December 2Last week, we were guests of Massimo, our storyteller from the Courtesan Tour. This tour was at night and was billed as a Torture Tour…I thought it was called a Ghost Tour but I was wrong.  Our first stop was in Campo di Fiori…Field of Flowers is the translation. In the middle of the square is a statue in memory of a man named Bruno. He was a contemporary of Galileo and was charged with heresy for saying the Sun didn’t revolve around Earth and Earth was not the center of the universe. He also debunked the Virgin birth and said Jesus wasn’t God on Earth. So, the church threw him in prison, tortured him and then burned him alive at the stake right on the very spot of his statue. The church used the ‘rack’ to stretch you, a device to stretch your arms, had people dig their own graves and put them in and covered them up, beheadings etc. We learned about a woman from Sicily who learned the art of poisoning from her mother. This witch would mix up the poison and bottle it for sale, or for a lower price she would just sell you the written recipe. One woman didn’t get the recipe quite right and her husband figured out he was being poisoned and she was arrested and tried as a witch. But not before she had dispatched many husbands to their just reward. We learned that there are over 500 madonnelas around town. These are little altars or pictures of the Madonna that were lighted with candles or torches in the evenings and were the forerunners of street lights. The lights helped to keep the streets safer as well as having Mother Mary keeping an eye on things. I had always thought that they were little devotional altars and wondered why they needed two or three every block,when there were four churches on every corner..but they were more for safety than devotion. We learned about a woman who was the mistress of a Pope and when he died she stole everything she could get her hands on…and she and her coaches still travel across one of the bridges every night…and she is a ghost now. We then heard the story of Beatrice Cinci. She caused the biggest scandal in all of Europe at the time. She had an older brother and a younger brother, a mother and father. Her father was a good friend of the Pope. He was, however, not a good father. He molested Beatrice for years. She wrote letters asking people to help her and finally word got to the Pope of this situation and he told Mr. Cinci that he had to stop molesting his daughter…in Rome!! So the family moved to the villa in the countryside. One night, Beatrice killed her father, wrapped him in a sheet and threw him over a balcony to the rocks below. She failed to burn the bloody sheet. She was thrown in prison, tried and sentenced to be executed. The Pope knew if the entire family died off, the church would inherit their wealth, so he had Beatrice, her mother and older brother beheaded on the Angel Bridge in front of Castel SanAngelo. He spared the 14 year old brother’s life, but had him castrated. So no more Cinci family and the church inherited. It is said that 20,000 people witnessed the beheadings with the heads impaled on stakes across the bridge. Google Beatrice Cinci…there are hundreds of paintings, books, stories and even modern day movies made about her.  Different spots around town were the sites for various tortures and depending on your favorite form of torture entertainment, you could go to the sites and see hangings, or burning at the stake, or live burials or beheadings. Just a typical,Saturday night in Rome in the Middle Ages and even up until 1870. A great tour!