RIO DELLA SENSA
XIII
THE LAST SBIRRI
It is worth while to glance at the agents of the police, of the Council of Ten, and of the Inquisitors of State
Mutinelli, Lessico.
at the end of the Republic. The two Councils had six in their service, called the Fanti de’ Cai, the footmen of the Heads, and one of them was at the beck and call of the Inquisitors. This particular one was the famous Cristofolo de’ Cristofoli, whose name is connected alike with all the tragedies and the comic adventures of the last days.
He was a sort of general inspector of freemasons, rope-dancers, circus-riders, antiquaries, bravi, and gondoliers, and he exercised in his manifold functions all the civility of which a detective can dispose. He was a giant in body, a jester and a wit by nature, a combination certainly intended for the stage rather than the police.
His especial bugbear was freemasonry, together with all the secret societies which were then largely in the pay of France, employed by her to promote general revolution. A manuscript preserved in the Museo Correr gives an account of the first discovery of a Lodge.
A patrician named Girolamo Zulian, says this document, when returning one night from a meeting of the Lodge left upon the seat of his gondola a piece of paper on which were drawn certain incomprehensible signs. The gondoliers found the paper, and supposed that the symbols were those of some kind of witchcraft. One of the men took the scrap to a monk he knew and begged him to decipher the signs, or at least to give his advice as to what should be done with the thing, as it might be fatal even to destroy a spell of black magic. The monk told the gondolier to take it to the Inquisitors of State. The man did so, and one of them kept him in a garret of his house, to protect him against any possible vengeance on the part of the secret society, and Cristofolo de’ Cristofoli was commissioned to clear up the mystery. On the following night he raided the house indicated by the gondolier with thirty Sbirri, and found there assembled a large meeting of the brethren, one of whom had the presence of mind to throw into the canal the heavy register containing a complete list of their names. Cristofoli took a quantity of papers, however, together with the paraphernalia of the Lodge, and he afterwards, says the manuscript, dictated from memory the names of the persons he had seen at the meeting. But he must have made mistakes, since several of the persons he designated are known to have been absent from Venice on foreign missions at the date of the raid, May sixth, 1785.
Another manuscript, published by Dandolo, gives a different account of the affair, under the same date. It was copied by the famous Cicogna, and is amusing for its language:—
It was the anniversary of the feast of the principal Protector of this most serene dominion, Saint Mark the Evangelist, April the twenty-fifth, 1785, when it was discovered that the public Arsenal of Venice had been treacherously set on fire; the fire was eventually discovered by a certain woman, who was rewarded for life [i.e. with a pension] by the public munificence; and by the discovery of it, a fire was prevented which might have been fatal to a large part of the city, and which was not to have broken out till the night following the twenty-fifth, but which showed itself after noon on account of an extraordinary wind which had temporarily arisen from the east and which blew with fury all day.