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1SCIARRA COLONNA.There were two of the Colonna. One was Sciarra; I don’t know the name of the other. They were always fighting against the pope of their time.1At last they took him and shut him up in a tower in the Campagna, and kept him there till they had starved him to death; and when the people found him afterwards, what do you think?—in his extremity he had gnawed off all the tips of his fingers.When these two Colonna found they had actuallykilled a Pope, they got so frightened that they ran away to hide themselves. They ran away to France, to Paris, and at last, when all the money they were able to carry with them was spent, they were obliged to take a place as stablemen in the king’s palace, and they washed the carriages and cleaned down the horses like common men. But they couldn’t hide that they were great lords; the people saw there was something different from themselves about them, and they watched them, and saw that they waited on each other alternately every day at table, and you could see what great ceremony they were used to. Then other things were seen, I forget what now, but little by little, and by one thing and another, people suspected at last who they really were.Then some one went and told the king of France, and he had them called up before him.They came just as they were, in their stable clothes, wooden shoes2and all.The king sat to receive them in a raised seat hung all round with cloth of gold, and he said:‘Now, I know one thing. You two are hiding from justice. Who you are I don’t know exactly for certain. I believe you are the Colonna. If you confess you are the Colonna, I will make the affair straight for you; but, if you will not say, then I will have you shut up in prison till I find out who you are, and what you have done.’Then they owned that they were the Colonna,3and the king sent an ambassador to the Pope that then was, and the thing was arranged, and after a time they came back to Rome.1Litta, ‘Storia delle Famiglie italiane,’ traces that from the beginning the Colonna family was always Ghibeline. The present representatives of the house, however, are reckoned Papalini.↑2‘Zoccolo,’ a wooden sandal kept on the foot by a leather strap over the instep. It is worn by certain ‘scalsi’ or ‘barefooted’ friars, hence called by the people ‘zoccolanti.’ The street near Ponte Sisto in Rome, called Via delle Zoccolette, received its name from a convent of nuns there who also wore ‘zoccoli.’↑3That Sciarra Colonna headed a band of ‘spadassini’ against Boniface VIII., and made himself the tool of Philippe le Bel, is of course true to history, as also that he held him imprisoned for a time at Anagni. The Pontiff’s biographer, Tosti, mentions however only to refute them, ‘le favole Ferretiane,’ to which Sismondi, ‘Storia delle Republiche italiane,’ gives currency, and which embody the floating tradition in the text. ‘Ferreto da Vicenza,’ writes Tosti, ‘narrates that a kind of poison was administered to this great Pontiff, which put him in a state of phrenzy; the servant who waited on him, also, was sent away, and being left alone in the room he is supposed to have gnawed at a stick (in another allusion to the same fable—at page 293—he says, ‘his fingers’ as in the text), and struck his head against the wall so desperately that his white hairs were all stained with blood; finally, that he suffocated himself under the counterpane invoking Beelzebub. But when we think how Boniface arrived at extreme old age, enfeebled with reverses; how, shut up in a room alone, there was no one to be witness to the alleged gnawing and knocking and Satanic invocations, and how that the manner of his death was quite differently related by eye-witnesses, I do not know for whom Sismondi could have thought he was writing when he marred his history by inserting such a fable. What certainly happened, and it is certified by Cardinal Stefaneschi, who was present, and by the Report afterwards drawn up of the acts of Boniface—was, that ‘he was lodged in the Vatican at the time of his death, and breathed his last tranquilly. The bed of the dying Pontiff was surrounded by eight cardinals and by other distinguished persons (Process. Bonif. p. 37, p. 15), to whom, according to the custom of his predecessors, he made confession of faith, affirming, however enfeebled his voice, that he had lived in that faith, and wished to die in it, a Catholic. Consoled with the Viaticum of the Sacraments he gave up his soul to God, weary with the prolonged struggle he had sustained for the rights of the Church, ... thirty-five days after his imprisonment at Anagni’ (vol. ii. p. 286–7). Platina goes into less detail, but also records that he died in Rome (Le vite de’ Pontefici, Venice, 1674, p. 344). The magnanimous stedfastness evinced by Boniface when attacked by Colonna and Nogaret, all abandoned as he was by human aid (detailed by Tosti, p. 276,et seq.), could not but have been succeeded by a grander closing scene than that imagined by Ferreto. Maroni (vi. 17–18) not only narrates that he survived the Anagni affair to return to Rome, but that with great Christian charity he ordered Nogaret, who had been taken prisoner by the Romans in the meantime, to be released from confinement; and [xiv. 283] that he could have had no poison administered to him at Anagni, for all the time he was imprisoned he would eat nothing but eggs on purpose to be proof against it.The best disproof of the story, however, is that given by Tosti (p. 296–7). In the clearing for the rebuilding of the nave of St. Peter’s, 302 years after the death of Boniface, his sepulchre was opened and the grave then revealed the truth. It so happened that his body had scarcely undergone any change, and those who stood by could hence depose that both his head and his hands were quite perfect;there were no marks or blows on the former, and so far from his finger-tips being gnawed, they noticed that the nails even were particularly long. The face also wore a peculiarly placid expression.Several contemporary writers cited by Tosti tell, however, that Benedict XI., Boniface’s successor, died of poison believed to have been administered by Sciarra Colonna at the instigation of Philippe le Bel. But unfortunately for the tradition in the text Moroni [xiv. 283], who also mentions this, adds that Sciarra Colonna died in exile as he deserved. The two Cardinals Colonna, however, who had been exiled with the rest of the family, were reinstated by Benedict XI., and Clement V. in 1305 restored the other members of it to their possessions in the Roman States, where they made themselves obnoxious enough during the Papal residence at Avignon, and were as hostile to Rienzi as they had ever been to the Popes.↑2DONNA OLIMPIA.The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia1are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted2to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.3The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple4nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age weresuch that Cancellieri5tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’1Donna Olimpia Pamfili, nata Maidalchini, wife of the brother of Innocent X.↑2Cancellieri Mercato, § ix. note 7.↑3He had not, however, been originally intended for the Church; had been General of the Pontifical forces before he was Cardinal, and was only in Deacon’s orders.↑4His simplicity was the subject of many contemporarymotsand anecdotes; e.g. at the time of his elevation to the purple the Pasquin statue had been temporarily lost to view by a hoarding put up for the erection of a neighbouring palace; ‘Marforio’ was supposed to express his condolence for the eclipse of his rival in the following distich:‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’His want of capacity seems however to have been compensated by his goodness of heart.↑5Cancellieri Mercato, § viii. As I have been desirous to put nothing in the text but what has reached myself by verbal tradition, I will add some no less interesting details collected by Cancellieri, in this place.It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,6was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 16417that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himselflet down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.8He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) whohad married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,9and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’10to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscriptionAgonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed11to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, andundertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’and‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law12was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpiafuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in hermots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’13but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr.Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’14and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.15There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.Her palace in Piazza Navona became in 1695 the residence of Lord Castlemaine, ambassador of James II. to the Holy See. He had an ox roasted whole before it, and other bounties distributed to the people on occasion of the birth of ‘The Pretender.’↑6A certain Niccolo Caferri was much ridiculed for the spirit of adulation with which he pretended to trace up Innocent X.’s genealogy to Pamphilus, king of Doris, 300 years before the birth of Rome. But the Pope himself was so little ashamed of his origin that Cancellieri tells us he took a piece of cloth for one of his armorial bearings in memory of it.↑7This date, however, must be incorrect, as Innocent X. only began to reign in 1644. This grandiose Campanile is described at length, and a plate of it given in Fontana, ‘Descrizione del tempio Vaticano,’ p. 262,et seq.It was 360 ft. in height.↑8He does not specify what pope, and the wording used seems to imply Innocent X., but this aqueduct is always ascribed to Paul V., twenty years earlier, and is called theAcquaPaola.↑9Described in Cancellieri, ‘Descrizione delle Cappelle Ponteficie,’ cap. x.↑10In Melchiorri’s table of Roman moneys he gives the value (in 1758, a hundred years later) of adoppioas 4 scudi 40 bajocchi; and of adoppiaat 6 scudi, 42 bajocchi. It appears to be the latter the Pope sent for.↑11Dyer says it was theStadiumof Domitian, and Becker, that there is no proof it was ever a circus.↑12Cancellieri calls Innocent hercognato, andcognatoin common conversation now is used for a cousin. Bazzarini explains it as ‘any relationship by marriage.’↑13MS. life of his successor Alex. VII. by Card. Pallavicini, quoted by Novaes: Storia de’ Sommi Pontefici, x. 61.↑14Nothing better than deal, I believe.↑15Mercato, § xxi.↑THE MUNIFICENCE OF PRINCE BORGHESE.[If the Romans remember the vices of their princely families, they are proud of storing up the memory of their virtues too; and the following narrative was told me with great enthusiasm.]Liberality is a distinguishing characteristic of the Borghese family. It was always a matter of emulation who should get taken into their service, and no one who was once placed there ever let himself be sent away again, it was too good a thing to lose.There was a man-servant, however, once who gave the Prince, I think it was the father of this one, an insolent answer, and he turned him off.No one would take that man. Wherever he applied, when they asked him, ‘Where have you lived?’ and he answered, ‘in casa Borghese,’ everyone answered, ‘Oh, if you couldn’t live with Borghese, I’m sure I’ve nothingbetter to offer you!’ and the door was shut in his face. It wasn’t in one place or two, buteverywhere, Borghese’s character is so well known in Rome. As he couldn’t get a place, however, he was reduced to near starvation, and he had a wife and six children, all with nothing to eat. Every article of furniture went to the Monte di Pietà, and almost every article of clothing; and yet hunger stared them in the face.Then the man got desperate, and he went out one night and waited for Borghese in a lonely street in the dark, with a knife in his hand, and said, ‘Your purse!’Borghese thought he had a gang behind him, round the corner, and handed him his purse. But the man only took out three pauls and gave it back, and he looked so thin and haggard that Borghese could not but notice it, dark as it was, though he had forgotten his face.