While earlier prisons in Florence were initially privately operated, Le Stinche was communally organized and funded from its inception. It served as a political prison, a debtor’s prison, and a judicial prison. The central prison of Le Stinche, an Italian word for “shinbone” replaced, in the fourteenth century, a variety of decentralized prison institutions across the city, and was initially associated with the dominance of the Guelf faction of papal supporters over the Ghibelline imperialists in Florence.
One of the Seven Acts of Corporal Mercy, dictated by Jesus and followed by Catholics, is to visit the imprisoned or to ransom the captive prison charity allowed Renaissance Italians to do both.
As in other steps of the judicial process, the charitable participation of the public was a critical aspect of justice: as we say, there but for the grace of God go I, and Renaissance Florentines took such dicta to heart. But punitive incarceration for defined terms was also an element of the judicial process, and some crimes were punished with jail time, as today.Įrcole notes an important element of the prison in Florence, which is that the costs of feeding and maintaining a prisoner were borne by the prisoner, his family, his friends, and those Florentines who took pity on the imprisoned and donated food, clothing and money. One of the myths about pre-modern prisons is that they were places of temporary confinement in between judicial stages, or for debtors until they paid their dues, rather than places of punishment.
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