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Mastro Titta, the Rome executioner
Giovan Battista Bugatti, known as Mastro Titta, was the undisputed protagonist of executions carried out in the Papal State.
Born in Rome in 1779, he performed no less than 516 executions during his long career as a “master of justice” – all of which are conscientiously described in his Annotazioni (Notes) – from 22 March 1796 to 17 August 1864 when, at the age of eighty-five, he was retired by Pius IX and given a monthly pension of 30 scudi.
Before each execution Mastro Titta made confession and took communion, then donned his red robe and went off to do his work.
He performed bludgeonings, hangings, quarterings and beheadings with equal skill and his work often took him to the provinces.
This is how he recorded the start of his career: “I began my career as executioner for His Holiness by hanging and quartering Nicola Gentilucci in Foligno, a young man who, seized by jealousy, first killed a priest and his coachman, then robbed two friars after being forced to go on the run.”
In nineteenth-century Rome famous travellers were struck by the goriness of the executions, which were witnessed by, among others, Lord Byron, who met Mastro Titta when the executioner was about to perform his 200th execution.
After watching three executions by guillotine, the English poet wrote to his friend and publisher John Murray in 1813: “…the ceremony - including the masqued priests, the half-naked executioner, the bandaged criminals, the black Christ and his banner, the scaffold, the soldiery, the slow procession and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe, the splash of the blood and the ghastliness of the exposed heads is altogether more impressive than the vulgar and ungentlemanly dirty ‘new drop’ and dog-like agony of infliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence.”
Charles Dickens was deeply shocked by an execution he witnessed in Via dei Cerchi in 1865 or thereabouts, and described the scene as follows: “It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.”
When the corpse had been taken away, the blade had been cleaned, and the executioner had walked back over the bridge, Dickens bitterly concluded that “the show was over”.
Lastly, Massimo D’Azeglio, summed up in I miei ricordi (My Memoirs) the barbarity of the justice practised in Rome during those years, in his description of what he saw at Porta San Giovanni: “In an iron cage there was the skull of a notorious scoundrel, bleached by the sun and the rain.”
Similar scenes, however, were repeated daily in all civilized countries and, despite the principles of humane punishment upheld by the followers of the Enlightenment movement and expounded in Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments), the celebrated work by Cesare Beccaria, the “litany of suffering” constituted by public executions continued to win support throughout the nineteenth century.
