Who Let the Colonel Escape? A Prison Break in Early Modern Bologna
The night of August 25th 1647, a prisoner escaped from the cells of the “Tribunale del Torrone”, the secular court of Bologna.1 Like many similar courts, the Torrone – literally, the “Big Tower” – served both as tribunal and as a prison, where the accused were held waiting for their trial.2 Prison breaks were quite rare in the Torrone, at least to our knowledge. But, when they did happen, as this case shows, they generated quite a bit of chaos.

© Laura Schiavone.
We first hear about the prison break from the head guard, a man named Giovan Battista Tigri. In the middle of the night, he appeared in front of the Auditore del Torrone, the court’s judge and chief. After explaining everything he had done that night in painful details, he finally got to the point: Colonel Tranquillo Varricelli, a prisoner, was nowhere to be found.3 His room was empty except for a lit candle and both the two doors leading from the cellar to the courtyard were open.
The Auditore immediately started an investigation. He examined the rooms, sent “policemen” (bargelli) around the city to look for information, and interrogated all the prison guards who were working that night. We can imagine that he had a twofold goal: to find and capture colonel Varricelli, and to understand who was responsible for the escape. In the end, the court never captured Varricelli, who probably fled the city and state.
The second goal – identifying who was responsible for Varricelli’s escape – took up most of the investigation. Since the escaped man was not found, the events were entirely reconstructed by prison guards who did not see, or hear, anything during the escape. They tried to recall details and piece them together to figure out what had happened. Moreover, they tried to attribute blame: who was responsible for Varricelli’s escape? Was it somebody’s fault, or everybody’s negligence and distraction?
Before looking at each guard’s testimony, let us reconstruct a timeline of the events. Four prison guards were involved. The first was Giovan Battista Tigri, the head guardian of the prison. He had two subordinates: Angelo Amadei and Antonio Maria Piazza, who also worked as servant and scribe. Finally, Agostino Grandi was the keeper of the prison keys.
August 25th 1647 was a Sunday, which meant that Grandi had a “night off.” As usual, he went home to sleep with his wife, after giving the keys to Piazza. Around six in the night, Tigri called Piazza and Amadei and asked them to patrol the prison, but Piazza did not answer. While looking for him, Tigri and Amadei found out that colonel Varricelli had escaped. Tigri went to inform the Auditore, who ran to the prisons and inspected the rooms. He interrogated Angelo Amadei and Agostino Grandi. Moreover, he found out from a city guard that colonel Varricelli had rejoined with his wife and servant, and they probably left the city.
From a first inspection of the prison rooms, it became evident that Varricelli’s “prison break” was orchestrated, and that he had obtained help from the inside. First, the Auditore and the notary visited Grandi’s room. They found a wooden box where he used to keep the keys to the cellar. The box was locked, but they had no certainty that the keys were inside. They then descended three flights of stairs and got to the cellar. At the end of the last flight of stairs, they found an extinguished candle. In front of it, the two doors leading to the courtyard were open. The first door had two locks and the second only had one. In this last one, they found a set of three keys. After testing them, the notary confirmed that they corresponded to the three locks. Moreover, Tigri reported that only one copy of the keys existed, and that it was normally held by Agostino Grandi in his wooden box.

© bibliotecasalaborsa.it
But Agostino Grandi was not there that night, and he had given his keys to Antonio Maria Piazza. Considering that Piazza was also nowhere to be found, everyone soon concluded that he had helped colonel Varricelli escape. But that did not end the case. The question became: how could no-one see or hear Piazza helping a prisoner escape? Each one of the three involved prison guards described in detail what they did that night. Unsurprisingly, we find out that none of them was paying attention.
First, Giovan Battista Tigri, the chief guardian, was sleeping. That evening he had first dined with his wife outside the prison. He then went back to the cells and found out that Agostino Grandi had already gone home. Allegedly, he took the keys from Piazza and asked him to make his bed. Then he simply fell asleep. At one hour in the night, he got up to urinate and met Piazza, who was walking around the cellars with a candle in his hand. He exclaimed: “what are you doing, Piazza!”4 to which Piazza simply replied that he was using the services too. Tigri went back to bed and fell asleep again. The next time he awoke, he found out that Piazza and Varricelli were gone.
Angelo Amadei was also sleeping. The fact that he noticed nothing is even more surprising, considering that he slept side-by-side with Piazza in the corridor. At three hours in the night, he went to bed. Piazza did not follow him: he took a candle and declared “that he wanted to chase the cats who lived in the kitchen.” He opened the pantry’s door, which was connected to the cellar and normally locked, and left it open. Unbothered by Piazza’s night-time activity, Amadei fell asleep, and claimed that he heard nothing until Tigri woke him up for his regular patrol. Only at that point did he notice that Piazza’s bed was empty and that Varricelli had escaped. Interrogated whether he had seen Piazza again that night, Amadei admitted: “No sir, after I saw Antonio Maria chasing cats (…) I never saw him again in the prison, because I fell asleep.”5
Finally, Agostino Grandi, the keeper of keys, was at home with his wife. At first, he had no clue of what had happened and why he was interrogated. He explained that normally he kept the keys to the cells on himself and the keys opening the gates (from the cellar to the courtyard) in his wooden box. The box was in turn locked with another key, which he kept in his purse. The only exception was when he went home: In that case, he was supposed to give all keys to Tigri. That night, however, Tigri was dining with his wife when Grandi went away, thus Grandi simply handed them to Piazza, who was supposed to give them to Tigri. We can presume, although we do not know for sure, that he only pretended to do so, and that he kept the three keys opening the courtyard’s doors.
To answer the initial question: The prison break was due to both somebody’s fault and everybody’s negligence. Out of the three prison guards who were present that night, two were sleeping, while the third was actively helping a prisoner escape. Piazza also took advantage of the absence of Grandi and of the fact that he had trusted him with the keys. But this only raises more questions: How come that nobody noticed that Piazza’s behaviour was suspicious, or at least a bit weird? Was it common for prison guards to sleep throughout the entire night?
The role and duty of guardians was to be vigilant, both during the day and during the night. This did not mean that they could not sleep or exit the prison. Some strategies must have been at play to grant vigilance and sleep. We do not know about the precise strategies used in the prisons in the Torrone, but we can look at other institution for comparison.
The Hospital of Exposed Infants of Bologna also needed guardians that constantly monitored the doors. Their task was opposite yet similar to that of prison guards: Whereas prison guards had to make sure that no-one got out, the guardians of the hospital had to make sure that abandoned children got in, and fast, so that they did not suffer in the cold.

