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1749: Antonio Camardella

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On this date in 1749, an unrepentant Antonio Camardella was hanged in Rome’s Piazza di Ponte Sant’Angelo (Italian link).

Camardella offed prelate Donato Morgigni for stiffing him in a business arrangement, and repelled all sanctimonious summons to contrition. When a priest mounted the scaffold with him to make one last go of it, verse has it, Camardella insisted on dying impenitent, crying “vendetta!” even as he dropped.

Dannato fu alle forche un delinquente
Per preticidio, detto Camardella.
Un santo fratacchion ch’era assistente
Dichiarollo per anima rubella,
Perche egli morir volle impenitente.
Invano a pentimento ei lo rappella,
Vendetta grida il reo, ne altrui da retta;
Penzolon cade e grida ancor vendetta.

This devil-may-care display of ferocity evidently made an impression on the denizens of a city still ruled by the papacy: they were still talking about it a century later, when Roman sonneteer Giuseppe Gioachino Belli anachronistically situated him on the scaffold with Belli’s own contemporary, renowned executioner Mastro Titta.

This pairing (written in the Roman dialect) of iconic criminal with iconic headsman, observed by our youthful narrator and his father, makes for a vivid scene of coming-of-age in an Eternal City where the Catholic Church extends ritual control over both life and death.

Il giorno che impiccarono Camardella
Io mi ero appena cresimato.
Mi sembra adesso, che il padrino al mercato
mi comprò un pupazzo e una ciambella.
Mio padre prese poi il carrozzino
Ma prima volle godersi l’impiccato:
E mi teneva in alto sollevato
Dicendo: “Guarda la forca quant’è bella!”
Nello stesso istante al condannato mastro Titta
Applicò un calcio nelle terga, e papà a me
Uno schiaffone alla guancia destra.
“Prendi”, mi disse, “e ricordati bene
Che questa stessa fine è destinata
A mille altri che sono migliori di te.”		 The day they hanged Camardella
I had just been confirmed.
It seems to me now that my godfather took me to the market
I bought myself a top and a sweet roll.
My father then took the buggy
But first he wanted to enjoy the hanging:
He lifted me up high
Saying, “See how beautiful the gallows!”
Suddenly Mastro Titta struck the condemned
A kick in the rear, my father struck me
A slap to the right cheek.
“Take it,” he said, “and remember well
That this same fate is destined
A thousand others who are better than you.”

On this day..