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  The agony of Beatrice Cenci

The last tragic act in a criminal affair that was destined to become a symbol of the cruel justice administered in sixteenth-century Rome took place on 11 September 1599. At the scaffold that had been erected on Ponte Sant’Angelo, Beatrice Cenci, aged 23, and her stepmother Lucrezia Petroni were beheaded for murdering Francesco Cenci, the father and husband respectively of the accused. Giacomo, Beatrice’s brother and accomplice, was tortured with red-hot pincers, struck on the head with a bludgeon and finally quartered, while her other brother, Bernardo, just twelve, was forced to watch the brutal execution of his family and was later condemned to life imprisonment.

The events that led papal justice to order these atrocious executions began a year previously, on 10 September 1598, when the body of Francesco Cenci was found with a smashed skull, at the foot of the Rocca di Petrella Salto. The two women had been living at the castle for a few months on the head of the family’s wishes, an evil, unscrupulous man who was wealthy and corrupt, and had been accused of committing dark deeds for which he had been tried various times. However, the members of Cenci’s own family, and especially Beatrice, were the designated victims of his violence.

Beatrice, Lucrezia and her brothers plotted to kill him, with the help of the lord of the castle Olimpio Calvetti. They first tried to do it with poison but Cenci survived, and so they decided to smash his skull and throw the body from a balcony, to make it look like an accident. The theory that he fell accidentally convinced no one, however, and the pope ordered an inquiry that provided for a medical examination of the victim’s head. The results of the investigation revealed that the accused were guilty and, after having made the Cencis submit to torture – which will loosen anyone’s tongue – the court sentenced them to death.

At 8.30 pm on 10 September 1599, the brethren of the Confraternities of Misericordia and of San Giovanni Decollato of the Florentine Nation were called urgently “because the next morning some prisoners had to be executed in the prisons of Tordinona, where Giacomo and Bernardo were being held, and Corte Savella”.

The next morning Giacomo and Bernardo had to climb onto the cart that was to take them from Tordinona to Piazza di Castel Sant’Angelo where the executions were to take place. The procession halted briefly outside Corte Savella to collect Lucrezia and Beatrice, who walked in front of the cart to the gallows. The procession passed through Via di Monserrato, Via de’ Banchi and Via San Celso, which were then the busiest streets in Rome. When the condemned prisoners arrived in the square they attended a Mass and said their last farewells. The first to mount the scaffold was Bernardo, so that he could watch his family suffer their terrible deaths. Then Lucrezia was forced to climb up; she had already fainted before her head was placed on the block and the axe came down and severed it.

Beatrice was next, the crowd murmured, sobs were heard, the young woman put her head on the block and the sharp blade of the executioner’s axe also came down on her neck. Bernardo could not stomach such a cruel spectacle and passed out. Then Giacomo appeared, his body bare and racked with torture; he again proclaimed Bernardo’s innocence, then laid his head on the block, and met his death with one powerful blow of the bludgeon that smashed his head. Giacomo’s already lifeless body rolled over and the executioner flayed, quartered and dismembered it and hung the pieces from butcher’s hooks.

The dead bodies, or what was left of them, remained on view until 11 pm, the brethren of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato recomposed Giacomo’s pitiful remains and took them to their church to hand them over to the relatives who, respecting his last wishes, buried him in the small Church of San Tommaso dei Cenci. Lucrezia’s body was given to the Velli family. According to witnesses, her decapitated corpse was honoured by the people who carried it in procession along Via Giulia, across Ponte Sisto, and down the tree-lined Via del Gianicolo to the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, where the brethren of the Confraternity of the Sacre Stimmate and Beatrice’s confessor laid it in a burial niche in the apse.

According to some, the two executioners who carried out the death sentences on Beatrice and Giacomo Cenci and Lucrezia Petroni – Mastro Alessandro Bracca and Mastro Peppe – both came to a tragic end: the first died thirteen days after the Cencis’ atrocious death, plagued by nightmares and remorse for having inflicted such horrible agony on them and, in particular, for torturing Giacomo Cenci with red-hot pincers; the second executioner was stabbed to death at Porta Castello, a month after Beatrice’s execution. 		 
 

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