So there I was in a city I never thought I’d visit, standing in the doorway of a building I’d never given two thoughts, and I was lost.  Well, I wasn’t lost, per say. I knew where I was, but I didn’t know where my friends were and they probably hadn’t even realized I wasn’t behind them.  The city was Venice and the building was the Doge’s Palace; the entrance to the Bridge of Sighs to be precise. I was visiting Venice for the weekend with two other Americans and a Brazilian I’d become friends with on a semester abroad in England.  It was lunchtime and an hour earlier we’d decided to tour the Doge’s Palace and the connecting prison before we stopped for lunch. We’d left the beautifully decorated rooms of the palace and were passing through a cramped chamber with bare stone walls when I announced that I was going to read the sign.  

The Bridge of Sighs, Ponte Dei Sospiri in Italian, was so named by Lord Byron in the nineteenth century.  This little covered limestone bridge connects the interrogation room at the palace with the prison across the Rio di Palazzo.  It was built in the year 1600 by Antonio Contino and any quick google search will tell you that this is not the only Bridge of Sighs in the world, but perhaps it is the most aptly named.  The sighs were said to be uttered by prisoners as they took their last look outside, and having seen what’s on the other side of that bridge I believe it.  There is a legend that if lovers kiss on a gondola as they pass under this bridge their love will last for eternity. How that legend came to be centered around this, of all bridges, I’ll never know.  But lovers in Venice must not know the whole legend because they kiss under every bridge. Maybe they’re just afraid they’ll miss the right bridge so they do them all just to be safe. The sign at the foot of the Bridge of Sighs was not nearly so informative and maybe if it had been it would have made the whole ordeal to follow a little more worthwhile.

As I was reading, the room filled up with a group of American teenagers and as anyone who has travelled abroad will understand I found this to be quite annoying.  Here I am standing in one of the oldest cities in Europe, about to cross a 400 year old bridge to see where medieval criminals were kept and suddenly I’m having the exact same experience I could achieve by going to the local mall.  Only instead of standing in a crowd trying to claim the one free table in the food court, we’re all trying to squeeze across a bridge that’s older than my country. My nerves and my faith in renaissance engineering were failing.  

I fell into line behind the Americans and we all shuffled across the bridge.  This was made more difficult than it needed to be because not only did every single person need to stop to look out the window, but they each needed to take a picture.  I, for some reason do not have any photographs from the Bridge of Sighs. In fact, I possess no photographic evidence of ever being in the prison at all.  This is strange considering I managed to take approximately 2,000 photographs over the three day trip.  That’s 666 pictures each day for those of you who can’t do that math in your head. You can make of that what you will.  I imagine that the prisoners, at least, would have been able to enjoy their last look outside without having to squeeze in between a frustrated chaperon attempting a head count and a future NBA star who made my five feet and three inches feel like a house elf.

The bridge is, as my grandmother would have called it, a “coming and a going road.”  There are two corridors separated by a thick stone wall with iron barred windows. You enter the prisons through one corridor and you leave them through the other.  The barred windows in between are especially nice for those of us who are entering the prison because we can see people leaving through the other corridor who serve as proof that it is in fact possible to make it out alive.  The windows facing outside aren’t really windows at all.  The bridge has two squares cut into the limestone and there are designs cut out of it.  It’s very geometric.  It would be very pretty if I didn’t have to press my face up to the wall and close one eye just to get a glimpse out of one of the little triangular slots before some fifteen year old shoved his camera out the hole for an artistic shot.  But the view made the bruises worth it. There is just one small bridge between the Bridge of Sighs and the edge of Venice. From the bridge you can see all the way to the Lido, and beyond it, the sea. It’s fitting that the view going into the prison is towards the sea and the view coming out looks into town.

To get out of the bridge at the other side you have to go down this narrow set of stairs and pass under a low arch.  The NBA kid hit his head causing the whole group to explode at the hilarity of the situation, pushing the chaperon into an even further state of distress. We were about to begin the exciting part of the tour.  This was why we wanted to tour the Doge’s Palace in the first place. This was Casanova’s Venice.  

In preparation for the trip my friends and I had watched David Tennant’s miniseries Casanova.  It stays much truer to the original autobiography than Heath Ledger’s 2005 adaptation.  Not to mention, it is three hours of David Tennant running around Venice in a pair of tights.  Upon exiting the bridge, I didn’t yet know that Casanova was incarcerated in the old prison, the Piombi, that is located in the attic of the palace.

Before the new prison was built during the fourteenth century there were two prisons, together called the old prison, that were located in the palace itself.  The Pozzi, which is Italian for “wells”, was in the dungeons and the Piombi, or “leads” was in the attic.  The Doge, the most powerful man in Venice was surrounded by criminals.  I’m surprised he could sleep at night, knowing that traitors were above his head and murderers were below his feet.  The Pozzi had an insect infestation and the Piombi amplified whatever temperature it happened to be outside. I’m not sure which would be worse.  Casanova is one of the few to escape this inescapable prison.  

