Marino Faliero, the Beheaded Doge

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We mentioned
this in a listener Male segment not long ago, but
we did finally take that trip to Italy that we

(00:22):
originally planned all the way back in and then had
to postpone repeatedly because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. So
the trip was to Rome and parts of Tuscany, and
then I stayed a few extra days to go to Venice,
and of course through all of that saw all kinds
of things that could become podcast episodes. One of them

(00:44):
was in the Doges Palace in Venice, which was both
the Doges residents and the seat of the Venetian government
until the fall of the Venetian Republic in seventeen. So
in that palace, the chamber of the Great Council is
the largest chamber. It's built to a comminate a council
that sometimes had more than two thousand members, and it's

(01:04):
just a truly striking room. A lot of the rooms
in the palace are apart from its size, which is
very large. The walls and the ceiling are adorned with
artwork depicting scenes from Venetian history and allegorical representations of
the republic. And then all around the room, in a
row just below the ceiling our portraits of seventies six doges.

(01:26):
Each of them has a banner noting what his major
accomplishments were, except for one, the fifty five Doge of Venice,
is instead represented by a black banner that says, in Latin,
here is the place of Marino Faliero, decapitated for his crimes.
So the audio tour that we were listening to said

(01:48):
he had been executed for treason, So of course I
had to find out what's that story there. And we're
gonna start with just a bit of background about the
Republic of Venice and how the office of doe evolved.
Although people had settled already on various islands in the
northwestern Adriatic Sea, what we know as Venice today started

(02:09):
to coalesce around the end of the seventh century. Early on,
the ruler of Venice was known by the Latin title
Dukes that's d u x, which eventually morphed into doge,
which was used in Venice and some other parts of
what's now Italy. Yeah, and in Italian that final e
is pronounced a little bit more, but in English we
say it doze. Sometimes does is translated as duke. That

(02:33):
also traces back to that same Latin origin. But in
most places duke is a hereditary title, and although there
were some attempts early on to make the office of
doze a hereditary one, in the end in Venice it
explicitly was not. Historically, dukes have also been sovereign rulers
of duchies, which was also a different set up from

(02:55):
the role of doge. The first doj of Venice is
generally recognized as Paolo Luccio, anafesto, who was elected in
the year six nineties seven. But at that point Venice
was not a sovereign nation. It was part of the
Eastern Roman Empire under the command of the exarch of Ravenna.
Under the Eastern Roman Empire, the office of doze started

(03:17):
out primarily as a military role. Even as the role
of doze expanded out beyond something involving mostly military stuff,
there was still some power wrangling going on between Venice
and the Byzantine Empire. So, for example, in the eighth
century Emperor Leo the Third banned the use of religious
icons and ordered their destruction. This policy of iconoclasm was

(03:41):
deeply controversial, and it was reviled by many of the
Venetian clergy. So the clergy elected their own doge, or
so a patdo Sometimes he's described as the first true
doge of Venice because he was the first one to
be elected without the Byzantine Empire's involvement. But Leo did
not recognize Venice as independent. After this election, he offered

(04:06):
the dose the Byzantine title of Hippatos, which he accepted,
so that made him at least nominally part of the
imperial courts, not just does on his own off by himself.
These sorts of power struggles continued until the late ninth century,
when Venice established itself as an independent republic governed by

(04:28):
a popularly elected doge, although its relationship with the Byzantine
Empire was often fraught. From there, Venice quickly grew into
a major maritime power. In many ways, it had to
be almost every basic necessity had to be brought in
from elsewhere. Venice used its maritime power to conquer additional

(04:49):
territory and as leverage when negotiating trading agreements with other
nations and empires. By the eleventh century, Venice had become
a major trading center, moving huge amounts of things like
luxury goods, spices, wood, and precious metals. Although at some
points slavery and slave trading were banned under Venetian law,

(05:11):
Venice also participated in slave trafficking and there were enslaved
workers within the Venetian Republic. During this approximate period, the
office of Doge had become incredibly powerful, but in the
late twelfth century, the Venetian government started formally trying to
limit that power. The process of electing a new doge

(05:34):
shifted from a popular vote to a nomination process that
was carried out only among the ducal counselors. The government
also started delegating the doges decision making power to other
government bodies. So there was the Great Council, which had
sometimes as many as two thousand members. The doge effectively
reported to the Minor Council, which was made up of

