On the 1st of May three of these prisoners were hung at the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico, and then thrown thence into the square, where they were literally torn to pieces, and the shocking fragments left exposed till sunset, when they were collected and buried. The brutalising effects of such spectacles on the entire mass of the population is sufficiently indicated by the fact, that contemporary public opinion considered the Countess to have used much and unusual moderation in her dealings with such of the conspirators as fell into her hands. On the evening of that day an ominous decree was posted in all quarters of the city, requiring that one able-bodied man from every family in Forlì should attend on the morrow with pickaxe and crowbar in front of the vast and magnificent palace of the Orsi. At daybreak on the 2nd of May a great crowd, armed as had been ordered, were assembled. At the same hour the venerable-looking head of the great Orsi clan was seen coming forth from his prison on the piazza, bare-headed, with his long silver locks glancing in the sunshine of that bright May morning, with hands bound behind his back, and led by the hangman, holding the end of a halter passed round the old man's neck. Thus led into the midst of the crowd of his fellow-citizens, he was placed in front of his ancestral home. And then the work of demolition was commenced. "Have you well marked the spectacle, O Orso!" said the hangman to his prisoner, when the work was done; and then led him by the halter back to the piazza. A cruel death awaited him there; but that which he had already endured, was probably the bitterest part of his punishment to the old patrician. That razing of the family mansion was infinitely more to a medieval Italian noble, than the mere destruction of so much property; and carried with it a bitterness of misery hardly appreciable to our less clannish feelings, and less localised attachments. The old Italian noble would have seen an equal amount of property destroyed at his villa in the country, or at a residence in a foreign city, had he possessed such, with comparative indifference. But the turreted family "palazzo" in his native city, his fortress in time of civil broil, the patriarchal home of several branches and generations of his race, the manifestation and evidence of the rank and importance of his clan, was more in his eyes than mere stone and timber. His strongest passion, his family pride, saw in the old ancestral walls the corporeal presentment of the family name. And the levelling of the massive building with the soil, was the extremest ignominy an enemy could inflict, and was felt by the doomed race as a symbol of the extinction of their name and stock for ever.