Beatrice Cenci

The story

There are stories of Rome that are not ghosts. They are wounds. And this is one of them.

Beatrice Cenci was born in Rome around 1577, into a noble family, in an age when name and money counted for more than the law. Her father was called Francesco. In the documents of those years, and in the accounts that have come down to us, he is described with two words: overbearing patriarch. A man who ruled his house by fear.

Beatrice grew up under that rule. She suffered years of violence, tradition says, of the kind that is not told to children. She was young. She was alone. And at a certain point she decided she could bear it no longer.

She did what today seems to us the only right thing. She reported it. She asked for help.

Nobody answered.

In Rome, the sources say, everyone knew what kind of man Francesco Cenci was. The neighbours knew, the powerful knew, the authorities knew. But nobody intervened. Beatrice's requests fell into silence.

Then, according to the trial records, she and some people close to the family made a terrible decision. They were her stepmother Lucrezia, her brothers Giacomo and Bernardo, the steward of the Rocca, Olimpio Calvetti, a servant, Marzio da Fioran, and Beatrice herself. They decided to kill Francesco.

I do not write how. It is not needed. It is enough to know that the father died, and that they tried to make his death look like an accident.

But they did not succeed. On 9 September 1598, the body of Francesco Cenci was found in a garden, at the foot of the Rocca of Petrella Salto, near Rieti, where the family lived far from Rome. The wounds, in the doctors' view, were not those of a fall. Investigations began.

The investigators arrested the suspects. They questioned them. And, as was done at the time, they used torture. In the end they obtained what they wanted: full confessions.

The judges condemned Beatrice, Lucrezia and Giacomo to death. For Bernardo, who was eighteen, the sentence was changed to life in the galleys.

It is said that in Rome many people, during the days of the trial, sided with Beatrice. That they thought of what she had endured, and how justice had left her alone. But the sources I read do not say this with certainty, and so I leave it as a rumour.

At dawn on 11 September 1599, Beatrice was executed. She was about twenty-two years old.

She was buried in an unnamed tomb, in the cemetery of the church of San Pietro in Montorio, as was done with the condemned. But not even that simple rest was left to her. In 1798, during the French occupation of Rome, soldiers destroyed many gravestones in that cemetery, hers included. Her remains were scattered. They were never found.

Her story, however, did not disappear. Quite the opposite.

For more than two centuries, Beatrice's story travelled across Europe. Painters like Guido Reni, poets and novelists like Shelley and Stendhal drew inspiration from her. Shelley, in 1819, dedicated a tragedy to her. For many, in that girl there was the injustice of a world that had not known how to protect her.

And in Rome, where every stone has its story, the legend was born.

It is told that every year, on the night between 10 and 11 September, someone sees her. She walks back and forth on the bridge that leads to Castel Sant'Angelo, among the statues of the angels, says the card. And she holds her head in her hands.

It is a ghost scene. But those who tell it often do not do so to frighten.

They do it to remember. That a girl, four hundred years ago, asked for help, and nobody listened.

And that it would be good, today, to listen better.