(05:57):
six ducal counselors. They kind of oversaw all of his asians.
Then there was the Council of forty or Quarantina, which
acted as a supreme court. In addition to limiting the
DOJ's power, these changes also put more power into the
hands of the Venetian nobility. By this point, Venice was
extremely wealthy, powerful, and renowned for its shipbuilding, both for

(06:20):
the quality of the ships themselves and the speed at
which they could be built. In the twelfth century, Venice
built a fleet for the Fourth Crusade, which is of
course its own entire story, but briefly. Pope Innocent the
Third called for this crusade to try to bring Jerusalem
under Christian control. French and German forces were supposed to

(06:40):
meet in Venice, bringing the money with them to pay
for the fleet, but many departed from their own ports instead.
Doge Enrico Dandolo persuaded the Crusaders to settle this debt
by attacking the Catholic city of Zara, which had been
part of the Republic before rebelling in eleven eighties six.
The Fourth Crusade then went on to capture the city

(07:01):
of Constantinople, and Thomas Morrissini of Venice became the first
Latin patriarch of Constantinople. Although this really expanded Venice's power
and wealth, and influence. Venice itself was becoming increasingly divided.
Political power had become really concentrated into a small group
of noble families, and most of those families had a

(07:23):
long history in Venice. But Venice had also become home
to an increasingly wealthy class of merchants and artisans, and
many of them were newcomers to the area. They were
pushing for their own representation and involvement in the government.
This class became known as the Popolo, and the Venetian
government work to try to curtail their influence. So they

(07:45):
did things like kept the trade guilds divided from one
another so that the more wealthy trades people couldn't easily
come together and push for change. And as the popolo
tried to find a way into the Venetian government, the
nobility locked down its power membership, and the Major Council
eventually became hereditary by law limiting members to men from

(08:06):
fewer than two hundred families. Just to be clear here,
even though popolo means people, this was still a pretty
specific and limited group of Venetian people who were trying
to get a place in the government. This was about
skilled trades people and artisans and merchants and other people
who had amassed some wealth, so they were not really

(08:27):
including poor people or laborers or enslaved people. In all
of this. Meanwhile, the office of doge was becoming less
and less powerful. Enrico Dandolo had been the first to
swear a promission a dugalle, or oath of office that
formally and publicly outlined his power. A committee revised that

(08:47):
oath for each incoming doge, sometimes tailoring it in response
to actions taken by the previous doge. In the face
of all this, the early fourteenth century saw a way
of popular uprisings and conspiracies in Venice, as people tried
to get the Major Council to open up new members
and generally just tried to have a bigger voice in

(09:09):
the government. This included an attempt to overthrow the doge
in thirteen ten. After that, the Venetian government established the
Council of Ten, which was an elected body, again elected
within that group of nobility, whose duties included things like
maintaining a secret police and investigating suspected conspiracies and treason.

(09:31):
To add to all of that, Venice was at war
with Genoa, part of a series of wars that stretched
from twelve fifty six to one. In the first half
of the fourteenth century, Venice also faced a series of
earthquakes and the Black Death, which killed as much as
a third of the Venetian population. All of this that

(09:52):
we've been talking about was going on just before Marino
Faliero's election as doge. We'll get to that after a
quick sponsor break. Marino Falierro was born in Venice, and

(10:12):
various sources give his birth year as twelve seventy four,
twelve seventy nine, and twelve eighty five. You'll also see
his name spelled in a few different ways today. When
I was doing the research for this, I saw it
most often as Marino Falierro, but in Venetian dialect it
was Marine falier The Latin inscription that we mentioned up

(10:33):
at the top of the show used the name Malini Faletri. However,
the name is spelled though. This was a prominent family.
They had a long history in Venice, including other doges
in the family. Vitale Falierro was the thirty second dose
from ten eight four to ten ninety five, and then,
as we said, this office was not hereditary but different

(10:56):
people in the same family could be elected, and Vitalis
son Or de la Phoe was elected to be the
thirty fourth Doze and was in office from eleven o
two to eleven seventeen. Marino Falierro married twice, first to
Thomasina Contarini and then after her death, to a Lucia Gradenigo.
Although we do not have much information about either of them,

(11:18):
they were both from prestigious families. Aluccio was much younger
than Marino when they married, but she was still probably
in her forties. Some fictionalized depictions of all of this
depict Alucia as extremely young, pretty, and unfaithful, but there's
really not much to back that up in the historical record.
Marino Falierro had a mostly distinguished career before being elected Doge,

(11:42):
including commanding Venice's fleet in the Black Sea. In addition
to that, he was elected to the Council of ten
at various points. Starting in thirteen fifteen, he served as
provincial governor of both Chiogi and Treviso. Chiog is in
the south of Venice on the Adriatic Sea, and Viso
is north of Venice and a little bit farther inland.