The story goes that he was incarcerated in the worst of the seven cells that make up the Piombi.  He was given clothing, an armchair, and after a personal appeal from Count Bragadin received warm bedding and a monthly stipend.  For the first five months of his five year sentence he was under solitary confinement but after that he had a series of cell mates.   During a two week period when he was without a cellmate he found a piece of marble and an iron bar on one of his allotted exercise walks and used them to gouge a hole through the ceiling of the room below.  His planning was impeccable. He knew that the room would be empty during the time in which he could make his escape but just three days before his escape he was moved into a different cell. This new cell was bigger, had more light and was considered to be generally better than the one he had left, but his escape plan was ruined.  

Casanova did not give up.  He snuck the iron bar into the new cell by hiding it inside the armchair which he was allowed to bring with him and he passed it to his neighbor and new ally, Father Balbi by concealing it in a Bible.  Considering one of the crimes for which he was in prison was public outrages against the holy religion, this seems fitting. Father Balbi made a hole in the roof and climbed over and made a hole into Casanova’s cell.  They were too high up to be able to jump so they climbed down into an unused room of the palace. There they changed clothes and rested before walking out of the palace, undisturbed, in the early hours of the morning.

Today only those who buy the special guided tour of the palace get to visit the Pozzi and Piombi, so not only was I not going to see Casanova’s actual cell, but I wouldn’t see where David Tennant filmed his miniseries either.  And, as it turned out, I wouldn’t see the prisons with my friends, because when I came out on the other side of the bridge they weren’t waiting for me. From the bridge, you walk into a large room with three or four corridors leading off from it, including one that leads to the other side of the bridge.  There is a velvet rope guiding you from the bridge to the first door on the left. The chaperon ushered her group through the door and I was left standing alone in the chamber. I knew that my friends must have gone through that first door so that’s where I went. I was met with an empty hallway. Small iron barred windows lined the wall to the left and to the right were the cells.  The hallway was eerily quiet. The noisy teenagers had disappeared in the labyrinth of cells. I never saw them again and I’m not sure what happened to them. For all the people crowding together to get across the bridge, the prison itself was rather empty.  

The cells near the front were large with arched ceilings.  I suspect they once housed quite a few prisoners at the same time.    The new prison was completed in 1614 after the time of the inquisition and gruesome torture had passed.  Much like another infamous prison, Paris’s Bastille, during the eighteenth century the prison held only common criminals rather than the romantic victims that history’s imagination has populated it with.  Although you can’t tour the Bastille. It was destroyed in 1789 at the beginning of the French Revolution to set free all the unjustly imprisoned political visionaries it housed. Upon storming the Bastille the Parisians discovered only a handful of prisoners, one of whom was a child molester.  Imagine how they felt when they realized the only people the King had been throwing into prison actually deserved it.

The New Prison of the Doge’s Palace was never stormed and thus is available for millions of tourists to wander through its corridors each year, imagining the horrors that probably didn’t really take place within its walls.  To see the rooms where the real horrors took place you need to go on the special tour, something which I did not know about when I was in Venice. The cells of the new prison were lighter and had better ventilation than the old Pozzi.  They even boasted of crude plumbing and while all of the cells in the new prison were nicer than those of the old, not all of them were as nice as these first cells I saw.  

The velvet rope that led me through the first doorway was no more.  I had to make my own way through the prison from here. Well, there were signposts with bold red arrows pointing me around corners and through doorways but I suspected that they were placed there just to confuse tourists because they seemed to guide people in circles.  I wandered through the corridors of the prison, rarely seeing anyone but often I could hear some sign of the other tourists; laughter, a loud American voice, the soft lilt of some foreign language I was too far away from to recognize. Occasionally I would hear a voice that I thought must be one of my friends and I would rush around the corners, running past cells, through doorways with thick iron padlocks only to find myself, once again in an empty corridor.  

At one point I found myself on the ground floor of an imposing courtyard.  Three stories of white brick loomed above me lined with large iron windows. The prison was designed around this courtyard.    A well sat in the middle. I had my choice of four doors, one of which led back where I had come from and three others which led into unknown depths of the prison.  Any of them could have led to my friends. I hastily chose a doorway and was met with a set of narrow steps. I climbed them, and at the top I found myself in a corridor that I had already been through.  I had no memory of going downstairs to get to the courtyard and this unnerved me, but I continued on.  

At this point I had already made a complete circle without finding my friends.  I went down a step into a corridor that I hadn’t been through before. The cells in this hall were smaller.  The doors were open but I did not go into any of them. Standing outside of them it looked as if a grown man would not have been able to stand up, the ceilings were so low.  They each had a low stone bed in one corner, or at least I think it was a bed. I suppose it could have been a toilet. It was down this corridor that I saw other people for the first time since I had lost the American teenagers.  They were white, but not American. They spoke so quietly to each other that I couldn’t tell what language they were speaking.  

That’s the thing about being a tourist in Europe.  If you’re American people know. American English is naturally louder than most European languages and even when you’re trying to be quiet and fit in Europeans can tell.  It’s possible to tell where a European tourist is from as well but it is a much more complex process. There is something about the way they dress and hold their faces that allows the more practised to recognize them as German, French, English or Italian before they ever speak.  

