My lecture touches upon prison and exile in Venice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. In modern age, criminals could be sentenced to death, locked up in prison, forced to serve as rowers in the galleys or banished from the city, either for a certain period of time or for the whole life.
An important testimony of the connection between the administration of justice and religious opinions is given by the case of Francesco Spinola, a humanist who in 1564 was incarcerated for heresy and then sentenced to death by drowning. Spinola had as a cellmate Dionisio Gallo, a French humanist who had moved to Venice in 1566. Contrary to what happened to Spinola, Gallo was released and banished from the city.
In the Seventeenth century there are other voices coming from the Venetian prisons. In 1644, for instance, the Italian writer Girolamo Brusoni was arrested in Padua and then jailed in Venice. The following year he published a work which collects the letters written during the captivity, together with short love stories and poems. In some of these letters, Brusoni illustrates his experience as an inmate and dispenses advice useful to withstand life in jail. In modern Venice, other prisoners also wrote poetry where their miserable conditions are clearly described.
All these documents, some more famous than others, allow to explore the phenomenon of imprisonment in Venice in the early modern age from different points of view as well as to investigate the relationship between captor and captive.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 