Stinche Prison

In Dante’s times, the Florentine prison stood where Teatro Verdi is today. Before 1299, incarcerated criminals were put in the tower of the Bargello or in the burelle (the underground cells made within the rubble of the Roman amphitheater), which makes Dante’s description of the funnel of hell as a natural burella (Inf. 34.98) particularly appropriate.

The Stinche were begun in 1299 in order to hold the criminals of Florence but, more importantly, to contain prisoners taken in various skirmishes around Tuscany. It gets its name from the 1304 siege of a castle belonging to the Cavalcanti in Chianti that was called “il castello delle stinche.” So many of the castle’s defenders were captured that the new prison built to hold them took on the name of this single battle. It was built on the site of properties once owned by the Uberti family with materials from those structures.

The entrance to the prison was a single small doorway under a plaque reading “Oportet misereri” (“Be compassionate”) that, after being moved, was for some time still visible at Via Ghibellina 81. A number of famous Italians were incarcerated here because, in addition to being a correctional facility, it was a debtors’ prison as well. In fact, the famous chronicler Giovanni Villani was detained here for investments in failed banks. Benvenuto Cellini, whose statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi is world-famous, was locked up here in 1556 for sodomy. Of the 600 or so White Guelphs exiled together with Dante in 1302, the Stinche waited patiently for all those who returned without permission.

When the Medici returned to Florence in 1512, it was here that they subjected Machiavelli to torture. In the last decade or so, scholars have discovered that a significant number of the inmates used to copy manuscripts for money that would help them get out. However, this could only be done in cells that received a bit of sunlight, for all the others were extremely dark.

In 1833, the Stinche were torn down and replaced by a ring for equestrian events and a space for Florence’s philharmonic. Not long afterwards, it became the great nineteenth-century theater known as Teatro Verdi.