‘That is not a thief, he is some poor fellow who wants relief,’ said Borghese to his servant. ‘Go after him and see what he does, but take care not to be seen,’ and he walked home alone. In less than half an hour the servant came back. He had seen him spend the three pauls in food; had seen him take it home to his family; had seen them scarcely covered with rags; had seen the room denuded of furniture; had heard the man say, as he put the food on the table, ‘Here is wherewith to keep you alive another day, and to-morrow I die in sin, for I had to steal it.’Then Borghese called up the steward (Maestro di Casa), and told him to go to the house and find out who the man was, and leave them what was wanted for the night.The steward did as he was told, and left a scudo that the man might get a supper without eating stolen food, but without saying who sent him, for he had learnt by his inquiries that he was the servant whom Borghese had sent away.The next day Borghese sent and clothed all the family; furnished their place again for them; put the children to schools, and gave the parents ten scudi a month. He wouldn’t take the man back, having once had to send him away—for that was his rule—but he gave him a pension for the rest of his life.‘POPE JOAN.’‘You know, of course, that there was once a Papessa? They have putthatin the books, I suppose?’‘I know there is such a story, but learned writers have proved it was a mere invention.’‘Well, I daresay it isn’t true; but there’s no one in Rome who has not heard of it. And what makes them believe it is this.1Outside of St. Peter’s somewhere there’s a statue of her all among the apostles and saints; and they say it’s because a Pope must have a statue, and they didn’t dare to puthers insidethe church, so they put it upoutside. And if it isn’t a Papessa, what is a woman’s statue doing there, for it wasn’t the Madonna, that’s certain?’‘Oh! that’s a statue of Religion, or the Church.2There never was a woman-pope.’‘Ah, well! you read books. I dare say you know best; but, anyhow, that’s what they say. And, after all, who knows!’1An argument worthy to take rank beside the famous one of ‘Mrs. Brown’ concerning Noah’s Ark.↑2I said this, really thinking at the moment there was such a statue surmounting the apex of the pediment of the façade; but it afterwards came to mind and I have since verified it on the spot, that the statues on the pediment represent the twelve Apostles with Christ in the centre, and there is no female figure there. Among the numerous statues of saints surmounting the colonnade, are a small proportion of female saints, but nooneat all prominent.↑GIACINTA MARESCOTTI.There was a prince Marescotti,1who had two daughters, Cecilia and Giacinta. From her childhood Cecilia had always been gentle and pious, and everyone said, ‘When she grows up she will be a nun.’ Giacenta was proud, handsome, and passionate, and everyone said, ‘She will be a leader of society, and woe betide whoso offends her.’But their father, good man,2knew them better, and one day he announced to them the choice of a state of life which he had made for them; for the pious, gentle Cecilia there was a great lord coming from abroad to make her his wife; but the proud, passionate Giacinta was to enter a convent.The one was as dismayed as the other at the time, though the event showed he had chosen right. Cecilia, who loved quiet and repose, tenderly entreated her father to let her off the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming the head of a great family, while Giacinta made a great noise3at the idea of her beauty and talents being laid up hidden in a nun’s cell. Nevertheless, in those days long gone by, girls were used to obey.4Cecilia married and proved herself an exemplary wife and mother, and carried respect for religion wherever she went.Giacinta, on the other hand, took all her worldly state into her convent with her; her cell was furnished like the drawing-room of a palace, and she insisted on having her maids to wait on her; the other nuns she scarcely spoke to, and treated as the dust under her feet.One day the bishop came to visit the convent. ‘What a smell!’5he said, as he passed the cell of Giacinta Marescotti.‘A smell, indeed! In my cell which is not only the sweetest in the convent, but which is the only one fit to go into!’ exclaimed poor Giacinta in deep indignation. ‘What can you possibly mean by “a smell!”’‘A smell of sin!’ responded the bishop; and it was observed that for a wonder Giacinta made no retort.‘A smell of sin,’ said Giacinta to herself, as she sat alone in her elegant and luxurious cell that night. The words had touched her soul and awakened a train of thoughts latent and undisturbed till then. Always hitherto she had ambitioned the loftiest, most refined objects of research, and thought she knew the secret of attaining them. The bishop’s words spoke to her of there being ‘a more excellent way’ yet. They cast a light upon a higher path than that which she was treading, and revealed to her that those who walked along it, lowly as they might seem, could afford to look down upon hers.She saw that those who despised distinctions were grander than those who courted them, to become, in the end, their slaves; that those who aspired to celestial joys were nobler than those who surrounded themselves with the most exquisite luxuries of earth.6From that day, little by little,7Giacinta’s cell grew nearer and nearer to the pattern of the House of Nazareth. The mirror, the cosmetics, and the easy couch made way for the crucifix, the discipline, and the penitential chain.8From having been shunned as a type of worldliness, she became to her whole order a model of humility and mortification.91The Marescotti were a noble family of Bologna, the second city of the Pontifical Dominions; there were two cardinals of the name.↑2‘Il buon uomo di loro padre.’↑3‘Faceva il diavolo,’ lit. ‘raised the devil.’↑4‘In quei tempi antichi ubbedirono le figlie, capisce.’ ‘Capisce,’ lit.‘understand,’ equivalent to ‘you see.’↑5‘Puzza—puzza di peccato!’ Lit. ‘It stinks—it stinks of sin.’ (See n. 5, p. 13.)↑6I give the story, as near as possible, in the words which the pious faith of the narrator prompted her to use. The success of the final results of a measure may prove that what seemed tyranny was really prudent foresight; the contemporary views of parental responsibility must also be taken into account. But it is impossible for the modern English mind to sympathise readily with so violent an interference with natural instincts.↑7‘A mano, a mano.’↑8‘Catenella,’ lit. ‘little chain,’ an instrument of penance worn by some persons on the arm or waist.↑9The following are briefly the authentic particulars of her life from Moroni, xxx. 194. She was daughter of Marc Antonio Mariscotti and Ottavia Orsini, born in 1535, and baptised by the name of Clarice. Although brought up in the fear of God and led to appreciate holiness, her youth was passed in worldliness and vanity. Her younger sister having been asked in marriage before her, she was so much vexed and annoyed that she became insupportable at home, on which account her father proposed to her to become a nun in the convent of S. Bernardino at Viterbo, where she had been educated, and she adapted herself to his counsel, though without any personal inclination for it. At the end of her noviciate she made her father arrange that she should have a room of her own magnificently furnished. Sister Giacinta lived ten years thus a religious in name but not in mind. Nevertheless she was not without virtue, for she was always obedient to her superior as she had been to her parents; and her modesty, purity, and respect for holy things was observed by all. A serious illness was to her the call of grace; having given up to the abbess of the convent all the things that had been brought in for her use by special privilege, she devoted herself to severe penance and continual meditation. On occasion of a contagious disease with which Viterbo was afflicted, she gave abundant proof of her charity towards her neighbour, for she founded two societies, the object of one of which was to collect assistance for the convalescent and those who had fallen into reduced circumstances; the other to support a hospital built to receive the sick. These two societies, which she called ‘Oblates of Mary,’ still continue (the date of Moroni’s work is 1845) in full activity.↑PASQUINO.11‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’2‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]1The statue called by this name was not originally found in its present situation. The shop of the tailor Pasquino was in the Via in Parione, a turning out of the Via del Governo Vecchio, some little distance off, nor was it discovered at all till after Pasquino’s death. At his time it was buried unperceived in the pavement of the street, and the inequalities of its outline afforded stepping-stones by means of which passengers picked their way through the puddles! Cancellieri (Mercato, appendix, N. iii.)]quotes a passage from a certain Tibaldeo di Ferrara, quoted in a book, his dissertation concerning the author of which is too long to quote. This Tibaldeo, however, says, ‘as the street was being repaired, and I had the shop that was Pasquino’s made level, the trunk of a statue, probably of a gladiator, was found, and the people immediately gave it his name.’ He, however, quotes from other writers mention of other sites for its discovery mostly somewhat nearer to the present situation. The site of the present Palazzo Braschi was then occupied by the so-called Torre Orsini, a building of a very different ground-plan. Cancellieri quotes from more than one MS. diary that at the time the Marquis de Créquy came to Rome as ambassador of Louis XIII. in 1633, the Palazzo de’ Orsini, where he was lodged, was designated as ‘sopra Pasquino.’ And again from another MS. diary, that in 1728, when the palace was bought by the Duca di Bracciano-Odoscalchi, the same designation remained in use. In the Diary of Cracas, under date March 19, 1791, is an entry detailing the care with which the Pasquino statue was removed to a pedestal prepared for it in front of Palazzo Pamfili during the completion of the contiguous portion of the Palazzo Braschi, and its restoration is duly entered on the 14th March of the same year.2It was Adrian VI. (not Alexander VI. as Murray has it), who proposed to throw it into the Tiber. Adrian VI. was a victim of pasquinades for two reasons,—the first, because born at Utrecht and tutor of Charles V., and afterwards viceroy in Spain, during all Charles’ absence in Germany Rome feared at his election that he would set up the Papal See in Spain; and it is not altogether impossible that the popular satires may have had some influence in deciding him on the contrary to repair immediately to Rome,—the second, because he was an energetic and unsparing reformer; and those who were touched by his measures were just those who could afford to pay the hire of the tongues of popular wags.Nor was it only during his life that he was the subject of such criticisms. When his rigorous reign was suddenly brought to a close after he had worn the tiara but twenty months, on the door of his physician was posted this satire, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S.P.Q.R.’3; and his tomb in St. Peter’s, between that of Pius II. and Pius III., was disgraced with this epitaph: ‘Hic jacet impius inter Pios,’ till some years later, when his body was removed to a worthier monument in S. Maria del Anima.↑2There is clearly a typographical error about one of these dates, which could doubtless be corrected by reference to ‘Notizie delle due famose statue di un fiume e di Patroclo dette volgarmente di Marforio e di Pasquino,’ by the same author, Rome, 1789, which I have not been able to see. Moroni, vi. 99, gives 1791 as the year in which it was bought by Duke Braschi, the nephew of Pius VI. while the Pope was in exile in France, and the completion by the rebuilding must, therefore, have been some years later.The date of its discovery is told in the following inscription by the cardinal inhabiting Torre Orsini at the time, and who saved it from destruction:—Oliverii CaraffaBeneficio hic sumAnno Salvati Mundi—MDI.↑3Giovio; Vit. Hadr. VI.↑

