The Ancient Jails

The Carceri are made up of three rooms, perhaps dating back to the thirteenth century, intercommunicating, carved into the rock that in some places can still be seen from the floor, characterized by the stone with which the same walls and sturdy vaults are built. In the 1970s, they were recovered from the abandonment in which they had been lying for over a century. It was on that occasion that they put the tiles on a floor that was previously bare ground (after which they hosted the Municipal Historical Archive until the late 80s). While the function from which they take the name for the papal age is certain, from 1540 to 1860, it is only possible to hypothesise an identical function in the previous three centuries of the communal age, when the Statutes and Reforms of Fossato speak of people to be led in fortiam comunis or from guards in palatio, or in case, to be put in cippis comunis. It is the Reformation of 1425 that explicitly speaks of the possibility of imprisoning aliquem habitatorem of Fossato. The fact that pecuniary penalties prevail in the Middle Ages, as the two-thirteenth-century Statutes of Fossato testify, while in the papal age corporal penalties prevail, means that in the first case there were times of prosperity and in the second case times of crisis.