Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P----, we found
ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the
magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but
for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his
greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but
lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary
effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped
and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with
inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety
of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and
we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality
were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P---- had
collected into earthen _amphoræ_ the ashes of the most famous men of
ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their
number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was
conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne
in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the
thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the
cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.
We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by
the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons
of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our
sepulchral shelter.
Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden
already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping
statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we
reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key
to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and
in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on
reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site
of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps
through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a
yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from
masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in
spite of Signor P----, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather.
The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality
gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were
come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and
hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
before.
We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's
time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P---- with Latin
inscriptions.
In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath
this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened
and precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body
fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty
iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.
"This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was
very fond."
A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I
demanded.
Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the
custodian replied, "_Appunto_."
It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the
establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been
confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine--an awful instrument
in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure
under its blade--which the custodian confessed to be a modern
improvement placed there by Signor P----. Yet my credulity was so
strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the
torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as
well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton
beneath it--found as we saw it--was entire and perfect.
In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton--found as we saw it--with its
neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more
merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of
the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose
skeleton had been hanging for ages--as we saw it--head downwards from
the ceiling.
Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy
oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through
which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a
skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there,
and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of
drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was
of course not the original food.
At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P----, the supreme
excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us,
and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly
upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the
block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little
slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck
from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries,
was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight
had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers
stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown
dread,--the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild,
shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike,
the merciful swoon after the mutilation,--his companion, with a sudden
pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away.
In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached
instruments of torture,--all original Ecelinos, but intended for the
infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,--and then
they passed from that place of fear.