(12:03):
He was also named counts of Valdemarino in the Marches
of Treviso, and in thirteen fifty three he was knighted
by Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fourth in Vienna. In
addition to all of that, Falieto served as a diplomat.
For much of the fourteenth century, the papacy was headquartered
in Avignon rather than in Rome, and Salietto traveled to

(12:26):
Avignon at various points to negotiate with the Pope on
behalf of Venice. On one diplomatic mission, he negotiated for
Venice to be allowed to trade with Muslim ports in
Egypt and Syria, something the Pope agreed to, providing that
Venice's exports did not include iron ship timbers or enslaved people.
When Salietto was elected Doge, he was again in Avignon,

(12:50):
petitioning for the Pope to intervene in Venice's ongoing war
with Genoa. It seems like Falierro was pretty well respected
in all of these roles, but he was also reported
to have a quick and sometimes even violent temper. This
included slapping a bishop who was late bringing the sacrament
to an official event Marine Sanudo, the younger, who lived

(13:12):
about two centuries after Falierro and wrote a book called
The Lives of the Doges, said that he read about
this in an earlier chronicle. He described it this way,
quote Marino Falierro was so very proud and wrathful that
he buffeted the bishop and almost struck him to the ground.
As we said earlier, when Falietro was elected Doge, he

(13:34):
was in Avignon petitioning for the pope to intervene in
Venice's war with Genoa. Venice had won a series of
critical battles, leading Genoa to sign a treaty with Milan
for its own protection. The Archbishop of Milan sent poet
and intellectual Francesco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch, to negotiate
a piece with Venice. Petrarch was friends with the current Doge,

(13:57):
Andrea Dandolo, but since it looked like Venice was winning
the war, Dondolo refused to negotiate. Does did not work
out well for Dondolo. Naval forces from Genoa and Milan
made their way into the Adriatic Sea, attacking Venetian ports
and getting perilously close to Venice. Proper was at that
point that the Doge became personally involved in the fighting

(14:20):
and he contracted an illness and died. The Great Council
seems to have thought Falietro was the perfect choice for
Dondolo's successor. That was thanks to his experience as both
a diplomat and as a naval commander. The election of
Doge was carried out among forty one men, and thirty
five of them voted for Faleiro on September eleventh, fifty four.

(14:43):
After that election, the Great Council sent a delegation of
twelve men to Avignan to inform Falero of his election
and to make sure he had safe passage back to Venice,
because again, this war was still going on. Valiero got
back to Venice in October, and there's some superstitions around
his arrival. Normally, an official barge would formally dock alongside

(15:05):
the Docious Palace, but a thick fog surrounded the city
that day and it made that tradition unsafe, so Falierro
had to be roaded to shore aboard a smaller tinder,
and that tinder missed the normal docking place and wound
up at a spot just to the west of the
palace called the Molo. There are two pillars at this spot,

(15:25):
marking the entrance to the Piazzetta, or the little plaza
adjacent to the larger plaza of St. Mark. Those still
stand today, one topped with the winged lion of Saint Mark,
and the other was St. Theodore standing on a crocodile.
Executions were sometimes carried out between those two pillars, so
a lot of people thought it was bad luck to

(15:46):
walk between them, but Salieto did that again. In the
words of Marine Snudo the younger quote Messer Marino Faliero,
the Duke was about to land in this city on
the fifth day of October four a thick as came
on and darkened the air, and he was enforced to
land on the place of St. Mark, between the two columns,

(16:06):
on the spot where evil doers are put to death,
and all thought that this was the worst of tokens.
Falietto's predecessor had been popular as doge, at least until
the war shifted in the weeks just before his death.
This is impressive considering that his time as doge included
a devastating earthquake and the Black Death. In spite of

