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By Root 1268 0

or many, he gave the following answer: ‘Sir, among us poor beggars there are different confraternities [compagnie, a word normally used to refer to religious confraternities] … the first is called the Confraternity of the Grencetti, those who, while they are begging for alms in the churches in a crowd, cut purses … The second is called the Confraternity of the Sbasiti, and includes those who pretend to be ill and lie on the ground as if they were dying and keep groaning and demanding alms. The third is called the Baroni, who are healthy and upright, and are sturdy beggars who do not want to work.’ By the time he had finished, Pompeo had listed no fewer than nineteen groups of fraudulent beggars. They included the Formigotti, who pretended to be discharged soldiers; the Rabrunati, who faked epilepsy by eating soap and then foaming at the mouth; and the Pistolfi, who posed as priests to extract ‘donations’ from their victims.43

The same set of documents also contains the testimony of another man claiming familiarity with different groups of criminals at work in Rome in the 1590s. His name was Girolamo, and to Pompeo’s nineteen categories of villain he added seventeen more, including the Marmotti, who affected to have been struck dumb, and the Spillatori, who – like Caravaggio’s Cardsharps – sought out the gullible in taverns and inns and cheated them out of their money using marked cards and loaded dice. Girolamo disagreed with Pompeo’s (presumably) ironic comparison of such groups of criminal specialists with religious confraternities. ‘They are not confraternities [compagnie] but crafts [arti], like shoemakers, goldsmiths and so on.’

The exact status of these texts is questionable, and the precision with which they reflect actual criminal activity in Caravaggio’s Rome is open to debate. Peter Burke, who translated and republished them, notes that ‘these documents cannot now be found in the Roman archives, and are best known though a copy made a few years later, which used to be in the former Imperial Library in Berlin’, with ‘the rather literary title of the “delightful examination” of rogues, “Il dilettevole essamine de’ guidoni, furfanti o calchi” ’.

It is likely that the documents are altered transcripts of reported speech; and almost certain that they have been liberally ‘improved’ by the late sixteenth-century writer who gave them their present form. Many of the practices that they record, such as the use of soap to feign epilepsy, were (and still are) used by real fraudsters. They are part of an oral history of fraudulence that certainly has a basis in fact. But other elements seem to have been exaggerated. Analysis of the certain testimonies of known criminals that still are to be found in the Roman archives presents a less well-organized and significantly less colourful picture of criminal activity – gangs of crooks robbing at random when the opportunity presents itself, fencing stolen goods to the city’s Jewish pedlars and immediately eating and drinking away the proceeds.44

For all that, the tales told by ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Girolamo’ contain their own kind of truth, halfway between fact and fiction. What these stories reveal above all is a particular set of stereotypes about the seamy side of life in Rome, in which a certain sector of the city’s elite wished to believe: that criminals were so well organized as to constitute a dark, mirror-version of normal society, complete with ‘fraternities’ or ‘guilds’ of particular ill-doers; that they had, in effect, created a kind of inverted world of their own, a mondo alla rovescia, or ‘world upside down’ (a phrase of the time which anticipates the modern term ‘underworld’); that any apparently needy beggar might easily turn out to be a crook.

There was something of a craze for the classification of rogues in Caravaggio’s Italy. Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Universal Marketplace of the World), a compendium published in 1585, had listed seventeen types of false beggar, including five that appear in the accounts of ‘Pompeo’ and