“One day a young man, who had been gaming and lost, threw some dirt at an image of the Virgin in one of the numerous shrines in the city, blaming her for his bad luck. He was observed by a boy, who reported it to the authorities, and was soon arrested. Having confessed that he did it in a rage at having lost, he was hanged the same night from one of the windows of the Bargello.” { 164}
Thereby adding another ghost or _folletto_ to those who already haunt the place. It should be noted that according to Italian witch-lore a ghost is never simply the spirit of the departed as he _was_, but a spirit transformed. A witch becomes a _fata_, good or bad, and all men something more than they were.
Among other small legends or tales in which the Bargello is referred to, I find the following, of which I must first mention that _debito_ in Italian means not only debt but duty, and that _fare un debito_ is not only to get into debt, but to do what is just, upright, and honourable.
“It happened once, long ago, that a certain good fellow was being escorted, truly not by a guard of honour, but by several bum-bailiffs, to the Bargello, and met a friend who asked him why he was in custody. To which he replied, ‘Other men are arrested and punished for crime or villainy, but I am treated thus for having acted honourably, _per aver fatto il debito mio_.’
“And it happened to this same man that after he had been entertained for a time at the public expense in that _gran albergo_, or great hotel, the Bargello, that the Council of Eight, or the public magistracy, gave him a hearing, and told him that he must promptly pay the debt which he owed, which was one of fifty _scudi_ or crowns. To which he replied that he could not. Then the chief of the Eight said, ‘We will find out a way to make you pay it, be sure of that.’ To which he answered, ‘_De gratia_, _Signore_, while you are about it, then, make it a hundred, for I have great need just now of another fifty crowns.’”
Prisoners in the Bargello, as elsewhere, were subject to the most appalling injustice and cruelty. Thus we are told of Cosimo di Medici, when he was doing all in his power to assassinate or poison Piero Strozzi, that he was always very circumspect as regarded the venom, “and did not use it till he had studied the effects and doses on condemned prisoners in the Bargello.” But “condemned prisoners” here means doubtless those who were simply condemned to be made the subjects of such experiments, as may be supposed, when we learn that Cosimo obtained the recipe of making up a poison from Messer Apollino, secretary of Piero Luigi, by _torturing_ him. It was thus they did in good old pious times. Poisoning, as a most familiar and frequent thing, even in England, did not pass out of practice, even in politics, until that great beginning of a moral era, the Reformation.