I never determined where this couple was from although I saw them a few times more after we passed in the corridor that first time.  The first time we were coming from opposite directions and passed each other. I continued down my corridor, wondering if I should be going in the same direction as them before I saw another red arrow pointing me around a corner and followed it.  I turned a few more corners before I saw them again but when I did I came through a doorway and fell in line behind them. I didn’t think too much of it the second time I passed them but when it happened for a third time I began to wonder if we weren’t all lost in here wandering in circles.  It also made me worried about my friends. I had been walking in circles for twenty minutes now (I checked my watch) and hadn’t run into them once.

I am suspicious that the prison was designed this way on purpose.  After the Doge’s most famous prisoner was able to escape from his inescapable prison he most certainly would have wanted to make the new prison as inescapable as possible.  If a prisoner could get out of his cell he’d die trying to get out of the prison. And that’s with all the doors open. The Doge, as I said was the most powerful man in Venice.  The word Doge comes from the Latin, dux for “Duke” but the Doge wasn’t quite a Duke in our sense of the word. He was an elected official, although, like the Pope, he was elected for life.  The Doge was often a trusted elder of the city. According to the chronicler, John the Deacon, the first Doge was elected around 700 AD and replaced the former system of a tribune. The Doge remained the supreme ruler of Venice and its surrounding territories for a thousand years.  

The Doge originally had almost unchecked power but after new laws were passed in 1268 he was under constant surveillance and his power only declined from there.  There was a series of checks that were put into place to stop a monarchy from forming. The Doge was chosen by a committee of forty (although it was changed to forty-one after a tie in 1229) and he was not allowed to put a son into office, nor could he name a successor.  After a Doge’s death his rule was examined and his estate could be fined for any misdemeanors.  

Originally, the Doge’s salary was not large and even in later years he remained active in trading.  Over the years the Doge’s power diminished to the point that the last Doge, Ludovico Manin, was little more than a figurehead.  Manin abdicated in 1797 when Napoleon conquered the city. I imagine he was afraid Napoleon would throw him into one of the cells with low ceilings. This reminded me of the NBA star and I wondered if he hit his head on that ceiling too and if the others laughed again.  That’s assuming that they made it that far. For all I know the lot of them could have gotten locked in one of the cells back at the beginning. But I had been in so many circles around that place I probably would have noticed.

I couldn’t imagine how they had gotten in and out so fast.  I didn’t find the exit until I’d been lost for about thirty minutes.  I climbed the stairs up to the bridge and crossed it, not even registering that I was back on the Bridge of Sighs, and descended into a panelled room.  At the bottom of the stairs I realized that I had made it out without any sign of my friends. At this point I was in need of a restroom and more than a little ready for lunch.  I didn’t know what to do. I could wait or go back in to find my friends. I was no longer lost. I had found the exit. They were the ones who were lost now.

I decided to go back in.  In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best idea but I wasn’t thinking clearly.  I felt as though I had just escaped something much worse than a deserted prison and realized that I had left my friends behind.  I had no choice but to go back. Like I said, I wasn’t thinking clearly, so I crossed over the Bridge of Sighs and plunged back into the maze getting more and more frantic at the absence of my friends.  

Five minutes later I found myself back at the base of the Bridge of Sighs, this time on the side of the rope that we came in.  I did that which is only fun because we aren’t supposed to do it and stepped under the velvet rope. I left the prison for a second time, hoping that my friends would be waiting for me on the other side.  They weren’t. Again, I could stay and wait, or go back in. Since they weren’t waiting for me at the entrance or the exit of the prison I had to assume that they were either waiting somewhere in the middle or still wandering around looking for me.  

I went back in.  I’d been lost for forty minutes now.  I was beginning to feel the symptoms of being lost in the desert; dehydration, dizziness, I was seeing mirages in the corridors.  I decided I never wanted to get lost again. I wouldn’t stop to read another sign ever. I was starting to panic, and in my panic I was thinking irrational thoughts.  I was in a museum. I needed to calm down. Yes, it was a maze, but there wasn’t anything jumping out at me, trying to eat me. I was fine. I was safe. I made one more lap around the prison, trying to keep straight all the doors I went through so that I could get back to the exit.

It didn’t work.  I got turned around almost as soon as I re-entered the prison and after a few minutes I found myself back in the courtyard.  Again, I have no memory of going down the stairs that led to it. It had been about forty five minutes at this point. I was hungry and wanted to get out as soon as I could.  I passed that same couple again and wondered what they were still doing in there. I had made it to the exit twice now. My feet hurt and I decided to go back to the exit and wait there.  

My friends had to get there at some point and as I rounded the corner into the room at the base of the bridge there they were.  All three of them were standing in the middle of the room, their backs towards each other, watching the doors. Where they were the last three times I passed through that room I’ll never know, but I don’t think I was ever more relieved to see them.  As if we were in some dramatic film I spread my arms and ran to them hugging them all in turn. Later, as we sat at a little cafe and debated whether to have tiramisu or gelato for lunch we laughed over the situation and decided that all those years of our teachers making us use the buddy system wasn’t such a bad idea after all.