The Ponte dei Sospiri is a covered bridge connecting the administrative halls of the Palazzo Ducale with the Prigioni Nuove, one of the city's many prisons, with the most infamous being the Piombi, located in the basement of the Palazzo Ducale itself. Prisoners walked across the bridge after their trial on their way to prison, where they would serve their sentences or be executed. That’s where the name of the bridge, given to it during the Romantic Age, comes from: Ponte dei Sospiri means the 'bridge of sighs', because of the cries and sighs that prisoners would make while crossing it, looking out from its windows at the city and the sea, at the freedom they were about to lose.