A man of humble origins that lived in Venice. He apparently found a precious dagger near Ponte dei Assassini. He showed it to his fiancée Anna, a maidservant in Ca’ Barbo, with the intent to sell the valuable object to marry her. However, she asked him to immediately bring the dagger back to where it was found. Piero obeyed, but when he reached Calle de la Verona, he found a dead man lying on the ground. He was Alvise Guoro, the young cousin of Clemenza Barbo, wife of Lorenzo Barbo, Anna’s employer. At that point, a woman and a carpenter living nearby saw Piero and urged him to run away. He hesitated, but a moment later a group of guards arrived and took him to prison. After being tortured in the camera del tormento, he confessed to a crime he did not commit and was condemned by the Quarantia to be beheaded and quartered between the columns of Piazza San Marco, and his quartered body exposed to the four main entrances of Venice. A servant of the Barbo family tried unsuccessfully to stop the execution, having proofs that the murderer was in fact Lorenzo Barbo, who had killed the cousin of his wife for jealousy. The news that Piero was unjustly executed caused uproar. A few days later, the Consiglio dei Dieci rehabilitated him, mandating that every time a trial could result in a death sentence, the clerk of court should remind the episode to the judges, a habit that was followed for three centuries afterward. Although the story of Piero Fasiol have uncertain historical roots, it inspired many plays and novels through the centuries.
Copyright © Alastair Fontana 2013
(Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of a Young Man, 1897)
Copyright © Alastair Fontana 2013
(Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of a Young Man, 1897)
