Giovanni Battista Bugatti – what a name, eh? It sounds like the kind of bloke you’d expect to sell you a fine bottle of chianti or offer unsolicited advice about your olive oil. But no – our man Bugatti wasn’t swirling wine or chasing goats in the hills. He was the official executioner for the Papal States from 1796 to 1864, casually clocking up 514 confirmed kills, which puts him somewhere between a very pious hitman and the Catholic version of the Grim Reaper on payroll.
They called him Mastro Titta, which sounds endearing until you realise it roughly translates to ‘Master Titus,’ and was Roman dialect for ‘the bloke with the axe.’ You know you’re in strange waters when your job title comes with a cape and a sword blessed by the Bishop.
Now, picture it: Rome, sultry and superstitious, reeking of incense, revolution, and goat. And here comes Mastro Titta, cloaked in black with a red sash – somewhere between Dracula and a Holy Week float – heading out at dawn for another day’s ‘mercy.’ Not with forms or fines, mind you, but with a blade the length of a cello bow and all the charm of a migraine.
And here’s the kicker: he wasn’t even scary. No gnashing teeth or frothing zeal. Just a nice, neat little man who lived in Trastevere, sold religious souvenirs on his off-days (because nothing says “forgive us our trespasses” like a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary), and went home each evening to a quiet domestic life with his wife and zero children – perhaps wisely. Imagine the career day at school.
He wasn’t a torturer. He wasn’t a sadist. He was, horrifyingly, a professional – with the sort of bureaucratic tidiness that would make an accountant blush. He kept meticulous notes of each execution, including the name, crime, weather, and method – as if he were writing Yelp reviews for divine retribution. ‘Mild drizzle. Good swing. Head came off clean. Four stars.’
And the executions? Oh, they were theatrical affairs. You weren’t just killed, you were escorted like a VIP to your own curtain call. There’d be monks chanting, candles glowing, the crowd gathering for the moral lesson of the week, children on shoulders, popcorn optional. It was Holy Roman Got Talent, but with fewer encores and more decapitations.
There’s something deeply unsettling about this sacral solemnity. One minute the Pope’s kissing babies, the next he’s signing off your death warrant and sending in Mastro Titta like a divine Deliveroo driver with one item on the menu: your neck.
But the real irony – the sort of irony only history can provide – is that Mastro Titta was beloved. Yes, beloved! The Romans saw him not as a monster but as a kind of sombre civil servant – a binman of sin, if you will. He kept the streets clean, the moral order intact, and he did it with calm, clerical efficiency. He wasn’t Jack the Ripper. He was Jack the Invoice Clerk of Finality.
He retired in 1864, just in time to avoid the awkward bit when the Papal States collapsed and Italy finally decided that perhaps bishops shouldn’t be running the police. You can almost imagine Bugatti in his slippers, reading about Garibaldi and muttering, “Tch. No sense of pageantry these days.”
He died in bed, age 90, presumably without ever once blurting out “I did it for the Lord” in a scandalous memoir. His sword, mercifully retired, now lies in a glass case at the Criminology Museum, no doubt wondering where all the good times went.
So what do we make of Mastro Titta? A holy hangman? A sword-wielding sacristan? A religiously endorsed butcher in a cassock? He reminds us – gloriously and grotesquely – that history isn’t always made by generals or saints, but sometimes by strange little men with sharp tools, steady hands, and a schedule to keep.
And in the grand theatre of Papal Rome, with its incense, its tyranny, its ecstatic visions and public gallows, Mastro Titta wasn’t the villain.
He was just on the rota.
Wording 
Nothing scarier than a man who is “just doing his job”, unless it’s a man who believes in his job.
Too right. One will follow orders – terrifying enough. The other thinks he’s been ‘called’. That’s when you hide the women, the wine, and the philosophy books.