ABSTRACT
On 17 April 1587, Benedetto Mangone, the leader of a gang of bandits that for years terrorized the countryside of Eboli, was executed in Naples. A song describing his various sadistic crimes, The Lament and Death of Benedetto Mangone, depicts him as a heartless killer and closes with the description of his sentencing and execution.1 This involved him being drawn through the city while having his esh pinched off with burning tongs (‘tanagliato’), having his limbs tied down to a cartwheel and then smashed with hammers, and his body being burned. The ballad, in 52 verses of ottava rima, seems to relish each iniction of suffering on his body:
Now enough, we have sentenced you For royal disobedience. First, your esh will be torn while you go Through the City on a triumphal chariot. Then nailed on a wheel, To await the great fatal blow; And then from that bloody death You will be thrown in the blazing re.2