(16:28):
all the restrictions on his office, Andrea Dondolo had managed
to reform the Venetian legal code and to write a
history of Venice. Falieto may have hoped for a legacy
that was equally impressive, but the revised oath of office
he was given didn't leave him much autonomy at all.
He couldn't even receive returning diplomats without counselors and members

(16:50):
of the Karantina there to observe. In early November of
thirteen fifty four, Venice was defeated at the Battle of Sepenzia,
also called the Battle of Porto long. This was a
catastrophic and humiliating loss, with Venice losing at least thirty
ships and five thousand men being killed or taken prisoner.
Although the shipyards of Venice could build new ships at

(17:12):
just an astounding rate, this wasn't a loss that could
easily be recovered from Valierro had no choice but to
sign a peace treaty with Genoa a few months later. This,
of course, led to a lot of bitterness. The animosity
between Venice and Genoa was deep, and it had been
going on for decades plus. The defeat at Sapienza had

(17:34):
followed some serious tactical errors on Venice's part, so people
started to question Falieriro's decision making and that of the
nobles who had been in command during the battle. Valierro
seems to have tried to mediate between the established leadership
of the nobility and the increasingly discontented popolo. He commissioned

(17:55):
new ships, and he put them under the command of
some commoners who had disting wish themselves at sea. While
this made some of the popolo happy, the nobility, of
course saw it as a threat. There were also ongoing
disputes between the older members of the Council of forty
and the younger ones, who the older members saw as
rude and brazen. All of this seems to have fed

(18:18):
into a conspiracy, and we're going to get into that
after we pause for a sponsor break. All of those
tensions between the nobility and the popolo seemed to have
come to a head in early The festival of Carnival

(18:41):
just before Lent, included things like bullfighting and mask balls.
It's not clear whether it was actually called Carnival yet,
but it was what evolved into that celebration. So during
a banquet that the Doge hosted at the palace, a
young noble named Michael A Staino behaved indiscreetly with a woman.
In some accounts, this woman was Falierro's wife, but most

(19:03):
likely it was really with a young woman who was
one of the Dogares's attendants. It's possible that it was
Christina Falierro, who was the wife of the Doges's nephew.
That nephew was also named Marino Falierro, so if that's
the case, it would explain some of this confusion. Whatever
Stano did, the Doge found it offensive enough that he

(19:24):
had him removed from the palace. Of course, Stano was
also insulted, and after everyone had left, he got back
into the palace and scrawled some graffiti on the dog's
chair in the council room. Exactly what he wrote it
doesn't show up in accounts until much later, but it
is usually noted as something like Marin falier the husband

(19:46):
of the fair wife. Others kiss her, but he keeps
her so. Falierro, having found this, ordered the Arsenalatti to investigate.
These were workers from Venice's shipyard and Arsenal, who also
that as the dog's personal bodyguard and They determined that
Steano had written this graffiti, and he was brought before
the Council of forty to stand trial. The council felt

(20:10):
like he was young and in love, and they were
lenient with him since all of this was also happening
during Carnival. He was to be quote kept in close
confinement or imprisoned for two months, and then afterward he
would be banished from Venice for a year. Valiero, though,
did not think this was nearly enough. He wanted Stano

(20:31):
to be hanged or banished for life for writing some
graffiti right, writing some graffiti and possibly taking some liberties.
Yet meanwhile, these tensions between young nobles and old in
between commoners and nobility were playing out in other parts
of Venice as well. A commoner named Bertucci Isarello had

(20:55):
been placed in command of a Venetian ship, and he
got into a dispute with Giovanna Dondolo, paymaster of the
Venetian Navy and a member of the same family that
had produced the previous doge, as well as three others,
and during this dispute, Dondolo reportedly slapped Isarello in the face,
and another man named Gisello who was a foreman at

(21:18):
the Arsenal, had also been slapped by Great Council member
Marco Barbaro, who had been wearing a ring that cut
Gisello's face. Gisello went to the Doze to complain about
both incidents, a lot of slapping going on and the
general perception that nobles had become very eager to slap
commoners around. So the Doze brought in another commoner who

(21:40):
was a stonemason or maybe a sculptor, named Philippo Calendario,
who was working on renovations at the palace, And then,
together with some other commoners and some of the arsenal Atti,
and possibly Falierra's nephew, they started planning a q. Calindario
and his accomplices would recruit twenty men each. Those men

