Capital punishment was variously inflicted; Sometimes in public, as when a murderer was beheaded on the scene of the crime and then hung from one of the windows of the Doge’s palace or between the two columns of the Piazetta. Sometimes the culprit, if the offence was great, was paraded the whole length of the Grand Canal, frustrato e arrotato. Executions were frequently carried out in private with the purpose of sparing some offender of high rank from the ignominy of being exposed to the public gaze. It was claimed for the Council of Ten and the inquisitors that although the laws were harsh and severe to the last degree, justice was administered legally and regularly and profound secrecy shrouded all their actions. On the whole, the government was better than its reputation.
The earliest prisons in Venice were established in the very centre of government in the Grand Ducal Palace, where the doge, or chief magistrate, resided and ruled, supported by the Council of Ten, whose chief assistants were the Inquisitors of State, especially appointed to protect its interests by enforcing that policy of secretiveness and mystery so dear to Venetian administration. A decree dated 1321 records the order to construct certain prisons beneath the palace, and another, five years later, orders them enlarged. The old historians are much concerned in denying that these first prisons were underground, although the fact that they were called pozzi or “wells” must be taken as clear proof that they were below ground. This description is borne out by the evidence of one who spoke from personal knowledge. Casanova was not himself an inmate of these lower dungeons, but he tells us that he knew them to be like damp tombs; further, he says that they were always two feet deep in the salt water which had penetrated from the canal outside. The occupant was perforce obliged to remain constantly upon a bench or platform raised above the level of the water and on which his bed was laid. He spent both day and night there and consumed his frugal allowance of thin soup and black ammunition bread with all possible speed to save it from the voracious water rats, great numbers of which infested the place. There was little hope for those who were thrown into the pozzi, and yet Casanova assures us that some reached a green old age in
Grand Ducal Palace, Venice
The great entrance, the allegorical sculptures, and the Giant’s Staircase of the Palace of the Doges in Venice, are hardly more remarkable than the prison under the eaves or so-called “leads” of the palace or the Prison of the Piombi. Here many noted prisoners have been confined and from the “leads” Casanova made his famous escape after six years’ imprisonment decreed by the Council of Ten.
these horrible habitations. One criminal who died there when Casanova was in the Piombi had spent thirty-seven years in one of the wells. He was forty-four years old when first imprisoned. This was a Frenchman named Beguelin, who had been a captain in the service of the Venetian republic and had been employed as a spy in the war against the Turks in 1716. During the siege of Corfu he had sold information to both sides, and when caught by the Venetians he was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment.
The prison of the Piombi or the “Leads” was of quite a different character and was so called because it lay on the topmost story of the ducal palace immediately under the leaden roof. It consisted, as indeed may still be seen, of a series of small chambers with a roof so low that a man of six feet could not stand erect under the ceiling. They were not abundantly provided with light or air. Many were darkened by the overhanging eaves and massive projections in the architectural façade, and only a scant supply of air entered through the small windows in the neighbouring passages. Their worst feature was the extraordinary variations of temperature. In the summer, when the dog-day sun beat down pitilessly upon the leads, the heat was almost insupportable; in the winter, being unprovided with fireplaces and having no provision for artificial warmth, they were almost glacial. The disciplinary régime was a mixture of barbarous severity and extreme neglect. Prisoners were only visited once daily by a gaoler who attended half a dozen cells, brought in food and, if necessary, arranged for a doctor’s visit many hours after occasion arose. This single visit was made soon after sunrise, when the secretary to the inquisitor, who held all the keys, suffered them to go out of his own keeping for the brief space of an hour. At first, no books were issued except those of a dreary devotional description. All writing materials, pens, ink or paper were scrupulously forbidden. Imprisonment might be quite solitary till the loneliness long protracted grew all but maddening; the alternative was uncongenial companionship with some offensive and personally unclean creature from whom there was no escape day or night, a far greater hardship than unbroken solitude. What life really meant in the Piombi has been graphically recorded at first hand by one who endured it for a year or more, but, goaded to despair, dared all to escape from its intolerable evils.
The escape of Giovanni Casanova from under the Leads of the Grand Ducal Palace in 1756, as described by himself, exhibits a remarkable combination of patient ingenuity and the most determined courage. The incident deserves to be inserted here in some detail, and will serve to bring home to the reader some of the curious conditions of the inmates of gaols in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The story is to be found in his autobiography, a book of memoirs, the authenticity of which has been seriously questioned, but his prison experiences bear the distinct impress of truth; he writes with a precision and particularity that must be wanting from any purely imaginative fiction. He must surely have acted personally in the events he describes; the difficulties he surmounted were real; the perils and adventures through which he passed successfully could never have been invented; all the incidents and episodes were solid, sober facts. In other respects these memoirs may appear shadowy and untrustworthy. Much of the matter seems too highly coloured and full of exaggeration. This prince of vauriens was no doubt a great liar. We can easily believe that he was constantly in luck’s way, long able to keep his purse full by his winnings at the gaming table; but when he tells us how he rubbed elbows with the best in society, appeared at European courts, talked familiarly with crowned heads and received civilities and high consideration from princes and great personages, we are disposed to question his veracity. He was unquestionably a real personage and the hero of many stirring and surprising adventures, and in none does he show to so much advantage as in his escape from the prison of the Piombi. It is certain that at an early stage of his profligate and depraved career, he came under the grave displeasure of the authorities of his native Venice and was committed, arbitrarily, no doubt, but not altogether wrongly, to the tender mercies of the legal custodians of the Grand Ducal Prison. His arrest put a summary check upon his vicious and dissolute proceedings, but it was not on account of his immorality that they laid hands upon him; his chief offence was that he was supposed to deal in magic and was in possession of certain forbidden books on the Black Art, containing the formulas and incantations to be used in raising evil spirits and communing with the devil.