Hawkwood’s men were not confined, as it happens, in the prisons of the Palazzo Pubblico, but no pity can be too great for those who were, for the Perugians were by no means dainty in their treatment of prisoners in mediæval times. The street which runs from the Piazza down into the Via dei Priori is still called the Via della Gabbia because of the large iron cage which used to hang above it from the upper windows of the palace. In this cage the Perugians were wont to imprison thieves and other malefactors, and not even the clergy escaped the horrid degradation. In 1442 we read of a priest, Angelo di Marino, who robbed Roberto di Ser Francesco di Ferolo of some of his possessions: “the missing articles,” says Fabretti, “were found concealed in the campanile and under the altars, and, together with Angelo, the brothers of the priest were discovered to be accomplices, also a friar of S. Fiorenzo and many other priests and excellent citizens. On the 29th the said Angelo was put into a round cage, and with a cord he was dragged up into the corner wall of the Palace of the Podestà and there he remained for two days, and in the night he was put into prison and in the
loggia of that palace twelve sacks of stolen goods were stored and round that cage there was a garland of false keys ... and on the 28th of January the said Angelo was once again put back into the cage at midday, and it was very cold and there was much snow, and he remained there till the first day of February, both night and day, and that same day he was brought out dead and laid upon his bier in the piazza, and he was buried in the passage of S. Lorenzo which leads into the cloister.”
A big “open-air” prison looked into the Via della Gabbia: a sort of large cavern in the fathomless walls of the old building, and here no doubt the wretched prisoners sat huddled in chains together, a prey to all the pigs and passers-by. A corkscrew staircase leads up from the lower prisons to the higher storeys of the palace, and into this, merely in the thickness of the wall, separate cells are built, windowless, undrained, airless places, where other unfortunate persons were put by the “men of warlike spirit.”
There were even rougher modes than these of dealing with malefactors. On one occasion we hear of the most barbarous butchery of some gentlemen whose offences were purely political. Some were “thrown from the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico, and others were hanged from the lumiere, or long spikes which project from its lower walls.” The lumiere were intended for the heads of Perugia’s enemies, and one can fancy the faces of the butchered men looking down on the unforgiving citizens, whilst their blood dripped into the street. All through Perugia’s history we find references to the lumiere: “On the 3rd of July 1541, the head of Ciancio de Burelio was borne along by one of the twenty-five rebels of the Pope, a student killed him: his head was put on a lumiere outside the Palace of the Podestà” (Fabretti, iii. 22).