1SCIARRA COLONNA.There were two of the Colonna. One was Sciarra; I don’t know the name of the other. They were always fighting against the pope of their time.1At last they took him and shut him up in a tower in the Campagna, and kept him there till they had starved him to death; and when the people found him afterwards, what do you think?—in his extremity he had gnawed off all the tips of his fingers.When these two Colonna found they had actuallykilled a Pope, they got so frightened that they ran away to hide themselves. They ran away to France, to Paris, and at last, when all the money they were able to carry with them was spent, they were obliged to take a place as stablemen in the king’s palace, and they washed the carriages and cleaned down the horses like common men. But they couldn’t hide that they were great lords; the people saw there was something different from themselves about them, and they watched them, and saw that they waited on each other alternately every day at table, and you could see what great ceremony they were used to. Then other things were seen, I forget what now, but little by little, and by one thing and another, people suspected at last who they really were.Then some one went and told the king of France, and he had them called up before him.They came just as they were, in their stable clothes, wooden shoes2and all.The king sat to receive them in a raised seat hung all round with cloth of gold, and he said:‘Now, I know one thing. You two are hiding from justice. Who you are I don’t know exactly for certain. I believe you are the Colonna. If you confess you are the Colonna, I will make the affair straight for you; but, if you will not say, then I will have you shut up in prison till I find out who you are, and what you have done.’Then they owned that they were the Colonna,3and the king sent an ambassador to the Pope that then was, and the thing was arranged, and after a time they came back to Rome.1Litta, ‘Storia delle Famiglie italiane,’ traces that from the beginning the Colonna family was always Ghibeline. The present representatives of the house, however, are reckoned Papalini.↑2‘Zoccolo,’ a wooden sandal kept on the foot by a leather strap over the instep. It is worn by certain ‘scalsi’ or ‘barefooted’ friars, hence called by the people ‘zoccolanti.’ The street near Ponte Sisto in Rome, called Via delle Zoccolette, received its name from a convent of nuns there who also wore ‘zoccoli.’↑3That Sciarra Colonna headed a band of ‘spadassini’ against Boniface VIII., and made himself the tool of Philippe le Bel, is of course true to history, as also that he held him imprisoned for a time at Anagni. The Pontiff’s biographer, Tosti, mentions however only to refute them, ‘le favole Ferretiane,’ to which Sismondi, ‘Storia delle Republiche italiane,’ gives currency, and which embody the floating tradition in the text. ‘Ferreto da Vicenza,’ writes Tosti, ‘narrates that a kind of poison was administered to this great Pontiff, which put him in a state of phrenzy; the servant who waited on him, also, was sent away, and being left alone in the room he is supposed to have gnawed at a stick (in another allusion to the same fable—at page 293—he says, ‘his fingers’ as in the text), and struck his head against the wall so desperately that his white hairs were all stained with blood; finally, that he suffocated himself under the counterpane invoking Beelzebub. But when we think how Boniface arrived at extreme old age, enfeebled with reverses; how, shut up in a room alone, there was no one to be witness to the alleged gnawing and knocking and Satanic invocations, and how that the manner of his death was quite differently related by eye-witnesses, I do not know for whom Sismondi could have thought he was writing when he marred his history by inserting such a fable. What certainly happened, and it is certified by Cardinal Stefaneschi, who was present, and by the Report afterwards drawn up of the acts of Boniface—was, that ‘he was lodged in the Vatican at the time of his death, and breathed his last tranquilly. The bed of the dying Pontiff was surrounded by eight cardinals and by other distinguished persons (Process. Bonif. p. 37, p. 15), to whom, according to the custom of his predecessors, he made confession of faith, affirming, however enfeebled his voice, that he had lived in that faith, and wished to die in it, a Catholic. Consoled with the Viaticum of the Sacraments he gave up his soul to God, weary with the prolonged struggle he had sustained for the rights of the Church, ... thirty-five days after his imprisonment at Anagni’ (vol. ii. p. 286–7). Platina goes into less detail, but also records that he died in Rome (Le vite de’ Pontefici, Venice, 1674, p. 344). The magnanimous stedfastness evinced by Boniface when attacked by Colonna and Nogaret, all abandoned as he was by human aid (detailed by Tosti, p. 276,et seq.), could not but have been succeeded by a grander closing scene than that imagined by Ferreto. Maroni (vi. 17–18) not only narrates that he survived the Anagni affair to return to Rome, but that with great Christian charity he ordered Nogaret, who had been taken prisoner by the Romans in the meantime, to be released from confinement; and [xiv. 283] that he could have had no poison administered to him at Anagni, for all the time he was imprisoned he would eat nothing but eggs on purpose to be proof against it.The best disproof of the story, however, is that given by Tosti (p. 296–7). In the clearing for the rebuilding of the nave of St. Peter’s, 302 years after the death of Boniface, his sepulchre was opened and the grave then revealed the truth. It so happened that his body had scarcely undergone any change, and those who stood by could hence depose that both his head and his hands were quite perfect;there were no marks or blows on the former, and so far from his finger-tips being gnawed, they noticed that the nails even were particularly long. The face also wore a peculiarly placid expression.Several contemporary writers cited by Tosti tell, however, that Benedict XI., Boniface’s successor, died of poison believed to have been administered by Sciarra Colonna at the instigation of Philippe le Bel. But unfortunately for the tradition in the text Moroni [xiv. 283], who also mentions this, adds that Sciarra Colonna died in exile as he deserved. The two Cardinals Colonna, however, who had been exiled with the rest of the family, were reinstated by Benedict XI., and Clement V. in 1305 restored the other members of it to their possessions in the Roman States, where they made themselves obnoxious enough during the Papal residence at Avignon, and were as hostile to Rienzi as they had ever been to the Popes.↑2DONNA OLIMPIA.The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia1are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted2to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.3The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple4nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age weresuch that Cancellieri5tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’1Donna Olimpia Pamfili, nata Maidalchini, wife of the brother of Innocent X.↑2Cancellieri Mercato, § ix. note 7.↑3He had not, however, been originally intended for the Church; had been General of the Pontifical forces before he was Cardinal, and was only in Deacon’s orders.↑4His simplicity was the subject of many contemporarymotsand anecdotes; e.g. at the time of his elevation to the purple the Pasquin statue had been temporarily lost to view by a hoarding put up for the erection of a neighbouring palace; ‘Marforio’ was supposed to express his condolence for the eclipse of his rival in the following distich:‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’His want of capacity seems however to have been compensated by his goodness of heart.↑5Cancellieri Mercato, § viii. As I have been desirous to put nothing in the text but what has reached myself by verbal tradition, I will add some no less interesting details collected by Cancellieri, in this place.It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,6was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 16417that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himselflet down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.8He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) whohad married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,9and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’10to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscriptionAgonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed11to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, andundertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’and‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law12was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpiafuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in hermots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’13but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr.Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’14and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.15There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.Her palace in Piazza Navona became in 1695 the residence of Lord Castlemaine, ambassador of James II. to the Holy See. He had an ox roasted whole before it, and other bounties distributed to the people on occasion of the birth of ‘The Pretender.’↑6A certain Niccolo Caferri was much ridiculed for the spirit of adulation with which he pretended to trace up Innocent X.’s genealogy to Pamphilus, king of Doris, 300 years before the birth of Rome. But the Pope himself was so little ashamed of his origin that Cancellieri tells us he took a piece of cloth for one of his armorial bearings in memory of it.↑7This date, however, must be incorrect, as Innocent X. only began to reign in 1644. This grandiose Campanile is described at length, and a plate of it given in Fontana, ‘Descrizione del tempio Vaticano,’ p. 262,et seq.It was 360 ft. in height.↑8He does not specify what pope, and the wording used seems to imply Innocent X., but this aqueduct is always ascribed to Paul V., twenty years earlier, and is called theAcquaPaola.↑9Described in Cancellieri, ‘Descrizione delle Cappelle Ponteficie,’ cap. x.↑10In Melchiorri’s table of Roman moneys he gives the value (in 1758, a hundred years later) of adoppioas 4 scudi 40 bajocchi; and of adoppiaat 6 scudi, 42 bajocchi. It appears to be the latter the Pope sent for.↑11Dyer says it was theStadiumof Domitian, and Becker, that there is no proof it was ever a circus.↑12Cancellieri calls Innocent hercognato, andcognatoin common conversation now is used for a cousin. Bazzarini explains it as ‘any relationship by marriage.’↑13MS. life of his successor Alex. VII. by Card. Pallavicini, quoted by Novaes: Storia de’ Sommi Pontefici, x. 61.↑14Nothing better than deal, I believe.↑15Mercato, § xxi.↑THE MUNIFICENCE OF PRINCE BORGHESE.[If the Romans remember the vices of their princely families, they are proud of storing up the memory of their virtues too; and the following narrative was told me with great enthusiasm.]Liberality is a distinguishing characteristic of the Borghese family. It was always a matter of emulation who should get taken into their service, and no one who was once placed there ever let himself be sent away again, it was too good a thing to lose.There was a man-servant, however, once who gave the Prince, I think it was the father of this one, an insolent answer, and he turned him off.No one would take that man. Wherever he applied, when they asked him, ‘Where have you lived?’ and he answered, ‘in casa Borghese,’ everyone answered, ‘Oh, if you couldn’t live with Borghese, I’m sure I’ve nothingbetter to offer you!’ and the door was shut in his face. It wasn’t in one place or two, buteverywhere, Borghese’s character is so well known in Rome. As he couldn’t get a place, however, he was reduced to near starvation, and he had a wife and six children, all with nothing to eat. Every article of furniture went to the Monte di Pietà, and almost every article of clothing; and yet hunger stared them in the face.Then the man got desperate, and he went out one night and waited for Borghese in a lonely street in the dark, with a knife in his hand, and said, ‘Your purse!’Borghese thought he had a gang behind him, round the corner, and handed him his purse. But the man only took out three pauls and gave it back, and he looked so thin and haggard that Borghese could not but notice it, dark as it was, though he had forgotten his face.