My Prisons (Le mie prigioni)

The book moves chronologically from the arrest in Milan through the Venetian prisons, the trial, the death sentence and its commutation, and then the years at the Spielberg — the cold, the hunger, the illnesses, the jailers, the fellow prisoners, and above all the interior life of a man with nothing to do but think.

Its power is in the restraint. Pellico describes brutality without rhetoric and refuses to hate his captors; the passages on preparing himself for execution, and on his own inconsistency — how liable a man is, when most firm and pious, to fall suddenly into weakness — are the ones readers remember.

Published in 1832, it was translated across Europe within a few years and became one of the most widely read books of the century. It was said that it did the Austrian empire more damage than a lost battle, precisely because it made no accusations at all.

The 1868 Boston English edition is free at Archive.org, with the Italian original and a French translation also freely available. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the English.

This edition follows the English translation of Le mie prigioni published at Boston by Roberts Brothers in 1868. The Italian original appeared at Turin in 1832.

We checked it for cuts before using it, and for the first time we checked with a tool rather than by eye. Archive.org holds a second scan of this same 1868 printing and an entirely different English translation of 1844, and comparing all three reports no passage this text is missing. Two findings looked at first like omissions and both turned out not to be. The larger was editorial apparatus — the two 1868 scans carry different introductory matter — and the other was an artifact of the comparison itself: it reported us thin on the prisoner Oroboni, and our text in fact carries forty-three mentions of him against the 1844 translation’s thirty-four, with three chapters given to him. We record that because a tool that is trusted without reading is worse than none.

The second scan of the 1868 printing is used as a collation witness. That is all it is: the same translation and the same setting of type, read by a different scanner, so where one pass destroyed a word and the other did not, the reading that is a word has been taken.

The chapter titles are Pellico’s own, or rather his American publisher’s, taken from the book’s table of contents — the headings in the body are a bare “CHAPTER XXI.” with no title at all. The contents is set in the same narrow column as the text and breaks its words at the measure, so titles arrive with hyphens in the middle of them (“Pel- lico”, “Vien- na”); those have been healed.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the translator. Running heads, page numbers and catchwords have been removed; words broken at the line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question. The eleventh chapter is numbered XL in the scan, which is XI with its final stroke misread, and it is restored to its place.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.