The secrets of Venice

To say that Venice is beautiful is something quite obvious. Its beauty is combination of different beauties: landscape, architectural, artistic created in decades of history and fueled by love, rivalry and even the resentment of many foreigners. More than just a city, Venice has been a phenomenon: the strategic position, the nautical skills, the commercial skills have transformed a small group of islands, in the Venetian lagoon, into one of the most prosperous, rich and modern republics of the West: the Serenissima Republic of Venice, a state city, a Maritime Republic with a modern legal system that is very avant-garde for the time.
But all that glitters is not gold, hundreds of crimes with the death penalty are described in the State Archives of Venice. The penalties inflicted, for those stained with particularly serious crimes, were very cruel and ritualized.

Crimes, torture and the death penalty

The death penalty in the lagoon was born with Venice and set with her. Over the centuries there is a variation in the ways and times of executions, but the constant has always been that of inflicting torture and creating routes in the historic center of Venice that begin and end in Piazza San Marco. The path assumed the meaning of a ritual, which served as a warning and, precisely in order to make it all "spectacular", the government of the Serenissima Republic of Venice had decided to include steps marked by symbols from the Holy Land.
Until October 14th in Venice at Palazzo Zaguri, in Campo San Maurizio, Venice Secrets through a journey of five floors divided into 36 rooms tells mysteries, secrets, testimonies and exposes terrifying machines of death and torture used as an instrument of justice

Walking around Venice will no longer be the same

The exhibition circuit is structured in four sections: inquests and torture, prisons and prisoners, capital executions, the Inquisition between myths and legends.
The thirty-six showcasing rooms will offer the opportunity of viewing hundreds of instruments for torture and death, dozens of paintings, period garments and ancient books, all displayed to the world for the very first time and emerging from libraries, museums and private collections, from Italy and abroad.