‘That is not a thief, he is some poor fellow who wants relief,’ said Borghese to his servant. ‘Go after him and see what he does, but take care not to be seen,’ and he walked home alone. In less than half an hour the servant came back. He had seen him spend the three pauls in food; had seen him take it home to his family; had seen them scarcely covered with rags; had seen the room denuded of furniture; had heard the man say, as he put the food on the table, ‘Here is wherewith to keep you alive another day, and to-morrow I die in sin, for I had to steal it.’Then Borghese called up the steward (Maestro di Casa), and told him to go to the house and find out who the man was, and leave them what was wanted for the night.The steward did as he was told, and left a scudo that the man might get a supper without eating stolen food, but without saying who sent him, for he had learnt by his inquiries that he was the servant whom Borghese had sent away.The next day Borghese sent and clothed all the family; furnished their place again for them; put the children to schools, and gave the parents ten scudi a month. He wouldn’t take the man back, having once had to send him away—for that was his rule—but he gave him a pension for the rest of his life.‘POPE JOAN.’‘You know, of course, that there was once a Papessa? They have putthatin the books, I suppose?’‘I know there is such a story, but learned writers have proved it was a mere invention.’‘Well, I daresay it isn’t true; but there’s no one in Rome who has not heard of it. And what makes them believe it is this.1Outside of St. Peter’s somewhere there’s a statue of her all among the apostles and saints; and they say it’s because a Pope must have a statue, and they didn’t dare to puthers insidethe church, so they put it upoutside. And if it isn’t a Papessa, what is a woman’s statue doing there, for it wasn’t the Madonna, that’s certain?’‘Oh! that’s a statue of Religion, or the Church.2There never was a woman-pope.’‘Ah, well! you read books. I dare say you know best; but, anyhow, that’s what they say. And, after all, who knows!’1An argument worthy to take rank beside the famous one of ‘Mrs. Brown’ concerning Noah’s Ark.↑2I said this, really thinking at the moment there was such a statue surmounting the apex of the pediment of the façade; but it afterwards came to mind and I have since verified it on the spot, that the statues on the pediment represent the twelve Apostles with Christ in the centre, and there is no female figure there. Among the numerous statues of saints surmounting the colonnade, are a small proportion of female saints, but nooneat all prominent.↑GIACINTA MARESCOTTI.There was a prince Marescotti,1who had two daughters, Cecilia and Giacinta. From her childhood Cecilia had always been gentle and pious, and everyone said, ‘When she grows up she will be a nun.’ Giacenta was proud, handsome, and passionate, and everyone said, ‘She will be a leader of society, and woe betide whoso offends her.’But their father, good man,2knew them better, and one day he announced to them the choice of a state of life which he had made for them; for the pious, gentle Cecilia there was a great lord coming from abroad to make her his wife; but the proud, passionate Giacinta was to enter a convent.The one was as dismayed as the other at the time, though the event showed he had chosen right. Cecilia, who loved quiet and repose, tenderly entreated her father to let her off the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming the head of a great family, while Giacinta made a great noise3at the idea of her beauty and talents being laid up hidden in a nun’s cell. Nevertheless, in those days long gone by, girls were used to obey.4Cecilia married and proved herself an exemplary wife and mother, and carried respect for religion wherever she went.Giacinta, on the other hand, took all her worldly state into her convent with her; her cell was furnished like the drawing-room of a palace, and she insisted on having her maids to wait on her; the other nuns she scarcely spoke to, and treated as the dust under her feet.One day the bishop came to visit the convent. ‘What a smell!’5he said, as he passed the cell of Giacinta Marescotti.‘A smell, indeed! In my cell which is not only the sweetest in the convent, but which is the only one fit to go into!’ exclaimed poor Giacinta in deep indignation. ‘What can you possibly mean by “a smell!”’‘A smell of sin!’ responded the bishop; and it was observed that for a wonder Giacinta made no retort.‘A smell of sin,’ said Giacinta to herself, as she sat alone in her elegant and luxurious cell that night. The words had touched her soul and awakened a train of thoughts latent and undisturbed till then. Always hitherto she had ambitioned the loftiest, most refined objects of research, and thought she knew the secret of attaining them. The bishop’s words spoke to her of there being ‘a more excellent way’ yet. They cast a light upon a higher path than that which she was treading, and revealed to her that those who walked along it, lowly as they might seem, could afford to look down upon hers.She saw that those who despised distinctions were grander than those who courted them, to become, in the end, their slaves; that those who aspired to celestial joys were nobler than those who surrounded themselves with the most exquisite luxuries of earth.6From that day, little by little,7Giacinta’s cell grew nearer and nearer to the pattern of the House of Nazareth. The mirror, the cosmetics, and the easy couch made way for the crucifix, the discipline, and the penitential chain.8From having been shunned as a type of worldliness, she became to her whole order a model of humility and mortification.91The Marescotti were a noble family of Bologna, the second city of the Pontifical Dominions; there were two cardinals of the name.↑2‘Il buon uomo di loro padre.’↑3‘Faceva il diavolo,’ lit. ‘raised the devil.’↑4‘In quei tempi antichi ubbedirono le figlie, capisce.’ ‘Capisce,’ lit.‘understand,’ equivalent to ‘you see.’↑5‘Puzza—puzza di peccato!’ Lit. ‘It stinks—it stinks of sin.’ (See n. 5, p. 13.)↑6I give the story, as near as possible, in the words which the pious faith of the narrator prompted her to use. The success of the final results of a measure may prove that what seemed tyranny was really prudent foresight; the contemporary views of parental responsibility must also be taken into account. But it is impossible for the modern English mind to sympathise readily with so violent an interference with natural instincts.↑7‘A mano, a mano.’↑8‘Catenella,’ lit. ‘little chain,’ an instrument of penance worn by some persons on the arm or waist.↑9The following are briefly the authentic particulars of her life from Moroni, xxx. 194. She was daughter of Marc Antonio Mariscotti and Ottavia Orsini, born in 1535, and baptised by the name of Clarice. Although brought up in the fear of God and led to appreciate holiness, her youth was passed in worldliness and vanity. Her younger sister having been asked in marriage before her, she was so much vexed and annoyed that she became insupportable at home, on which account her father proposed to her to become a nun in the convent of S. Bernardino at Viterbo, where she had been educated, and she adapted herself to his counsel, though without any personal inclination for it. At the end of her noviciate she made her father arrange that she should have a room of her own magnificently furnished. Sister Giacinta lived ten years thus a religious in name but not in mind. Nevertheless she was not without virtue, for she was always obedient to her superior as she had been to her parents; and her modesty, purity, and respect for holy things was observed by all. A serious illness was to her the call of grace; having given up to the abbess of the convent all the things that had been brought in for her use by special privilege, she devoted herself to severe penance and continual meditation. On occasion of a contagious disease with which Viterbo was afflicted, she gave abundant proof of her charity towards her neighbour, for she founded two societies, the object of one of which was to collect assistance for the convalescent and those who had fallen into reduced circumstances; the other to support a hospital built to receive the sick. These two societies, which she called ‘Oblates of Mary,’ still continue (the date of Moroni’s work is 1845) in full activity.↑PASQUINO.11‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’2‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]1The statue called by this name was not originally found in its present situation. The shop of the tailor Pasquino was in the Via in Parione, a turning out of the Via del Governo Vecchio, some little distance off, nor was it discovered at all till after Pasquino’s death. At his time it was buried unperceived in the pavement of the street, and the inequalities of its outline afforded stepping-stones by means of which passengers picked their way through the puddles! Cancellieri (Mercato, appendix, N. iii.)]quotes a passage from a certain Tibaldeo di Ferrara, quoted in a book, his dissertation concerning the author of which is too long to quote. This Tibaldeo, however, says, ‘as the street was being repaired, and I had the shop that was Pasquino’s made level, the trunk of a statue, probably of a gladiator, was found, and the people immediately gave it his name.’ He, however, quotes from other writers mention of other sites for its discovery mostly somewhat nearer to the present situation. The site of the present Palazzo Braschi was then occupied by the so-called Torre Orsini, a building of a very different ground-plan. Cancellieri quotes from more than one MS. diary that at the time the Marquis de Créquy came to Rome as ambassador of Louis XIII. in 1633, the Palazzo de’ Orsini, where he was lodged, was designated as ‘sopra Pasquino.’ And again from another MS. diary, that in 1728, when the palace was bought by the Duca di Bracciano-Odoscalchi, the same designation remained in use. In the Diary of Cracas, under date March 19, 1791, is an entry detailing the care with which the Pasquino statue was removed to a pedestal prepared for it in front of Palazzo Pamfili during the completion of the contiguous portion of the Palazzo Braschi, and its restoration is duly entered on the 14th March of the same year.2It was Adrian VI. (not Alexander VI. as Murray has it), who proposed to throw it into the Tiber. Adrian VI. was a victim of pasquinades for two reasons,—the first, because born at Utrecht and tutor of Charles V., and afterwards viceroy in Spain, during all Charles’ absence in Germany Rome feared at his election that he would set up the Papal See in Spain; and it is not altogether impossible that the popular satires may have had some influence in deciding him on the contrary to repair immediately to Rome,—the second, because he was an energetic and unsparing reformer; and those who were touched by his measures were just those who could afford to pay the hire of the tongues of popular wags.Nor was it only during his life that he was the subject of such criticisms. When his rigorous reign was suddenly brought to a close after he had worn the tiara but twenty months, on the door of his physician was posted this satire, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S.P.Q.R.’3; and his tomb in St. Peter’s, between that of Pius II. and Pius III., was disgraced with this epitaph: ‘Hic jacet impius inter Pios,’ till some years later, when his body was removed to a worthier monument in S. Maria del Anima.↑2There is clearly a typographical error about one of these dates, which could doubtless be corrected by reference to ‘Notizie delle due famose statue di un fiume e di Patroclo dette volgarmente di Marforio e di Pasquino,’ by the same author, Rome, 1789, which I have not been able to see. Moroni, vi. 99, gives 1791 as the year in which it was bought by Duke Braschi, the nephew of Pius VI. while the Pope was in exile in France, and the completion by the rebuilding must, therefore, have been some years later.The date of its discovery is told in the following inscription by the cardinal inhabiting Torre Orsini at the time, and who saved it from destruction:—Oliverii CaraffaBeneficio hic sumAnno Salvati Mundi—MDI.↑3Giovio; Vit. Hadr. VI.↑

