For nearly seven decades, one of the most feared men in Rome lived an otherwise ordinary life. He sold umbrellas, attended church, and walked the narrow streets of the Borgo district near the Vatican. Yet whenever he crossed the Tiber River, Romans knew that someone was about to die.
His name was Giovanni Battista Bugatti, though history remembers him by a different name: Mastro Titta.
From 1796 until his retirement in 1864, Bugatti served as the official executioner of the Papal States. During that remarkable career he carried out 516 executions under six popes and during periods of French occupation, making him the longest-serving executioner in papal history.
Giovanni Battista Bugatti was born on March 6, 1779, in the Adriatic town of Senigallia. Little is known about his early life, and historians remain uncertain about how he obtained such an unusual position. What is known is that he became the Papal States' executioner at the astonishingly young age of seventeen. His first recorded execution took place on March 22, 1796, when he hanged and quartered Nicola Gentilucci, a murderer and robber, in the town of Foligno. The appointment marked the beginning of a career that would outlast empires, revolutions, and generations of Romans.
Bugatti's famous nickname was derived from the Roman dialect pronunciation of maestro di giustizia—"master of justice." Over time, "Mastro Titta" became so closely associated with him that it eventually became a generic Roman term for an executioner.
Despite the notoriety of his profession, Bugatti was not a public outcast. Contemporary descriptions portray him as a short, well-dressed man who took pride in his appearance and his work. During long periods when no executions were scheduled, he earned additional income as an umbrella painter and seller.
Bugatti lived on the Vatican side of the Tiber and, according to tradition, was discouraged from entering the rest of Rome except when official duties required it. Whenever he crossed the Ponte Sant'Angelo, word spread rapidly through the city that an execution was imminent.
Public executions in Rome were major events. Crowds gathered in squares such as Piazza del Popolo and near Castel Sant'Angelo to witness justice being carried out. Roman fathers would bring their sons to watch Mastro Titta lower the boom. By tradition, they would slap their son’s head when the blade came down, as a way of warning: “This could be you.”
Travelers often recorded these spectacles in their journals, helping to spread Mastro Titta's reputation beyond Italy. Lord Byron wrote about him in a letter to John Murray, his editor in England. Charles Dickens left a lengthy recollection in Pictures of Italy, after watching him work one afternoon in 1845. The Italian poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli penned several satirical sonnets in his honour. There is also a nursery rhyme about him that goes:
Slice, slice, Mastro Titta
A loaf of bread and salami.
One for me, one for thee,
One for Mama, that makes three
Over the course of his career, Bugatti employed nearly every method of capital punishment used by the Papal States.
Some prisoners were hanged. Others were beheaded with an axe. Particularly notorious criminals might be subjected to drawing and quartering. Bugatti also used the mazzatello, a grim method in which the condemned person was struck on the head with a heavy mallet before having the throat cut. Later, during and after the Napoleonic period, the guillotine became a common instrument of execution in Rome.
Although these punishments are shocking, they were common penal practices of the era. Compared with executioners during the French Revolution (such as Charles-Henri Sanson), Bugatti's workload was relatively modest, averaging only about seven or eight executions per year. His fame arose not from the number of people he executed but from the extraordinary length of his service.
One reason historians know so much about Mastro Titta is that he meticulously documented his work. Bugatti maintained a notebook listing the names of the condemned, their crimes, the dates and locations of their executions, and the methods used. Bugatti referred to these executions as "justices" rather than killings.
Despite his fearsome profession, Bugatti was not a monster. During executions, he had the habit of offering snuff to condemned prisoners shortly before the act. Unlike the stereotypical executioner portrayed in fiction, Mastro Titta seems to have viewed himself as a public servant carrying out lawful sentences rather than as an agent of cruelty. When not working for the pope, Bugatti supported his wife by painting umbrellas, producing images of papal faces and Roman scenes for the raingear peddled in curio shops around St. Peter’s.
By the time Pope Pius IX retired him in 1864, Bugatti was eighty-five years old. He received a pension and returned to his native Senigallia, where he died five years later in 1869. His assistant, Vincenzo Balducci, succeeded him as papal executioner.
Today, Giovanni Battista Bugatti remains one of the most recognizable figures in the history of the Papal States. The blood-stained scarlet, hooded cloak which he wore during his assignments is still on display at Rome’s Criminology Museum.
References:
# Giovanni Battista Bugatti. Wikipedia
# He executed justice. NCR Online
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