342 THE STONES OF VENICE

The Gradenigo Chamber was somewhere on the Rio Façade, behind the present position of the Bridge of Sighs; i.e., about the point marked on the roof by the dotted lines in the woodcut: it is not known whether low or high, but probably on a first story. The great façade of the Ziani Palace being, as above mentioned, on the Piazzetta, this chamber was as far back and out of the way as possible; secrecy and security being obviously the points first considered.

§ 15. But the newly constituted Senate had need of other additions to the ancient palace besides the Council Chamber. A short, but most significant, sentence is added to Sansovino’s account of the construction of that room. “There were, near it,” he says, “the Cancellaria, and the Gheba or Gabbia, afterwards called the Little Tower.”*

Gabbia means a “cage;” and there can be no question that certain apartments were at this time added at the top of the palace and on the Rio Façade, which were to be used as prisons. Whether any portion of the old Torresella still remains is a doubtful question; but the apartments at the top of the palace, in its fourth story, were still used for prisons as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century.† I wish the reader especially to notice that a separate tower or range of apartments was built for this purpose, in order to clear the government of the accusations so constantly made against them, by ignorant or partial historians, of wanton cruelty to prisoners. The stories commonly told respecting the “piombi” of the Ducal Palace are utterly false. Instead of being, as usually reported, small furnaces under the leads of the palace, they were comfortable rooms with good flat roofs of larch, and carefully ventilated.‡ The new chamber,

* “Vi era appresso la Cancellaria, e la Gheba o Gabbia, chiamata poi Torresella.”-P. 324. A small square tower is seen above the Vine angle in the view of Venice dated 1500, and attributed to Albert Dürer. It appears about 25 feet square, and is very probably the Torresella in question.

† Vide Bettio, Lettera, p. 23.

‡ Bettio, Lettera, p. 20. “Those who wrote without having seen them described them as covered with lead; and those who have seen them know that, between their flat timber roofs and the sloping leaden roof of the palace, the interval is five metres where it is least, and nine where it is greatest.”

[Version 0.04: March 2008]