The latest account of the old Inquisition is from an eye witness the Father Gavazzi who made some noise in his time as a fugitive priest and who visited the place in 1852. He wrote the following description: “I found no instruments of torture, for they were destroyed at the first French invasion and because such instruments were not used afterwards by the modern Inquisition. I did, however, find in one of the prisons of the second court a furnace and the remains of a woman’s dress. I shall never be able to believe that that furnace was used for the living, it not being in such a place, or of such a kind as to be of service to them. Everything, on the contrary, combines to persuade me that it was made use of for horrible deaths and to consume the remains of victims of inquisitorial executions. Another object of horror I found between the great hall of judgment and the luxurious apartment of the chief jailer, or _primo custode_, the Dominican friar who presided over this diabolical establishment. This was a deep trap, a shaft opening into the vaults under the Inquisition. As soon as the so-called criminal had confessed his offence, the second keeper, who is always a Dominican friar, sent him to the father commissary to receive a relaxation of his punishment. In the hope of pardon, the confessed culprit would go toward the apartment of the Holy Inquisitor; but in the act of setting foot at its entrance, the trap opened and the world of the living heard no more of him. I examined some of the earth found in the pit below this trap; it was a compost of common earth, rottenness, ashes and human hair, fetid to the smell and horrible to the sight and thought of the beholder.