He had come near enough to see without the aid of an instrument; yet he raised his opera glass. The traveller wished to look with rigorous attention, to lose nothing of an ordeal he believed he ought to witness at least once. Then his hands began to tremble. Before him, a man refused to lay himself down upon the machine destined to kill him. Curiosity had brought Lord Byron to the Piazza del Popolo in Rome on May 19, 1817. It had not taught him what he would do with the sight that awaited him.
Three condemned men were to die that morning: Giovanni Francesco Trani, Felice Rocchi, and Felice De Simoni. In the ledger of the executioner, Giovanni Battista Bugatti, their names follow one upon the other under the numbers 195, 196, and 197. A single entry binds them together: decapitated at the Popolo for homicides and armed robberies. That solitary line fixes the place, the day, the penalty, and the legal qualification of their crimes. It relates neither the ambushes, nor the victims, nor the successive steps that had brought the three men before the bar of justice.
The Names and the Faces
At the far end of this morning, there would be a letter. Byron would pen it to his publisher, John Murray, from Venice on May 30. Between the executioner’s professional ledger and the traveller’s private account, the very same deaths were to receive two profoundly different existences. Bugatti preserved their names without their gestures. Byron preserved their gestures without naming the men who made them. Thus is the memory of a criminal cause sometimes fashioned: one document records the who, another records the how, and neither restores to us the totality of a human life.
The trial was concluded by the time the poet arrived. The piazza did not offer a rehearsing of the proceedings; it presented only their verdict. He could not examine the evidence upon which the judges had ruled, interrogate a witness to the crimes, or hear the arguments for the defence. Those whom he termed robbers arrived with their sentence already adhering to their persons. For the onlooker, everything that had preceded seemed enclosed within that single word. For the men led to the scaffold, everything that would follow was contained within the apparatus.
The distinction matters even to the faces themselves. The letter does not permit us to identify with certainty which of the three men displayed the greatest terror. The sequence of a list kept by the headsman is no sufficient proof of the order of execution. Trani, Rocchi, and De Simoni each possessed a name; in Byron’s recollection, they become merely the first, the second, and the third. The numeral, however, alters its nature: it no longer reckons an executioner’s career, but measures the dulling of an emotion.
The Slowness of the Procession
What strikes the traveller first is the solemn choreography of the ceremony. The veiled friars, the blindfolded convicts, the sombre crucifix, and the banner compose about the scaffold an image which he details with the precision of a man accustomed to committing what he sees to paper. Soldiers frame the whole. The procession advances slowly; the blade, by contrast, must fall with extreme swiftness. Thus the entire preparation stretches out the very time that the mechanism professes to abridge.
The condemned man who resisted would not lie down. Byron’s narrative attributes to him no fine phrase, no political manifesto, no repentance composed for the assembly. It records a palpable terror, a physical recalcitrance, and then an added difficulty when the neck failed to adjust readily to the aperture. The priest’s exhortations swelled louder than the shrieks they accompanied. Upon that same platform were words intended to sustain and gestures intended to compel; in the end, the execution required that the man be forced into the appointed posture.
The machine performed its office. Byron observed a flinching movement at the very last instant and the consequence of that motion upon the blow. His insistence upon the swiftness does not efface what went before. The interval of the blade was brief; that of dread had enjoyed ample leisure to occupy the entire scene. For the witness looking on, this disparity became the essential experience: one might promise a rapid death and yet bestow upon it an agonizingly protracted approach.
He grew hot, thirsty, and trembled to such a degree that he could scarcely hold his glass. These are the physical symptoms he recounts, not those an eventual biographer might ascribe to him after the fact. The gaze that sought to master the spectacle had become a body overcome by its own reaction. He had chosen to attend the execution; he had not chosen the effect it would work upon him. The opera glass, an instrument of deliberate observation, now betrayed that defeat by its unsteady wavering in his hand.
Then Came the Other Two
The next two men appeared calmer. The letter does not allow us to discern what this composure concealed: resignation, supreme effort, exhaustion, or merely a difference in observable movements. A less agitated countenance affords no warrant to conclude there was lesser suffering. Byron describes what presented itself to his sight. The second and third executions proceeded without the same visible hindrances; the three convicts were dead when the ritual reached its close.
Yet the change that Byron confesses most candidly occurred within himself. The final deaths no longer provoked the same horror. He felt ashamed of it. He did not claim that he had come to approve of them; indeed, he wrote that he would have saved them had it lain in his power. What alarmed him was the swiftness of his habituation: a matter of minutes had sufficed for repetition to blunt a shock he would have imagined enduring.
This confession renders his letter far more disquieting than any narrative wherein the spectator maintains an unblemished sensibility to the end. He does not grant himself the flattering role of the witness forever overcome. He discovers that he can still look, and that looking once more no longer means feeling as much. The ceremony, designed to provide an example, had likewise produced an indifference. The third man had no less life to lose than the first; yet the attention of the public could already allot him less.
What One Carries Away from Rome
Byron compares the guillotine to the English modes of execution and to other capital practices. His relative preference for the velocity of the mechanism constitutes no true measure of the pain endured by the condemned; he speaks from the vantage of the spectator, with his own impressions and the prevailing judgments of his era. He perceives a mechanical efficiency, yet acknowledges the horror of the prelude. The one does not permit him to deny the other.
He departed Rome on the following day. His journey continued, as did his correspondence, with its manuscripts, awaited parcels, and publisher’s grievances. In the letter to Murray, the deaths at the Popolo stand side by side with these ordinary concerns. Such proximity does not render them trivial: it demonstrates how an extreme event enters into an existence destined to outlive it. The witness still had to write, to travel, to attend to his affairs. The men upon the scaffold had no morrow left to entangle with memory.
Posterity remembers the trembling hand upon the opera glass far better than the three names inscribed in the register. Their criminal docket remains incomplete; their deaths found a chronicler. It is for this reason that they must be named once more: Giovanni Francesco Trani, Felice Rocchi, Felice De Simoni. The final question bequeathed by that morning concerns neither the machine nor the fortitude of the condemned. It remains lingering between the fingers of the spectator, when he discovers that he is now able to hold his glass with a firmer hand.