Free audio walk in Rome

Beatrice Cenci and the Rome of the executioner

6 stops
Free

Starts at Via Monte dei Cenci 13

De Engelenburcht aan de Tiber, gezien vanaf de brug

About this walk

This walk of about two kilometres follows the case of Beatrice Cenci, the young woman executed in 1599 together with her family for the murder of her father. You begin at the palace where the family lived, pass the market square where sentences were carried out and Giordano Bruno was burned, walk the street that took the condemned to the scaffold, and end at the fortress that served for centuries as a prison.

The route deals with abuse within a family and with a public execution, and keeps to the facts without dwelling on them. The emphasis lies on the trial and on how justice worked in the papal city.

The stops

Walk them in order; each story plays when you reach its pin.

Map of the 6 stops on Beatrice Cenci and the Rome of the executioner

1
Stop 1
The house on the hill
The home of an immensely wealthy family, almost all of whom ended up on the scaffold in 1599.
2
Stop 2
The square of the burnings
The market where sentences were also carried out, with the statue of Giordano Bruno standing at its centre.
Read the story
3
Stop 3
The Corte Savella Prison
The trial, torture as a tool of evidence, and a pope who refused to show mercy.
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4
Stop 4
The Pope's Straight Street
The first straight street of modern Rome, meant to be the city's administrative heart and used as the route to the scaffold.
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5
Stop 5
The morning of 11 September
The morning of the execution, the crowd in the square, and the story that took on a life of its own in the years that followed.
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6
Stop 6
The castle and the executioner
The castle as a prison, and Mastro Titta, the executioner whose crossing of the bridge became a Roman expression.
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