It is a singular circumstance, but quite authentically recorded, that the government was just then without sufficient funds to pay Giovanni for his share in the house, and it was actually proposed to pawn the city’s silver trumpets, which were used in all public solemnities. The government, however, succeeded in raising the sum in a more dignified way.
The house of Bajamonte Tiepolo, at Sant’ Agostino, was levelled to the ground, and on the spot a column recorded the traitor’s infamy. This space is still open and desolate in our own time, after a lapse of six hundred years.
The column was set up in 1314, and it bore the following inscription, which is one of the most ancient specimens of Venetian dialect. It is in the form of a rhymed quatrain: ‘This ground belonged to Bajamonte, and now for his infamous treachery it has been turned common, that all may look upon it now and ever, and be afraid.’
It is not long since writers of democratic tendency still attempted to make Tiepolo seem a martyr to liberty. The Provisional Government of Venice, on July 13, 1797, invited the citizens to restore to honour the memory of those heroes, born in times of tyranny, who had fallen victims to their own generous efforts, and much more in the same manner. It was proposed to set
up a statue to Tiepolo, as well as to the proto-martyr, Marin Bocconio; but in the end, even the democratic government was obliged to concede that its hero had been nothing but a seditious egotist, and the name of Bajamonte has not lost the odium it deserves even to our own time; for in spite of his standard blazoned with the word ‘Liberty,’ he had really meant to seize the government of his country and to make the dogeship hereditary in his family. After the conspiracy the public feeling against the Tiepolo and Quirini families was so strong that those branches of the Tiepolo which had remained faithful to the republic changed their coats-of-arms. The innocent branches of the Quirini, however, resorted to an expedient which is quite unique in heraldry, so far as I know. In Italian ‘bono’ means ‘good’; the Quirini simply charged their coat with a capital B, to show how good they had been!
Marco Donà, the man who had revealed the plot, was rewarded by being admitted to the Great Council, and his name was inscribed in the ‘Golden Book,’ making the honour hereditary. The woman who had killed Bajamonte’s standard-bearer, and whose name was Rossi, on being asked what reward she would prefer, requested to be allowed to fly the standard of Saint Mark from her window on the day of Saint Vitus (June 15), and on the other solemn festivals of the year; and that neither she nor her descendants should ever be required to pay a higher rent for the house in which she lived, and which belonged to the patrimony