“Suddenly the sound of a trumpet was heard and the crowd rushed in the direction whence it proceeded. It was the public crier, who announced that their time of punishment in the pillory being over, the three criminals would further be subjected to the lash. Immediately two inferior officials mounted the platform; laid the culprits face downwards on the bench and bound them to it, while the executioner administered twenty-five strokes to the backs of the two first with a scourge made of strips of skin. The victims screamed and writhed under the lash, but their shrieks were drowned in the applause of the crowd, who gloated over their sufferings in a truly horrible manner. The third, a young man, pale and emaciated-looking, was to receive fifty stripes, the maximum number allowed by law, and which was usually given only to thieves.” “Again, in 1711, a man was beheaded in the Campo di Fiore and his body burned for having passed himself off as a priest. On June 26, 1717, Antonio Castellani, aged twenty-two, shared the same fate for having stolen a cloak, which he sold again for about a shilling; and in 1734, an old man of seventy-two, Marcantonio Troiani, was arrested for cattle-stealing. This latter was a noted thief but he hoped, by spontaneously confessing his guilt, to escape with perhaps a few years of the galleys. Instead of this, he was condemned to death. Furious at his sentence, he determined that he would not allow himself to be converted. He was, therefore, morally tortured by the members of the confraternity to begin with; and when this did not succeed, they applied, first, liquid wax, and then plates of red-hot iron to his person. This torture also failed, and then the executioner, after brutally ill-using him, put a halter round his neck and made as though he would strangle him; and the terrified old man, scarcely knowing whether his tormentor were man or devil, consented to recommend his soul to the tender mercies of Christ.”