Palace tour reveals Venice's history of tough love
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published July 13, 2003
The lavishly decorated Arco Foscari, a triumphal arch, is a passage from the courtryard of the Doge’s Palace to St. Mark’s Piazza.
[Times photos: Robert N. Jenkins]
The Doge’s Palace was the seat of government in the city-state of Venice, designed to impress visitors and citizens alike with its impressive paintings and statuary.
VENICE - Oversized, languorous figures in the richest of colors and reaching toward Heaven are splashed across the ceilings and walls of the Doge's Palace in this beguiling city. What space is not covered with Renaissance masterpieces is gilded, or it erupts in sculpted plaster flourishes. The ceilings cover some marble-floored rooms that are voluminous in size.
It was good, a few centuries ago, to be a resident of the rich city-state of Venice.
Good, indeed, as long as you were behaving in a manner approved by the all-powerful figures who controlled commoners, kept a suspicious eye on each other and even had their watchdogs matching strides with the head of state, the appointed-for-life doge.
But if three of your fellow citizens were willing to give secret testimony about your morals or activities, you would see a part of the Doge's Palace that Venetians and visitors learned to dread. The decorations were far less grand, though one room had a unique feature: a rope hanging from the ceiling.
For 12.50 euros (about $14.75), today's visitors can see this part of the palace for themselves. Unlike those who lived with it for centuries, now you can leave when you want to.
The "Secret Itinerary of the Doge's Palace" is a 90-minute guided tour that starts in the sun-splashed courtyard but moves quickly through back stairways into the darkest places, not merely of the palace but of the mind and heart.
The narrator begins innocently enough: She says we will learn about the "administration of justice" from the early 1300s until 1797, when splendid Venice fell to Napoleon's ambition.
The Palace of the Doge (pronounced dohzh) held offices of the bureaucracy, the courts and the doge's personal residence. It presents to the throngs in the Piazza of St. Mark's an almost delicate, lacelike facade of arches and tracery that belies the iron grip the presiding merchant/nobles had.
Suspicious minds
As the tour moves away from a second-story loggia, or arcade, overlooking the courtyard, the guide capsules the intricate overlap of departments and councils created by Venice's government of suspicious aristocrats.
Much of the ultimate decisionmaking was held by the Council of 10, so powerful that it dictated the political and moral behavior for the citizens.
Council members decreed, for instance, that no one could even meet with a foreigner without first seeking permission. Then, debriefings were held after such meetings. Proving that knowledge is power, the Venetians remained as cunning and as strong as much larger nations.
As moral watchdogs, the city's judges and bureaucratic rulers decreed how much jewelry was too much and also decided that the one-upsmanship in lavishly decorating the nobles' gondolas would stop: Henceforth, gondolas would be painted a simple black; they still are.
Climbing four stories of back stairways, the tour members step on front treads worn from seven centuries of use.
One of the tour stops is in the Secret Archives, an airy, wood-paneled room. Here, scribes copied reports from the government's spies, from the willing citizenry and from those persons who had not volunteered information the rulers considered pertinent.
The archives were presided over by the grand chancellor, a commoner who was appointed for life and was paid the equivalent of $600,000. That staggering sum was to guarantee both loyalty and efficiency.
The chancellor also controlled elections and was considered the equal of the doge: He did not have to bow to that head of state nor walk behind him.
But to remind the chancellor that he, too, merely served the state, his personal office measured perhaps 7 by 15 feet, with walls of stained but not painted wood. There was no fireplace against the chill winter off the Adriatic Sea.
Yet, the tour participants see, the chancellor's office was larger than those used by other high-ranking officials.
Crime and punishment
Another room on the Secret Itinerary is not much bigger than the bedroom of a modern house but is two stories tall.
On two walls, doors have been cut in the wood, with a metal grate in each door at about eye level. These are the doors to cells for suspects; there are two more cells above these. The only window in the cells is that metal grate looking into the room.
At one end of the room is a table on a raised platform and behind it, chairs for the inquisitors, for this is the Torture Interrogation Room.
There is no chair for the suspect facing the inquisitors. Hands tied behind his back, the suspect stood facing the inquisitors. Through his arms would be passed a rope, which had been fed through a hook on a beam overhead.
First the prisoner was raised off the floor by pulling on the rope. Then the inquisitors would put a question to him, and the suspect would be lowered, to answer. If there was no answer, the rope would be yanked again and the prisoner raised up.
Another question, another release of the rope and a pause for an answer. If need be, there would be another yank on the rope. And another . . .
This was simply the trial, not the punishment. Those who were found guilty of repeatedly stealing would have their right hand cut off. Those who lied had their noses cut off. Those who blasphemed had their tongue cut out.
Not every guilty party was mutilated. There were jail cells for the lesser offenders. And that is where perhaps the most famous Venetian of all, Giacomo Casanova, was sent.
After spying on him for eight months, the government did not charge Casanova with what was to gain him fame: his romantic conquests of the married and unmarried (he is said to have had more than 140 lovers).
Instead, Casanova was to be made an example of for cheating at cards and for speaking against the church. He was sentenced to five years in an attic cell, where the ceiling was so short he could not stand to his full 6 feet 2.
He must have had trouble even entering the cell: the doorway is barely 4 feet tall, which "forced the prisoner to bow down again to the power of the government," the tour guide notes.
A plan, of sorts
One day when Casanova was taking his exercise elsewhere in the palace attic under its lead roof, he found a metal tool and a piece of marble. He smuggled both back to his cell and hid them in an armchair a patron had provided.
Casanova sharpened the metal against the marble and used the point to dig a hole in the floor of the cell. He got the hole large enough to realize his cell was above an important room in the palace and that making the hole large enough for him to fit through would have been noticed long before it was finished.
Then Casanova was moved to a "better" cell, one large enough for him to stand upright. He bribed the guard who noticed the hole he had dug. Having hidden the metal tool beneath the cushion of his armchair, Casanova began calculating an escape and enlisted the help of another prisoner.
And on the night of Oct. 31, 1756, Casanova made his move to join the other trick-or-treaters out in Venice that Halloween night.
This time he went up, through the roof of his cell.
But that was the end of the plan. The two men were able to get down into hallways from the attic, only to find themselves locked inside the sprawling palace.
So Casanova and his accomplice simply waited near the main door for the guard to unlock it the next morning. The men bolted past him, ran through St. Mark's Square, grabbed a boat and rowed to the nearby mainland. Casanova was not to return for 18 years.
In what might have been part of his attic escape path are now displayed hundreds of weapons from the 16th and 17th centuries - swords, pikes, crossbows, shields, breastplates - an armory maintained by the Council of 10 to ensure their safety against any civilian revolt.
The Secret Itinerary winds back down old staircases and stops in a room less than 20 feet square, another chamber for inquisitors. This one lacks the rope of the Torture room.
But it does have a glowing painting by Tintoretto, The Father Welcoming Back the Prodigal Son. For this is how Venice's rulers saw themselves: the gentle parent always willing to forgive the child.
Even if they had to hang him by his arms to get him to admit his mistakes.
If you go
To book the Secret Itinerary, call 041 271 5911 in Italy and ask for the English-language tour. These leave several times a day and are limited to 20 participants.
No photography is allowed in the Doge's Palace. When the Secret Tour ends, participants are free to wander the labyrinth of rooms open to the regular tours.
