In 1502 the powers of the Podestà were curtailed by the institution of a Council of Justice, the _Ruota_, which necessitated great changes in the old palace. Room had to be found for the five judges constituting the council, and Baccio d’Agnolo and Giuliano da San Gallo were the architects selected by the Signoria to do the work. They abolished an old staircase which led up into the great hall (now filled with the works of Donatello) where the 300 citizens, forming the council of the Commune, used to meet, and built a new hall of audience looking out on the Piazza S. Apollinare (now Piazza S. Firenze). Fourteen rooms were decorated by the painters Agnolo Donnini and Domenico di Marco, while Bernardino of Settignano sculptured the windows and the doors. The judges’ rooms were on the ground floor, near the prisons and the torture chambers.[68] There were also a few underground cells, and in the courtyard suspected people, whom the Podestà wished to have under his own eye, were kept, but he could not detain them more than three days. A chain near the doorway marked the limit beyond which they were forbidden to go, under pain of severe punishment. In a curious and rare little pamphlet a list is given of the malefactors condemned to death in Florence from 1328 to 1759, and their crimes. Three hundred and three names, many of them of the most illustrious Florentine families, are set down; some were burnt alive, others hung and others decapitated. Such names as Alberti, Strozzi, Ridolfi, Salviati, Vitelli, Soderini, etc., are nearly all followed by the short sentence, “for affairs of state,” or “for speaking ill of the Republic,” or “for unknown reasons.” There are also common robbers and thieves and some heretics, the latter were always condemned to the stake.[69] Massimo d’Azeglio has taken one of the political “delinquents,” Niccolò de Lapo, as the hero of his well-known novel. But far more interesting is a description by Luca della Robbia, great-nephew of the famous Luca, of a night he passed in the Bargello with his friend Pietro Pagolo Boscoli, who was condemned to death. It is so curious a human document that I have translated the greater part.[70]