ABSTRACT
We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; we are far, too, from the dream of the reformers, less than fifty years before: the city of punishments in which a thousand small theatres would have provided an endless multicoloured representation of justice in which the punishments, meticulously produced on decorative scaffolds, would have constituted the permanent festival of the penal code.