1SCIARRA COLONNA.There were two of the Colonna. One was Sciarra; I don’t know the name of the other. They were always fighting against the pope of their time.1At last they took him and shut him up in a tower in the Campagna, and kept him there till they had starved him to death; and when the people found him afterwards, what do you think?—in his extremity he had gnawed off all the tips of his fingers.When these two Colonna found they had actuallykilled a Pope, they got so frightened that they ran away to hide themselves. They ran away to France, to Paris, and at last, when all the money they were able to carry with them was spent, they were obliged to take a place as stablemen in the king’s palace, and they washed the carriages and cleaned down the horses like common men. But they couldn’t hide that they were great lords; the people saw there was something different from themselves about them, and they watched them, and saw that they waited on each other alternately every day at table, and you could see what great ceremony they were used to. Then other things were seen, I forget what now, but little by little, and by one thing and another, people suspected at last who they really were.Then some one went and told the king of France, and he had them called up before him.They came just as they were, in their stable clothes, wooden shoes2and all.The king sat to receive them in a raised seat hung all round with cloth of gold, and he said:‘Now, I know one thing. You two are hiding from justice. Who you are I don’t know exactly for certain. I believe you are the Colonna. If you confess you are the Colonna, I will make the affair straight for you; but, if you will not say, then I will have you shut up in prison till I find out who you are, and what you have done.’Then they owned that they were the Colonna,3and the king sent an ambassador to the Pope that then was, and the thing was arranged, and after a time they came back to Rome.1Litta, ‘Storia delle Famiglie italiane,’ traces that from the beginning the Colonna family was always Ghibeline. The present representatives of the house, however, are reckoned Papalini.↑2‘Zoccolo,’ a wooden sandal kept on the foot by a leather strap over the instep. It is worn by certain ‘scalsi’ or ‘barefooted’ friars, hence called by the people ‘zoccolanti.’ The street near Ponte Sisto in Rome, called Via delle Zoccolette, received its name from a convent of nuns there who also wore ‘zoccoli.’↑3That Sciarra Colonna headed a band of ‘spadassini’ against Boniface VIII., and made himself the tool of Philippe le Bel, is of course true to history, as also that he held him imprisoned for a time at Anagni. The Pontiff’s biographer, Tosti, mentions however only to refute them, ‘le favole Ferretiane,’ to which Sismondi, ‘Storia delle Republiche italiane,’ gives currency, and which embody the floating tradition in the text. ‘Ferreto da Vicenza,’ writes Tosti, ‘narrates that a kind of poison was administered to this great Pontiff, which put him in a state of phrenzy; the servant who waited on him, also, was sent away, and being left alone in the room he is supposed to have gnawed at a stick (in another allusion to the same fable—at page 293—he says, ‘his fingers’ as in the text), and struck his head against the wall so desperately that his white hairs were all stained with blood; finally, that he suffocated himself under the counterpane invoking Beelzebub. But when we think how Boniface arrived at extreme old age, enfeebled with reverses; how, shut up in a room alone, there was no one to be witness to the alleged gnawing and knocking and Satanic invocations, and how that the manner of his death was quite differently related by eye-witnesses, I do not know for whom Sismondi could have thought he was writing when he marred his history by inserting such a fable. What certainly happened, and it is certified by Cardinal Stefaneschi, who was present, and by the Report afterwards drawn up of the acts of Boniface—was, that ‘he was lodged in the Vatican at the time of his death, and breathed his last tranquilly. The bed of the dying Pontiff was surrounded by eight cardinals and by other distinguished persons (Process. Bonif. p. 37, p. 15), to whom, according to the custom of his predecessors, he made confession of faith, affirming, however enfeebled his voice, that he had lived in that faith, and wished to die in it, a Catholic. Consoled with the Viaticum of the Sacraments he gave up his soul to God, weary with the prolonged struggle he had sustained for the rights of the Church, ... thirty-five days after his imprisonment at Anagni’ (vol. ii. p. 286–7). Platina goes into less detail, but also records that he died in Rome (Le vite de’ Pontefici, Venice, 1674, p. 344). The magnanimous stedfastness evinced by Boniface when attacked by Colonna and Nogaret, all abandoned as he was by human aid (detailed by Tosti, p. 276,et seq.), could not but have been succeeded by a grander closing scene than that imagined by Ferreto. Maroni (vi. 17–18) not only narrates that he survived the Anagni affair to return to Rome, but that with great Christian charity he ordered Nogaret, who had been taken prisoner by the Romans in the meantime, to be released from confinement; and [xiv. 283] that he could have had no poison administered to him at Anagni, for all the time he was imprisoned he would eat nothing but eggs on purpose to be proof against it.The best disproof of the story, however, is that given by Tosti (p. 296–7). In the clearing for the rebuilding of the nave of St. Peter’s, 302 years after the death of Boniface, his sepulchre was opened and the grave then revealed the truth. It so happened that his body had scarcely undergone any change, and those who stood by could hence depose that both his head and his hands were quite perfect;there were no marks or blows on the former, and so far from his finger-tips being gnawed, they noticed that the nails even were particularly long. The face also wore a peculiarly placid expression.Several contemporary writers cited by Tosti tell, however, that Benedict XI., Boniface’s successor, died of poison believed to have been administered by Sciarra Colonna at the instigation of Philippe le Bel. But unfortunately for the tradition in the text Moroni [xiv. 283], who also mentions this, adds that Sciarra Colonna died in exile as he deserved. The two Cardinals Colonna, however, who had been exiled with the rest of the family, were reinstated by Benedict XI., and Clement V. in 1305 restored the other members of it to their possessions in the Roman States, where they made themselves obnoxious enough during the Papal residence at Avignon, and were as hostile to Rienzi as they had ever been to the Popes.↑

