Chapter CXXII: Section XV: But the newly constituted Senate had need of other additions

to the ancient palace besides the Council Chamber. A short, but most significant, sentence is added to Sansovino's account of the construction of that room. "There were, _near it_," he says, "the Cancellaria, and the _Gheba_ or _Gabbia_, afterwards called the Little Tower." [Footnote: "Vi era appresso la Cancellarla, e la Gheba o Gabbia, iniamata poi Torresella,"---P. 324. A small square tower is seen above the Vine angle in the view of Venice dated 1500, and attributed to Albert Durer. It appears about 25 feet square, and is very probably the Torresella in question.]

Gabbia means a "cage;" and there can be no question that certain apartments were at this time added at the top of the palace and on the Rio Facade, which were to be used as prisons. Whether any portion of the old Torresella still remains is a doubtful question; but the apartments at the top of the palace, in its fourth story, were still used for prisons as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. [Footnote: Vide Bettio, Lettera, p. 23.] I wish the reader especially to notice that a separate tower or range of apartments was built for this purpose, in order to clear the government of the accusations so constantly made against them, by ignorant or partial historians, of wanton cruelty to prisoners. The stories commonly told respecting the "piombi" of the Ducal Palace are utterly false. Instead of being, as usually reported, small furnaces under the leads of the palace, they were comfortable rooms, with good flat roofs of larch, and carefully ventilated. [Footnote: Bettio, Lettera, p. 20. "Those who wrote without having seen them described them as covered with lead; and those who have seen them know that, between their flat timber roofs and the sloping leaden roof of the palace the interval is five metres where it is least, and nine where it is greatest."] The new chamber, then, and the prisons, being built, the Great Council first sat in their retired chamber on the Rio in the year 1309.