The morning of 11 September

The scaffold stood on the square at the end of this bridge, and on the morning of 11 September 1599 the whole city had gathered here.

Lucrezia went first. Beatrice followed, twenty-two years old. Her brother Giacomo faced a harsher punishment, because he was seen as a man and as the instigator. The youngest brother, Bernardo, was still a child, and he was forced to watch before being sent off to the galleys.

The interest was enormous. It was hot, and people died in the crowd from the heat and the crush. Among the onlookers, as the story goes, was the young Caravaggio, and soon after, beheadings began to appear in his work that he had never painted before.

The bodies were taken to two churches. Beatrice lies in San Pietro in Montorio on the Gianicolo hill, beneath the floor, without a stone bearing her name. That anonymity was part of the sentence.

The story stayed alive. Shelley wrote a play about it, Stendhal and Dickens came to see the place, and a portrait that was long said to be hers hung for years in the Palazzo Barberini, though art historians now think it shows someone else.

And then there's the legend: that every year, on the night of 11 September, Beatrice walks across this bridge with her head in her hands.

We cross the bridge toward the round fortress and head for the entrance on the river side.