(22:00):
would recruit another forty, and on April fifty five, they
would start spreading rumors that Genoa was about to attack Venice,
directly hoping to cause a panic. In response to those rumors,
Balieiro would summon the Great Council. Once the Great Council
had convened, the Arsenalotti would seal the exits to the

(22:21):
Council chamber, and they and those eight hundred recruited men
would kill as many of the nobles as they could
Marin Sinnuto's account of what was to happen was slightly different.
In his version, these eight hundred men would go make
trouble all around Venice, attacking people and causing enough mayhem
that the dose would ring the bells of St. Mark

(22:43):
That would summon the nobility to the main square, where
they would then be surrounded by the eight hundred men
and cut down where they stood. After all this planned
bloodshed was over, Falierro would appear on the balcony of
the palace to speak to the people and say that
all of this islends had been carried out in defense
of his own life. He would call for calm and

(23:05):
asked the Popolo to recognize him as Prince of Venice.
This whole plan would red Venice of its nobility. It
would install Faliero as sovereign, and then he would not
have to follow all those rules and deal with all
that oversight that had been put in place to restrict
the power of the doge. This plot was uncovered just
before it was supposed to be carried out. A furrier

(23:27):
named Beltraumo Berga Mosco visited the home of one of
his wealthier customers, a man named Nicola Leoni. Burga Mosco
suggested Leoni should stay home the next day, and at
that Leone became suspicious, and when he pressed Burga Mosco
for details, Burga Mosco told him the whole plan, including

(23:48):
naming names. Leone detained Burgamosco at his home, but since
Burga Mosco had not said anything about the Doge being involved,
Leonie's next step was to go warn him. So when
Leoni talked to the Doge, Falierro seemed to just brush
this whole thing off. He already knew about it, probably
didn't want him to let Leoni knew he knew, So

(24:11):
Leoni went to the Council of Ten, which again was
responsible for investigating things like treason. The Council of Ten
already suspected the disaffected members of the arsenal Ati might
be plotting against the nobility, so the council sent some
men back to Leoni's home to question Burga Moscow further,
and then they started arresting the people that had already

(24:32):
been implicated, including Bertucci Izarello and Philippo Callendario. The Council
of ten also summoned about seven thousand loyal men to
the Piazzetta and stationed cavalry officers all around the city.
Issarello and Callendario both confessed to the plot and were
sentenced to hang, and they both implicated the doge. The

(24:54):
Doge was arrested and jailed at the prison in the palace.
In addition to Issarello and Landario, at least nine other
co conspirators were identified and hanged, and these hangings were
public from the beams of the palace. When questioned, Marino
Faliero confessed to his role in this planned coup, and

(25:14):
he was sentenced to a ritual execution, and that execution happened.
He was taken to the top of the same staircase
where he had given his oath of office. He was
formally stripped of all of his insignias and the corner ducale,
or the horn like hat that was traditionally worn by
the doge. Then he was beheaded with a sword, with
his head and his body both thrown down the stairs.

(25:38):
That was handled before nobility. But then the palace doors
were opened so the common people could come and look
at the remains Although there were other Doges who were
deposed or imprisoned or charged with some kind of wrongdoing,
Falieriro was the only one to be executed for treason.
Here is how Marin Sonuto the Younger described it quote

(25:59):
on Fry Day, the sixteenth day of April, judgment was
also given in the aforesaid Council of Ten, that my
Lord Marino Falierro, the Duke, should have his head cut off,
and that the execution should be done on the landing
place of the stone staircase, where the dukes take their
oath when they first entered the palace on the following day,

(26:19):
the seventeenth of April, the doors of the palace being shut.
The Duke had his head cut off about the hour
of noon, and the cap of a state was taken
from the Duke's head before he came downstairs. When the
execution was over, it is said that one of the
Council of Ten went to the columns of the palace
over against the place of Saint Mark, and that he

(26:40):
showed the bloody sword unto the people, crying out with
a loud voice. The terrible doom hath fallen upon the trader,
and the doors were opened, and the people all rushed
in to see the corpse of the duke who had
been beheaded. Petrarch visited Venice not long after all this,
and wrote his own account of what happened as well.

