept on my hands and knees towards the gate, and after travelling some five hundred paces at last effected my egress,” from the castle enclosure and entered the city.

Two or three great mastiffs ran up and worried him but he beat them off with his dagger and crawled on. It was now broad daylight and he happened upon a water carrier who, at his entreaty, lifted him on his ass’s back and took him as far as the steps of St. Peter’s. Here he was fortunately found by a servant of his friend Cardinal Cornaro, who conveyed the news to his master and was desired to bring the wounded man into the cardinal’s apartments, where he was put to bed and a surgeon summoned. His leg was set and he was bled, then the cardinal hastened to the Vatican to intercede for Cellini with the pope. Another friend accompanied him. They were well received; “I know what you want,” cried the pope. “I am concerned to hear of Benvenuto’s sufferings, but bid him take care of his health and when he is thoroughly recovered it shall be my study to make him some amends for his past sufferings.” Only the constable of the castle made a great outcry and declared that he would be disgraced if his prisoner were not sent back to him, adding that Cellini had promised on his honour not to fly away and he had flown notwithstanding.

The pope was still well disposed, however. “This Benvenuto is a brave fellow,” he said, “and his exploit is very extraordinary. Yet when I was a young man I descended from the very same place.” This was true enough. He had himself been a prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo, confined by Pope Alexander VI, for forging a papal brief, and fully expected sentence of death. But execution was delayed and Farnese (Paul III) bribed some of his guard to put him into a basket and let him down from the tower.

Still Cellini was the hero of the hour. Numbers of the nobility and gentlefolk called upon him and honoured him as a man that had performed miracles. He writes: “Some of them made me promises, whilst others made me presents.” One enemy was still bitter and implacable. This was Pier Luigi, now duke of Parma, who strongly opposed his pardon, protesting that if this man were liberated, he would do something still more daring for he was “one of the boldest and most audacious of mortals.” At this time Cardinal Cornaro was intriguing to get a bishopric for one of his gentlemen, and the pope was willing to make a bargain with him,—the bishopric in exchange for Cellini, “and so,” says Cellini, “I was sold by a Venetian cardinal to a Roman of the Farnese family, both of whom in so doing violated the most sacred laws.” Cellini was on the point of getting himself smuggled out of Rome concealed inside a mattress, but he was suddenly seized by the pope’s order, and Cardinal Cornaro’s consent, and carried first to the Tor di Nona and lodged in the place assigned to condemned criminals; thence he was conveyed back to the castle in a litter, on account of his broken leg, and was very civilly treated.

The constable, however, owed him a great grudge for having escaped and threw him into a dark room under the garden, which had much water lying in it and was infested with tarantulas and other poisonous insects. He was given a mattress and a blanket and strongly locked in. He goes on: “Thus wretchedly did I drag on my time ... in three days everything in the room was under water, yet with my broken leg I could hardly stir an inch and was obliged to crawl about with great difficulty. Only for about an hour and a half I enjoyed a little of the reflected light of the sun, and I passed the remainder of the day and night in the dark patiently, having but little doubt that in a few days I should end my miserable life. Only I was comforted with the thought that I had been spared the excruciating pangs of being flayed alive,” a fate that he was told impended when he was a captive in the Tor di Nona. His sufferings must have been acute nevertheless. Nothing gave him more pain than his nails, which had grown to an inordinate length. “I could not touch myself without being cut by them, neither was I able to put on my clothes because they pricked and gave the most exquisite pain. My teeth likewise rotted in my mouth, and this I perceived because the foul teeth were pushed forward by the sound ones and the stumps came beyond their sockets when I pulled them as it were out of a scabbard without any pain or effusion of blood. Then being reconciled to my other sufferings, one time I sang, another time I played and sometimes wrote (verses) with the compound of brick dust.”

This last refers to the ink he manufactured from the powder of rotten bricks, his pen being a splinter of wood he had gnawed with his teeth from the back of his door, and his paper one of the blank leaves of the Bible which was now his inseparable companion. His piety became exemplary; he was constantly on his knees at prayer. His keepers resented this and roughly handled him, carrying him away by the light of a torch, as Cellini thought, to the sink of Sammalo, “a frightful place where many have been swallowed up alive by falling from thence into a well under the foundations of the castle.” But his fate was only to be immured in a dismal cell where a previous occupant, a victim of Clement VII, had been starved to death. Here he saw visions, divine visitors appeared to him and he was in a state of mental exaltation not far removed from madness. A sonnet he then indited gained him much sympathy and was deemed the work of “a worthy and virtuous person” and the pope was moved to release him, but still listened to the malevolent counsels of Pier Luigi to keep him a prisoner.

There was a dastardly plot against Cellini’s life from the moment of his reincarceration. Cardinal Cornaro had warned him to touch no food that had been dressed in the pope’s kitchen, plainly hinting that it would be poisoned, but to eat only the victuals provided by the Cardinal. These also were tampered with by the admixture of the powder of a pounded diamond. “This is not a poison in itself,” Cellini tells us, “but it is so excessively hard that it retains its acute angles, differing from other stones ... and when the powder enters the stomach with the meat and the operation of digestion is being performed, the particles of the diamond stick to the cartilages and perforate them.... On the day that it was administered to me, being Good Friday, they put it into all my victuals, into the salad, the sauce and the soup. When I had done dinner, as there remained a little of the salad on the dish, I happened to fix my eyes on some of the smallest particles remaining and examining them in a strong light I thought I realized what had been done and I concluded myself to be a dead man.