1SCIARRA COLONNA.

There were two of the Colonna. One was Sciarra; I don’t know the name of the other. They were always fighting against the pope of their time.1At last they took him and shut him up in a tower in the Campagna, and kept him there till they had starved him to death; and when the people found him afterwards, what do you think?—in his extremity he had gnawed off all the tips of his fingers.When these two Colonna found they had actuallykilled a Pope, they got so frightened that they ran away to hide themselves. They ran away to France, to Paris, and at last, when all the money they were able to carry with them was spent, they were obliged to take a place as stablemen in the king’s palace, and they washed the carriages and cleaned down the horses like common men. But they couldn’t hide that they were great lords; the people saw there was something different from themselves about them, and they watched them, and saw that they waited on each other alternately every day at table, and you could see what great ceremony they were used to. Then other things were seen, I forget what now, but little by little, and by one thing and another, people suspected at last who they really were.Then some one went and told the king of France, and he had them called up before him.They came just as they were, in their stable clothes, wooden shoes2and all.The king sat to receive them in a raised seat hung all round with cloth of gold, and he said:‘Now, I know one thing. You two are hiding from justice. Who you are I don’t know exactly for certain. I believe you are the Colonna. If you confess you are the Colonna, I will make the affair straight for you; but, if you will not say, then I will have you shut up in prison till I find out who you are, and what you have done.’Then they owned that they were the Colonna,3and the king sent an ambassador to the Pope that then was, and the thing was arranged, and after a time they came back to Rome.