(27:01):
Quote the most famous place to which his forerunners had
often brought home in triumphal procession, the gladdyst Honors. He
dragged in servile fashion by a concourse of people, and
stripped of the insignia of a doge, fell down a
headless corpse, and stained with his blood. The doors of
the church, the entrance of his palace, and the marble

(27:21):
stairs often made glorious by solemn beats or the spoils
of enemies. We can only speculate why Falieriro decided to
carry out this coup, and then why he confessed to it.
Petrarch summed it up this way quote, as regards the
unhappy man, I am both compassionate and indignant, honored as

(27:42):
he was. I know not what he could have desired
at the end of a long life. His misfortune is
aggravated by the fact that, according to the tradition of
public judgment, he will be held to have been not
only miserable, but mad and to have, for so many
years obtained by vain acts and undeserved reputation for wisdom.

(28:03):
Those who are for a time doges I would warn
to study the mirror set before their eyes, that they
may see in it that they are leaders, not lords nate,
not even leaders, but honored servants of the state. Historians
and commentators have put forth several interpretations of what Faliro did,
like maybe Falierro was manipulating the popelo to try to

(28:26):
become the supreme ruler of Venice, to put himself in
charge without all those rules, or maybe the popolo had
manipulated him to try to improve their station in Venetian politics.
Faliero was at least seventy when all this happened, and
a few commentators have kind of written the whole thing
off as a sign of age related dementia or some
other mental instability, or suggested that it was really a

(28:50):
warped way to try to get revenge against the council
for their lenient treatment of Michael A stain No. Stain No,
by the way, was self elected dose in fourteen hundred,
so that worked out. Uh. There's also speculation about what
drove the nobility's response to this coup. The Doges, questioning

(29:12):
and execution were carried out extremely quickly. So there's been
some suggestion that the nobility we're using all of this
as a pretense to solidify their own power and keep
the Doges power in check. In addition to being executed,
Faliero was subject to domnadio memorial or condemnation of memory.
In thirteen sixty six, the Council of Ten decreed that

(29:35):
Faliero's portrait in the Palace would be painted over with
azurite paint with the inscription quote hic s locus marini
filetri decapitati pro criminibus so the black banner and the
inscription that are there in the Great Council Chamber today
among the paintings of all the Doges. Those were actually
put there a lot later, because the chamber was almost

(29:55):
completely destroyed by fire in fifteen seventy seven. The role
of doge continued to evolve in Venice after all of this.
In general, the outside world often perceived the doge as
the most powerful person of a country that was so
powerful and influential that its currency, the dook it was
widely used in international trade. But although the Doge was

(30:17):
the highest ranking official in the Venetian government. The office's
power was really limited until the end of the republic.
Venice's power and influence started to wane in the fifteenth century,
and various European powers united in opposition to Venice as
the League of Cambra in fifteen o eight. The Republic
of Venice fell in seventeen ninety seven, which is a

(30:38):
whole other story involving Napoleon Bonaparte, but part of Napoleon's
rationale was that he wanted to destroy the Venetian oligarchy
and democratize its government. After the fall of the republic,
the Venetian archives became more accessible to people from other
parts of Europe, and the story of this coup in

(30:59):
Faliero's by heading became a source of fascination for various
writers and artists. It is a dramatic story on its own,
but it also played into perceptions of Venice as stealthy, conniving,
and licentious, with a secretive government that kept its population
under tight surveillance. That is pretty contrary to Venice's myths

(31:19):
about itself as La Satnissima or the most serene, a
place that was blessed by St. Mark and home to
a unique republic that lasted more than a thousand years. Yeah,
as a absolute outsider to all of this, it's so
interesting to me how like the perception of Venice and
other parts of Europe historically is so different from like

(31:41):
Venice's mythologizing of itself. Uh, they are almost opposite. So
in terms of all of this writing and artwork, in
eighteen twenty one, George Gordon Lord Byron wrote a play
in verse called Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice and Historical
Tragedy in five acts. Although Iron said pretty openly that

(32:02):
he was inspired to write this by a trip he
took to Venice, there were critics at the time who
interpreted it instead as a response to the Napoleonic Wars
or to the Cato Street Conspiracy, which took place a
year before this play was published. We have an episode
on the Cato Street Conspiracy in the archives and we
will put that out in just a bit as a

(32:22):
Saturday classic. Gitano Donizetti's opera Marino Falierro debut in eighteen
thirty five, and then Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a verse
drama called Marino Falierro. In eighteen eighty five. There were
also works of art. In eighty seven, Eugen Delacroix finished
a painting called the Execution of Marino Falierro, which seems

(32:46):
to have drawn from both Byron's play and historical accounts
of the execution, which Byron printed as an appendix. Francesco
Hayez painted the Last Moments of do Jemrin Falierro in
eighteen sixty seven. Spot is everything that I learned about this,
besides the couple of sentences that were in the audio
tour at the Doges Palace and we were in Venice.

