Milan’s Most Infamous Brigands
[HIGHWAYMEN.]
Processo formato contro due famosissimi banditi Giacomo Legorino, e Battista Scorlino, con suoi seguaci, quali furono tutti pubblici assassini di strada; dove narrano gli assassinamenti, ruberie, omicidi, incendi, ed altre iniquità da loro commesse in diverse parti. Come sono stati presi, e giustiziati. Estratto giustamente dal Processo, secondo il loro detto. Nuovamente ristampato. Milan, Pietro Francesco Malatesta, [1744].
12mo, pp. 120; typographic headpieces, woodcut initial; edges a little frayed, occasional light damp-staining, title-leaf attached to A2 slightly obscuring text in inner margin, but a good copy; bound in modern half leather with marbled sides.
Added to your basket:
Processo formato contro due famosissimi banditi Giacomo Legorino, e Battista Scorlino, con suoi seguaci, quali furono tutti pubblici assassini di strada; dove narrano gli assassinamenti, ruberie, omicidi, incendi, ed altre iniquità da loro commesse in diverse parti. Come sono stati presi, e giustiziati. Estratto giustamente dal Processo, secondo il loro detto. Nuovamente ristampato.
Seemingly unrecorded printing of the trials of two sixteenth-century Italian highwaymen and their gang, whose campaign of terror in Milan lasted eight years.
The preface explains how Giacomo Legorino and Battista Scorlino, and their band of eighty miscreants, all of them outlaws from the state of Milan, were ‘killing, quartering, hanging, strangling, and robbing the purses of all those they could find’ (p. 5, trans.). They used the Bosco della Merlata, a wooded area to the northwest of Milan (now the suburbs in the Certosa district), as their hunting ground. Following a deposition by a merchant of Novara about the gang, which claimed that they had murdered more than one hundred people, the bargelli (captains) of Milan and Novara took twenty men into the woods one evening and arrested the ringleaders. The other members of the gang fled but were gradually apprehended and sentenced.
The first two-thirds of the book contains the details of the arrests and court transcripts from Legorino’s trial, followed by a shorter transcript of Scorlino’s trial, including passages indicating that they were threatened with torture and put to the strappado. The last few pages detail the punishments meted out to the various members of the gang, whereby they were dragged through the streets of Milan by horses, after which some were broken on the wheel, some hanged and quartered, or beheaded.
OPAC SBN records one copy of this text, but with the Milan imprint of Donato Ghisolfo dated 1747 (at the Braidense in Milan). OCLC only records an 1801 printing. Such a sensational text was very popular, appearing in print from around the year 1600 onwards, but with very few copies surviving.