There were two of the Colonna. One was Sciarra; I don’t know the name of the other. They were always fighting against the pope of their time.1At last they took him and shut him up in a tower in the Campagna, and kept him there till they had starved him to death; and when the people found him afterwards, what do you think?—in his extremity he had gnawed off all the tips of his fingers.

When these two Colonna found they had actuallykilled a Pope, they got so frightened that they ran away to hide themselves. They ran away to France, to Paris, and at last, when all the money they were able to carry with them was spent, they were obliged to take a place as stablemen in the king’s palace, and they washed the carriages and cleaned down the horses like common men. But they couldn’t hide that they were great lords; the people saw there was something different from themselves about them, and they watched them, and saw that they waited on each other alternately every day at table, and you could see what great ceremony they were used to. Then other things were seen, I forget what now, but little by little, and by one thing and another, people suspected at last who they really were.

Then some one went and told the king of France, and he had them called up before him.

They came just as they were, in their stable clothes, wooden shoes2and all.

The king sat to receive them in a raised seat hung all round with cloth of gold, and he said:

‘Now, I know one thing. You two are hiding from justice. Who you are I don’t know exactly for certain. I believe you are the Colonna. If you confess you are the Colonna, I will make the affair straight for you; but, if you will not say, then I will have you shut up in prison till I find out who you are, and what you have done.’

Then they owned that they were the Colonna,3and the king sent an ambassador to the Pope that then was, and the thing was arranged, and after a time they came back to Rome.

1Litta, ‘Storia delle Famiglie italiane,’ traces that from the beginning the Colonna family was always Ghibeline. The present representatives of the house, however, are reckoned Papalini.↑2‘Zoccolo,’ a wooden sandal kept on the foot by a leather strap over the instep. It is worn by certain ‘scalsi’ or ‘barefooted’ friars, hence called by the people ‘zoccolanti.’ The street near Ponte Sisto in Rome, called Via delle Zoccolette, received its name from a convent of nuns there who also wore ‘zoccoli.’↑3That Sciarra Colonna headed a band of ‘spadassini’ against Boniface VIII., and made himself the tool of Philippe le Bel, is of course true to history, as also that he held him imprisoned for a time at Anagni. The Pontiff’s biographer, Tosti, mentions however only to refute them, ‘le favole Ferretiane,’ to which Sismondi, ‘Storia delle Republiche italiane,’ gives currency, and which embody the floating tradition in the text. ‘Ferreto da Vicenza,’ writes Tosti, ‘narrates that a kind of poison was administered to this great Pontiff, which put him in a state of phrenzy; the servant who waited on him, also, was sent away, and being left alone in the room he is supposed to have gnawed at a stick (in another allusion to the same fable—at page 293—he says, ‘his fingers’ as in the text), and struck his head against the wall so desperately that his white hairs were all stained with blood; finally, that he suffocated himself under the counterpane invoking Beelzebub. But when we think how Boniface arrived at extreme old age, enfeebled with reverses; how, shut up in a room alone, there was no one to be witness to the alleged gnawing and knocking and Satanic invocations, and how that the manner of his death was quite differently related by eye-witnesses, I do not know for whom Sismondi could have thought he was writing when he marred his history by inserting such a fable. What certainly happened, and it is certified by Cardinal Stefaneschi, who was present, and by the Report afterwards drawn up of the acts of Boniface—was, that ‘he was lodged in the Vatican at the time of his death, and breathed his last tranquilly. The bed of the dying Pontiff was surrounded by eight cardinals and by other distinguished persons (Process. Bonif. p. 37, p. 15), to whom, according to the custom of his predecessors, he made confession of faith, affirming, however enfeebled his voice, that he had lived in that faith, and wished to die in it, a Catholic. Consoled with the Viaticum of the Sacraments he gave up his soul to God, weary with the prolonged struggle he had sustained for the rights of the Church, ... thirty-five days after his imprisonment at Anagni’ (vol. ii. p. 286–7). Platina goes into less detail, but also records that he died in Rome (Le vite de’ Pontefici, Venice, 1674, p. 344). The magnanimous stedfastness evinced by Boniface when attacked by Colonna and Nogaret, all abandoned as he was by human aid (detailed by Tosti, p. 276,et seq.), could not but have been succeeded by a grander closing scene than that imagined by Ferreto. Maroni (vi. 17–18) not only narrates that he survived the Anagni affair to return to Rome, but that with great Christian charity he ordered Nogaret, who had been taken prisoner by the Romans in the meantime, to be released from confinement; and [xiv. 283] that he could have had no poison administered to him at Anagni, for all the time he was imprisoned he would eat nothing but eggs on purpose to be proof against it.The best disproof of the story, however, is that given by Tosti (p. 296–7). In the clearing for the rebuilding of the nave of St. Peter’s, 302 years after the death of Boniface, his sepulchre was opened and the grave then revealed the truth. It so happened that his body had scarcely undergone any change, and those who stood by could hence depose that both his head and his hands were quite perfect;there were no marks or blows on the former, and so far from his finger-tips being gnawed, they noticed that the nails even were particularly long. The face also wore a peculiarly placid expression.Several contemporary writers cited by Tosti tell, however, that Benedict XI., Boniface’s successor, died of poison believed to have been administered by Sciarra Colonna at the instigation of Philippe le Bel. But unfortunately for the tradition in the text Moroni [xiv. 283], who also mentions this, adds that Sciarra Colonna died in exile as he deserved. The two Cardinals Colonna, however, who had been exiled with the rest of the family, were reinstated by Benedict XI., and Clement V. in 1305 restored the other members of it to their possessions in the Roman States, where they made themselves obnoxious enough during the Papal residence at Avignon, and were as hostile to Rienzi as they had ever been to the Popes.↑

1Litta, ‘Storia delle Famiglie italiane,’ traces that from the beginning the Colonna family was always Ghibeline. The present representatives of the house, however, are reckoned Papalini.↑

2‘Zoccolo,’ a wooden sandal kept on the foot by a leather strap over the instep. It is worn by certain ‘scalsi’ or ‘barefooted’ friars, hence called by the people ‘zoccolanti.’ The street near Ponte Sisto in Rome, called Via delle Zoccolette, received its name from a convent of nuns there who also wore ‘zoccoli.’↑

3That Sciarra Colonna headed a band of ‘spadassini’ against Boniface VIII., and made himself the tool of Philippe le Bel, is of course true to history, as also that he held him imprisoned for a time at Anagni. The Pontiff’s biographer, Tosti, mentions however only to refute them, ‘le favole Ferretiane,’ to which Sismondi, ‘Storia delle Republiche italiane,’ gives currency, and which embody the floating tradition in the text. ‘Ferreto da Vicenza,’ writes Tosti, ‘narrates that a kind of poison was administered to this great Pontiff, which put him in a state of phrenzy; the servant who waited on him, also, was sent away, and being left alone in the room he is supposed to have gnawed at a stick (in another allusion to the same fable—at page 293—he says, ‘his fingers’ as in the text), and struck his head against the wall so desperately that his white hairs were all stained with blood; finally, that he suffocated himself under the counterpane invoking Beelzebub. But when we think how Boniface arrived at extreme old age, enfeebled with reverses; how, shut up in a room alone, there was no one to be witness to the alleged gnawing and knocking and Satanic invocations, and how that the manner of his death was quite differently related by eye-witnesses, I do not know for whom Sismondi could have thought he was writing when he marred his history by inserting such a fable. What certainly happened, and it is certified by Cardinal Stefaneschi, who was present, and by the Report afterwards drawn up of the acts of Boniface—was, that ‘he was lodged in the Vatican at the time of his death, and breathed his last tranquilly. The bed of the dying Pontiff was surrounded by eight cardinals and by other distinguished persons (Process. Bonif. p. 37, p. 15), to whom, according to the custom of his predecessors, he made confession of faith, affirming, however enfeebled his voice, that he had lived in that faith, and wished to die in it, a Catholic. Consoled with the Viaticum of the Sacraments he gave up his soul to God, weary with the prolonged struggle he had sustained for the rights of the Church, ... thirty-five days after his imprisonment at Anagni’ (vol. ii. p. 286–7). Platina goes into less detail, but also records that he died in Rome (Le vite de’ Pontefici, Venice, 1674, p. 344). The magnanimous stedfastness evinced by Boniface when attacked by Colonna and Nogaret, all abandoned as he was by human aid (detailed by Tosti, p. 276,et seq.), could not but have been succeeded by a grander closing scene than that imagined by Ferreto. Maroni (vi. 17–18) not only narrates that he survived the Anagni affair to return to Rome, but that with great Christian charity he ordered Nogaret, who had been taken prisoner by the Romans in the meantime, to be released from confinement; and [xiv. 283] that he could have had no poison administered to him at Anagni, for all the time he was imprisoned he would eat nothing but eggs on purpose to be proof against it.The best disproof of the story, however, is that given by Tosti (p. 296–7). In the clearing for the rebuilding of the nave of St. Peter’s, 302 years after the death of Boniface, his sepulchre was opened and the grave then revealed the truth. It so happened that his body had scarcely undergone any change, and those who stood by could hence depose that both his head and his hands were quite perfect;there were no marks or blows on the former, and so far from his finger-tips being gnawed, they noticed that the nails even were particularly long. The face also wore a peculiarly placid expression.

