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Updated: June 15, 2025
The courtyard is inexhaustible in interest and beauty, from its bronze well-heads to the grated leaden prison cells on the roof, the terrible piombi which were so dreaded on account of their heat in summer and cold in winter. Here in the middle of the eighteenth century that diverting blackguard, Jacques Casanova, was imprisoned.
§ VI. One main cause of it, the necessity of throwing off snow in the north, has been a thousand times alluded to: another I do not remember having seen noticed, namely, that rooms in a roof are comfortably habitable in the north, which are painful sotto piombi in Italy; and that there is in wet climates a natural tendency in all men to live as high as possible, out of the damp and mist.
But in the Piombi I was obliged to make capital out of everything that came under my hands." The capital he desired to make in this instance was to ascertain whether Balbi would be disposed to do for him what he could not do for himself. He wrote inquiring, and proposing flight.
On the 24th of November, one of our companions, Dr. Foresti, was taken from the Piombi, and transported no one knew whither. The jailer, his wife, and the assistants, were alike alarmed, and not one of them ventured to throw the least light upon this mysterious affair. "And why should you persist," said Tremerello, "in wishing to know, when nothing good is to be heard?
It lived on terror and voluptuousness; its police was a system of secret confession, of each against the other. Its cells, termed the Piombi or Leads, and which were entered at night by the Bridge of Sighs, were a hell that closed on the captive never to re-open. The wealth of the East flowed in on Venice from the fall of the Lower Empire.
Yet this law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian -piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers of the rich.
Abandoning, therefore, the sad tenants of the Piombi to their fate, I left the courts, and stepping into my bark, was rowed down a canal over which the lofty walls of the palace cast a tremendous shade. Beneath these fatal waters the dungeons I have also been speaking of are situated. There the wretches lie marking the sound of the oars, and counting the free passage of every gondola.
Pellico and his companions were still lying untried in the horrible Venetian prisons, called, from their leaden roofs, the 'Piombi, when the events of 1821 gave rise to a wholesale batch of new arrests.
We ascended the palace; Count B- spoke to the judges, then, handing me over to the jailer, after embracing me with much emotion, he bade me farewell. I followed the jailer in silence. After turning through a number of passages, and several large rooms, we arrived at a small staircase, which brought us under the Piombi, those notorious state prisons, dating from the time of the Venetian republic.
Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II. at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the Inquisitors of State in the Piombi at Venice, he made, in 1755, the most famous escape in history. His Memoirs, as we have them, break off abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings.
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