Everyone probably has heard of the _Ponte de Sospiri_ or Bridge of
Sighs. It is said that over this bridge walked political prisoners in
the days of Venice’s greatness, and these men were never seen again.
This bridge, however, is, as W. D. Howells says, “A pathetic swindle.”
The Bridge of Sighs dates only from the sixteenth century, and since
that time there has been only a single instance (Antonio Foscarini) of
political imprisonment. The bridge led from the criminal courts in the
palace to the criminal prisons on the other side of the Rio Canal.
The prisons really used for political offenders were the Pozzi, often
wrongly described as being beneath the level of the canal. A thick
wooden casing to the walls protected the inmates from damp, and the
romantic accounts of the horrors of these prisons are probably all
imaginary. The best known is that of Charles Dickens:
“I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another,
of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had
a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a
torch was placed, to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The
captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had cut and scratched
inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them; for their labor with
the rusty nail’s point had outlived their agony and them through many
generations. One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than
twenty-four hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by,
another, and a dismal one, whereto at midnight the confessor came,--a
monk brown-robed and hooded,--ghastly in the day and free, bright
air, but in the midnight of the murky prison Hope’s extinguisher and
Murder’s herald. I had my foot upon the spot where at the same dread
hour the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the
guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--through which the lumpish sack
was carried out into a boat and rowed away, and drowned where it was
death to cast a net.”
The Council of Ten which ruled Venice for many years had its place of
assembly during the sixteenth century in one of the smaller apartments
of the ducal palace on the second floor, a circular room with large
windows, looking on the canal spanned by the Bridge of Sighs. This
council had absolute power in administering justice and in governing
the Venetian State.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 27, SERIAL No. 27
[Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE]
_VENICE_
_The Grand Canal_