Doge's Palace

This guide to the Doge's Palace in Venice follows Giacomo Casanova through his year in the Piombi, the lead-roofed attic cells above the state rooms, after his arrest in the summer of 1755. It traces the iron spike he found on an exercise walk, the false start when guards moved him to a new cell just before he could use it, and the fellow prisoner, a renegade priest named Marino Balbi, he brought into the plan by smuggling the spike to him inside a bible. Stand beneath the attic roof and picture the cell: eight feet by ten, with a five-foot ceiling, for a man over six feet tall.