The first body presented no difficulty. The friars took it down from the gallows and laid it upon the bier. The man was about sixty years of age; the sentence had been executed, and nothing remained but to commit him to the earth. They turned then to the second condemned man, who seemed almost a child beside him. That one was still breathing.
The account is related by Cherubino Ghirardacci in his chronicle of Bologna. It begins on the fifteenth day of April 1505 in the cattle market, the customary place of executions. Two men condemned for theft had been hanged there and left suspended until the hour when the confraternity charged with the dead was to collect them. Everything had proceeded in the expected order, until the moment those hands, prepared to bear a corpse, encountered a survivor.
The youth was named Pietro Antonio. He was roughly eighteen years old, had been taken in by an inhabitant of the Borgo San Pietro, and had spent time as a novice at San Giacomo. The chronicle does not detail the larcenies that brought him to the scaffold. It dwells elsewhere: upon this body in which life persisted, upon the astonishment of the onlookers, and upon the explanation the survivor offered for what had befallen him.
He was conveyed to the hospital. A wound marked his neck; the youth’s apparent vigour could not erase the vestiges of the torment. Those who had approached the gibbet to shroud the dead were now escorting a man in need of physic. The change hung upon very few gestures, yet it reversed the destination of the cortege. A litter was no longer journeying toward the grave.
The news spread swiftly. An envoy from the Senate arrived to ascertain the facts and record Pietro Antonio’s narrative. The authority that had ordered the execution was bound to hear how its enforcement had spared the life it was meant to extinguish. The youth replied by invoking Saint Nicholas of Tolentino. Before dying, he said, he had vowed to take the habit if he were delivered from so shameful an end. The saint had come to hold him up by his feet while he hung in the air.
This was the explanation received throughout the city as a miracle. The testimony shifted his survival from the realm of accident into that of celestial intervention. Men no longer asked merely why the cord had left him breathing; they wished to know why the saint had singled out this youth. In its very phrasing, the question bore a promise: he who had been saved could not continue as he had lived before.
Visitors flocked to the hospital. They desired to behold the survivor and hear him recount what their own eyes had not witnessed. The wound confirmed the torment; the tale accounted for the deliverance. Pietro Antonio became simultaneously the witness, the proof, and the beneficiary of the event. His body laid bare the contradiction that faith claimed to resolve: human justice had willed his death, but a higher will had rendered it impossible.
The old man lowered before him had, in the meantime, vanished into his grave. The chronicle recalls neither his name nor his final words. Yet his initial presence suffices to lend the narrative its harshness: two men were led together to the same gibbet, and only one received this second life. For the friars who had gathered them up, the day had contained an interment and a conveyance to the hospital. The city would remember chiefly the latter.
On the twenty-seventh of April, his recovery took the form of a solemn procession. The religious of San Giacomo came to fetch Pietro Antonio, accompanied by the confraternity that had found him living. They led him back toward their church through streets where the populace could throng to catch sight of him. He was clad in a white garment beneath a black cloak, and wore about his neck the very rope of his execution.
The object had changed in meaning without changing in substance. Designed to demonstrate the power of the sentence, it was now borne as the sign of its arrest. The youth had no need to describe the gallows to every passerby: he wore its bond upon his person. His progress thus united what the city might have parted too hastily: yesterday’s condemned thief and the protege of the saint.
Before the image of the Virgin, he fell to his knees. The crowd pressed close. According to Ghirardacci, women tore shreds from his garments in their fervor, and it became necessary to cover him with another cloak so that he might go on his way. The devotion that enveloped him in reverence already threatened to strip him bare. Each soul sought to carry away a fragment of what she believed she had touched; the living man was made nearly a relic before his death.
At San Giacomo, the rope was laid upon the altar. The prior gave him the habit and a new name: Brother Nicholas, in honor of the saint to whom he ascribed his salvation. The singing sealed the passage. Pietro Antonio, condemned thief, entered religious life under the gaze of a city that expected of him a daily confirmation of the miracle.
He offered a painted portrait of himself, accompanied by the cord. The chronicle even records the expenses for the painting and the procession, preserved in an account book of the convent. This bookkeeping detail does not chill the narrative; on the contrary, it reveals how the event established itself in enduring memory. A painter had been paid, ceremonies organized, and an image fixed for others to contemplate long after the tumult of the hospital had faded.
For four years, Ghirardacci continues, Nicholas led a devout life and ministered to the sick. The vow appeared to have been kept. The man once carried toward medical care now rendered that service in turn to those whose lives depended upon others. Such a sequel would have sufficed to conclude an exemplary tale: sin, peril, salvation, conversion.
Yet the chronicler does not halt there. He relates that Pietro Antonio cast off the habit, returned to thievery, was captured anew, and was hanged a second time—this time from the long balcony of the Palazzo del Podestà. The second rope found no succoring hands of the saint to serve as a counterweight in his story. He died, and the chronicle construed this end as the consequence of grace spurned.
Thus the same narrative could sustain two contrary lessons. It demonstrated mercy interrupting punishment, and subsequently a relapse confirming retribution. Between the two lay four years spent tending the sick—an existence that was neither a mere waiting for the gallows nor the simple illustration of a sermon.
The painting and the rope had been deposited together. The image preserved the rescued youth; the object recalled what he had escaped. For anyone acquainted with the end related by Ghirardacci, it became impossible to look upon the one without remembering the other. The city had marched in procession behind a miracle. Pietro Antonio, for his part, had been obliged to go on living after the procession had dispersed.