The guardians of the hospital were two, one male and one female. They had to observe some strict rules: they could go outside the hospitals, but only one at a time, so that the other remained to monitor the door. They could sleep, but only next to the door “since they have to stay vigilant in receiving exposed newborns.”6 Even if they were asleep, they could hear when someone rung the bell or knocked at the door to abandon a child. This way, vigilance and sleep became compatible.
Something similar must have been at play for the prisons of the Torrone. However, it left no explicit trace. As it often happens with sources like trial records, we only notice the existence of a system in the moment it stops working. Smooth and unproblematic nights in the Torrone prisons left no trace. A night in which a prisoner escaped, on the other hand, leaves a mark and becomes a precious source to reconstruct how things should have worked.
A sum of factors could have caused the system to stop working. The first is misplaced trust: giving the keys to Piazza and leaving him as the only guard in charge, while the others were sleeping. The second is inattention to details: Piazza left a door to the cellar open, and behaved in an unusual way, yet nobody really marked this as relevant. The third is probably the absence of the only guard who really knew and had control over the circulation of the prison keys. Other possible factors could have to do with the prison’s structure and the disposition in which guards slept – nobody slept next to the gates.
We cannot say which ones of these factors were determinant in this case. The trial record is interrupted as soon as the Auditore found out that Varricelli had fled the state, so we do not know who was punished and how. Finding other instances of “prison breaks” could help, but we must also keep in mind that every case presents different constellations of actors and different dynamics. We can use each one to shed light on some elements, but we cannot expect to obtain a comprehensive picture. In the end, we must be satisfied with remaining uncertain about who was really responsible for the colonel’s escape.
Cite this article as: Laura Schiavone, Who let the Colonel escape? A prison break in Early Modern Bologna, in Vigilanzkulturen, 02.05.2025, https://vigilanz.hypotheses.org/?p=11779
Mehr zur Autorin Laura Schiavone
- The source relative to this case can be found at: Archivio di Stato di Bologna (ASBo), Tribunale del Torrone, Registri di Atti Processuali, 6450 “Pro Curia Turroni Contra Tranquillum de Varricellis” (1647). All translations from the original (Italian) to English are mine. Original versions are provided in the notes. ↩︎
- On the functioning of the Tribunale del Torrone, see for instance: Giancarlo Angelozzi e Cesarina Casanova, La giustizia criminale in una città di antico regime : il tribunale del Torrone di Bologna, secc. XVI-XVII (Bologna: CLUEB, 2008); Colin Rose, «The Tower of Justice», in A Renaissance of Violence. Homicide in Early Modern Italy, a c. di Colin Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 42–78; Sanne Muurling, Everyday Crime, Criminal Justice and Gender in Early Modern Bologna (Leiden: Brill, 2021). ↩︎
- Unfortunately, the trial records does not provide information about Tranquillo Varricelli’s accusations and why he was held prisoner. ↩︎
- “Cosa fai, Piazza!” ↩︎
- “Sig. no che da che io veddi d. Antonio Maria dar la caccia ai gatti (…) non lo veddi più per le preggioni per che mi addormentai” ↩︎
- Archivio Storico Provinciale di Bologna (ASPBo), Esposti, Miscellanea, b.2, fasc. 3: “dovendo stare vigilanti in ricevere le creature esposte.” ↩︎
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
lauraschiavone (3. Juni 2025). Who Let the Colonel Escape? A Prison Break in Early Modern Bologna. Vigilanzkulturen. Abgerufen am 14. Januar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/141p4