(33:09):
One of the things that's stricky to pin down about
all of this is which parts of the palace are
as they were when this happened, which are not many
of them because there were a lot of fires and
things like that, fires and earthquakes and things that destroyed
parts of it. So sometimes you'll see like this happened
at the Great Staircase, and I think the Great Staircase
as it stands now, the Giant Staircase is what people

(33:30):
call it, Like I think that is a newly built
structure that was after all of this, so so much slapping. Yeah,
there's a lot of slapping that happens in the story. Uh.
And then I have other stuff, same as when we
went to Paris. We will I'm sure spread out our

(33:52):
our Italy inspired episodes so that it doesn't become all
Italy all the time around the podcast for do you
have a little bit of listener mail I do. This
is from Kathy and this is actually about an episode
that Holly researched, which was the one about accidental and mentions.
We talked about the microwave and Kathy wrote, thank you

(34:13):
for making life interesting and for highlighting the interesting in life.
I feel like I could email a comment after every episode,
but after listening to the recent Happy Accident show, I
am compelled to share about one of the most amazing
women I've ever known, my aunt and godmother, Audrey. Audrey
was born in nine and was diagnosed with diabetes at
the age of eight. Her medical care involved train trips

(34:36):
from your rural Pennsylvania to Cleveland, where she entered the
early ranks of those being treated with insulin. While she
received a medal from the Joscelyn Clinic for living fifty
years on insulin, those were not easy years As a
young woman, Audrey learned a degree as a dietitian and
worked for local hospitals. She loved to cook, She loved people,

(34:56):
she loved. Her health declined with time, necessitating a move
to a warmer climate and community with better accessibility, which
she found in Tucson, Arizona. By the early seventies, Audi's
eyesight had the clans significantly. One foot had been amputated,
as well as one leg below the knee, and arthritis
had crippled her hands enter the microwave. While her disease

(35:18):
and time may have ravaged her body, her spirit and
wit were fully intact. This happy accident that we call
the microwave allowed Audrey to safely return to one of
her favorite activities food. The microwave could be placed at
the perfect height. Gone were the days of trying to
maneuver the stove and oven from her wheelchair. Audrey set
to work, learning everything she could about microwave cooking and

(35:40):
once again shared those loving results of family and friends.
For us, the microwave maybe the quickest route to a
hot lunch, but for Audrey, the microwave reopened a closed door,
providing a welcome pathway to independence. And joy. My oldest
daughter is named for her, and it is my hope
that we can all live life with such tenacity and love.
Thank you for in julging me this moment to remember her. Kathy, Kathy,

(36:02):
thank you so much for this email number one. I
love it. Uh. We talked about microwaves being a lot
more affordable in that episode, but we didn't really talk
about them being more accessible. And I also wanted to
read this because it reminds me of my mom who
similarly when we were kids, Mom made every single thing
we ate, it seemed like from scratch um and then

(36:26):
as she developed a disability, was less able to do
that until she found ways to make the kitchen more
accessible to her. And at one point she even wrote
a cookbook um of all the things that she had
done to try to make cooking easier and faster so
that she could still do it. Uh. So thanks for
you know, sharing that story with us and also given

(36:47):
me a minute to just think about my mom, who
sometimes I still pull out that cookbook. Some of the
recipes and them are things that it's honestly tough to
get in Green Is for now, just because the types
of things that are in stores now are sometimes a
little bit different than they were in the nineties, so

(37:09):
you cannot, for example, find the kind of canned ham
that my mom used in a ham recipe that she
made anymore. Uh. But yeah, it's a cool thing to
be able to make make kitchens more accessible. If you
would like to send us a note about this or
any other podcast, we're at History Podcasts at i heart

(37:29):
radio dot com. We're also all over social media at
miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart radio app and anywhere else you like
to get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from

(37:52):
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

The Breakfast Club

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Marino Faliero, the Beheaded Doge