Submitted by Alexander Frketic on the 2016 spring semester program in Tuscany, Italy…
This past week has been a big one and I am going to start by saying the Torture Museum that Claire and I went into was absolutely amazing. It was very cheap to go into the attraction and it covered several different forms of torturing techniques and devices throughout history. The purpose of the museum was to inform viewers about how human torture should be reflected on in a negative way by informing the public what cruel actions society has placed on people.
The first thing that you saw was a leather jacket with nails spiked all around it. This happened to be one of my favorite artifacts. The jacket was actually used for protection from wild animals like bears and prisoners back in the Middle Ages. It was quite interesting. Whenever the person wearing the jacket was attacked, the tips to the nails would sink into and painfully wounded the attacker.
Another interesting device was the coffin embedded with nails (see a trend lol). The coffin was a rectangular box with a pillow and the rest were nails. This was one form of punishment for someone who gossiped. The person would get locked into the coffin and if they moved too aggressively, they would die from all of the punctures via the nails. It was quite fascinating.
The creepiest item in the exhibit was the rocking horse. This children’s play toy was created in order to stop children from taking advantage of having fun. It was created by a ruler of a kingdom that wanted his youngest son to take horse riding seriously and not for fun. So the king ordered a craftsman to assemble a rocking horse with nails on the saddle. The nails weren’t supposed to be too sharp, but painful enough to take out the enjoyment in riding the horse for play. It was as if it was created for a movie.
