Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

The way of it was this: On the last day of February of that year, Pesaro, happening to pass beneath the window of a woman called Lucrezia Baglioni, who was leading a bad life under the protection of a nobleman named Paoli Lioni, called out some indecent jest to her and asked her to repeat it from him to Lioni. That same evening Pesaro returned to Lucrezia Baglioni’s house, where she was giving a banquet to a newly wedded pair, Lioni being of the company as a matter of course. It seems that Pesaro must have seen them both together at the window, for he repeated his jest of the afternoon loud enough to be overheard by Lioni, to whom, I fancy, he was unknown.

“What are you saying there, fool?” asked Lioni, with a pleasant condescension, smiling down at him from the iron balcony.

“What I please,” Pesaro retorted, “and if any one wishes to cross swords with me, I am at his service!”

From this it seems evident that Pesaro was in the pay of some enemy to Lioni and that he had thus sought an occasion of affronting him, and so of drawing him into a duel; which motive of Pesaro’s is confirmed beyond all doubt by what happened next.

On hearing this challenge, Lioni mildly withdrew from the balcony into the room, drawing Lucrezia with him, unwilling to expose her or his own dignity to the insolence of the unknown roysterer in the street: whereupon, Pesaro, seeing himself baulked of his prey, went off to his lodgings, put on his breastplate, mask, and morion, and then collecting a few of his fellow-bravi went with them to find Camillo Trevisano, who was his partner and the junior member of their firm of “bravi.” Having found Camillo, he clapped him on the shoulder, saying, “Come! there is a job waiting for us!”

And Camillo, nothing loath, put on his own armour and his mask and went with Pesaro to the house where Paoli Lioni and Lucrezia Baglioni, all unsuspecting of what was on its way to them, were feasting and making merry with their friends. The “bravi,” on reaching the house, had no difficulty in effecting an entrance, and, rushing up the stairs, burst into the chamber where Lioni and Lucrezia were seated at table with their guests. There followed a prolonged scuffle, in which Lioni was slain and Lucrezia received a murderous beating from the small shields carried by some of the bravi—from the effects of which she was eventually so fortunate as to recover—whilst others fell upon the assembled company, wounding several members of it, and extinguishing all the lights save one, a torch held in one hand of the bridegroom the while he defended his wife from her assailants with a chair.

This was the last of Messer Pesaro’s exploits, however, for the “sbirri” were sent out to take him; and, although he contrived to slip through their fingers, yet a decree of banishment was issued against him, together with Camillo Trevisano and another of their gang, Gabriele Morosini, and a price was set upon their heads. After which we hear no more of him.

Mr. Hazlitt tells us[28] how the Sieur de la Haye, in writing of the Venetian aristocracy in the year 1670, mentions that, “whether they were in their coaches or on horseback, they were accompanied by a rabble of Hectors they call Bravi, many times only in ostentation, but too often for a worse end.”

In the greater number of crimes perpetrated by the “bravi” of the city of Venice itself during the worst period, that of the Seventeenth Century, they appear to have done less with sword and pistol than with the arquebus and the stiletto; the employment of the latter is comprehensible enough on grounds of stealth and convenience, that of the arquebus I find less easy to understand, for it was an exceedingly clumsy weapon and possessed, as were all firearms of those days, of a tremendous “kick.” The only reason imaginable for its use is that it had the advantage of killing at a longer and, consequently, a safer distance for the murderer than a pistol, which could only be counted upon at a very short range.

It was not, however, until the comparatively recent epoch of the last half of the Eighteenth Century that the “bravo” as an institution acquired his widest celebrity by the commission of what were practically acts of open warfare against the then moribund Republic of Venice. These acts were committed under the leadership of a man the like of whom Italy had not known since the days of the Despots, one Count Alamanno Gambara, a native of the parts about Brescia.