Several contemporary writers cited by Tosti tell, however, that Benedict XI., Boniface’s successor, died of poison believed to have been administered by Sciarra Colonna at the instigation of Philippe le Bel. But unfortunately for the tradition in the text Moroni [xiv. 283], who also mentions this, adds that Sciarra Colonna died in exile as he deserved. The two Cardinals Colonna, however, who had been exiled with the rest of the family, were reinstated by Benedict XI., and Clement V. in 1305 restored the other members of it to their possessions in the Roman States, where they made themselves obnoxious enough during the Papal residence at Avignon, and were as hostile to Rienzi as they had ever been to the Popes.↑

2DONNA OLIMPIA.The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia1are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted2to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.3The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple4nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age weresuch that Cancellieri5tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’1Donna Olimpia Pamfili, nata Maidalchini, wife of the brother of Innocent X.↑2Cancellieri Mercato, § ix. note 7.↑3He had not, however, been originally intended for the Church; had been General of the Pontifical forces before he was Cardinal, and was only in Deacon’s orders.↑4His simplicity was the subject of many contemporarymotsand anecdotes; e.g. at the time of his elevation to the purple the Pasquin statue had been temporarily lost to view by a hoarding put up for the erection of a neighbouring palace; ‘Marforio’ was supposed to express his condolence for the eclipse of his rival in the following distich:‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’His want of capacity seems however to have been compensated by his goodness of heart.↑5Cancellieri Mercato, § viii. As I have been desirous to put nothing in the text but what has reached myself by verbal tradition, I will add some no less interesting details collected by Cancellieri, in this place.It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,6was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 16417that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himselflet down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.8He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) whohad married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,9and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’10to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscriptionAgonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed11to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, andundertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’and‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law12was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpiafuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in hermots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’13but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr.Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’14and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.15There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.Her palace in Piazza Navona became in 1695 the residence of Lord Castlemaine, ambassador of James II. to the Holy See. He had an ox roasted whole before it, and other bounties distributed to the people on occasion of the birth of ‘The Pretender.’↑6A certain Niccolo Caferri was much ridiculed for the spirit of adulation with which he pretended to trace up Innocent X.’s genealogy to Pamphilus, king of Doris, 300 years before the birth of Rome. But the Pope himself was so little ashamed of his origin that Cancellieri tells us he took a piece of cloth for one of his armorial bearings in memory of it.↑7This date, however, must be incorrect, as Innocent X. only began to reign in 1644. This grandiose Campanile is described at length, and a plate of it given in Fontana, ‘Descrizione del tempio Vaticano,’ p. 262,et seq.It was 360 ft. in height.↑8He does not specify what pope, and the wording used seems to imply Innocent X., but this aqueduct is always ascribed to Paul V., twenty years earlier, and is called theAcquaPaola.↑9Described in Cancellieri, ‘Descrizione delle Cappelle Ponteficie,’ cap. x.↑10In Melchiorri’s table of Roman moneys he gives the value (in 1758, a hundred years later) of adoppioas 4 scudi 40 bajocchi; and of adoppiaat 6 scudi, 42 bajocchi. It appears to be the latter the Pope sent for.↑11Dyer says it was theStadiumof Domitian, and Becker, that there is no proof it was ever a circus.↑12Cancellieri calls Innocent hercognato, andcognatoin common conversation now is used for a cousin. Bazzarini explains it as ‘any relationship by marriage.’↑13MS. life of his successor Alex. VII. by Card. Pallavicini, quoted by Novaes: Storia de’ Sommi Pontefici, x. 61.↑14Nothing better than deal, I believe.↑15Mercato, § xxi.↑

2DONNA OLIMPIA.

The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia1are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted2to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.3The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple4nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age weresuch that Cancellieri5tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’

The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia1are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted2to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.3The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple4nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age weresuch that Cancellieri5tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’

1Donna Olimpia Pamfili, nata Maidalchini, wife of the brother of Innocent X.↑2Cancellieri Mercato, § ix. note 7.↑3He had not, however, been originally intended for the Church; had been General of the Pontifical forces before he was Cardinal, and was only in Deacon’s orders.↑4His simplicity was the subject of many contemporarymotsand anecdotes; e.g. at the time of his elevation to the purple the Pasquin statue had been temporarily lost to view by a hoarding put up for the erection of a neighbouring palace; ‘Marforio’ was supposed to express his condolence for the eclipse of his rival in the following distich:‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’His want of capacity seems however to have been compensated by his goodness of heart.↑5Cancellieri Mercato, § viii. As I have been desirous to put nothing in the text but what has reached myself by verbal tradition, I will add some no less interesting details collected by Cancellieri, in this place.It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,6was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 16417that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himselflet down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.8He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) whohad married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,9and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’10to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscriptionAgonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed11to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, andundertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’and‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law12was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpiafuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in hermots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’13but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr.Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’14and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.15There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.Her palace in Piazza Navona became in 1695 the residence of Lord Castlemaine, ambassador of James II. to the Holy See. He had an ox roasted whole before it, and other bounties distributed to the people on occasion of the birth of ‘The Pretender.’↑6A certain Niccolo Caferri was much ridiculed for the spirit of adulation with which he pretended to trace up Innocent X.’s genealogy to Pamphilus, king of Doris, 300 years before the birth of Rome. But the Pope himself was so little ashamed of his origin that Cancellieri tells us he took a piece of cloth for one of his armorial bearings in memory of it.↑7This date, however, must be incorrect, as Innocent X. only began to reign in 1644. This grandiose Campanile is described at length, and a plate of it given in Fontana, ‘Descrizione del tempio Vaticano,’ p. 262,et seq.It was 360 ft. in height.↑8He does not specify what pope, and the wording used seems to imply Innocent X., but this aqueduct is always ascribed to Paul V., twenty years earlier, and is called theAcquaPaola.↑9Described in Cancellieri, ‘Descrizione delle Cappelle Ponteficie,’ cap. x.↑10In Melchiorri’s table of Roman moneys he gives the value (in 1758, a hundred years later) of adoppioas 4 scudi 40 bajocchi; and of adoppiaat 6 scudi, 42 bajocchi. It appears to be the latter the Pope sent for.↑11Dyer says it was theStadiumof Domitian, and Becker, that there is no proof it was ever a circus.↑12Cancellieri calls Innocent hercognato, andcognatoin common conversation now is used for a cousin. Bazzarini explains it as ‘any relationship by marriage.’↑13MS. life of his successor Alex. VII. by Card. Pallavicini, quoted by Novaes: Storia de’ Sommi Pontefici, x. 61.↑14Nothing better than deal, I believe.↑15Mercato, § xxi.↑

1Donna Olimpia Pamfili, nata Maidalchini, wife of the brother of Innocent X.↑

2Cancellieri Mercato, § ix. note 7.↑

3He had not, however, been originally intended for the Church; had been General of the Pontifical forces before he was Cardinal, and was only in Deacon’s orders.↑

4His simplicity was the subject of many contemporarymotsand anecdotes; e.g. at the time of his elevation to the purple the Pasquin statue had been temporarily lost to view by a hoarding put up for the erection of a neighbouring palace; ‘Marforio’ was supposed to express his condolence for the eclipse of his rival in the following distich:

‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’

‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’

‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’

‘Non piangere PasquinoChè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’

‘Non piangere Pasquino

Chè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’

His want of capacity seems however to have been compensated by his goodness of heart.↑

5Cancellieri Mercato, § viii. As I have been desirous to put nothing in the text but what has reached myself by verbal tradition, I will add some no less interesting details collected by Cancellieri, in this place.

It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,6was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 16417that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himselflet down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.8He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.

It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) whohad married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.

The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,9and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’10to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscriptionAgonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed11to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, andundertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:

‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’

‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’

‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’

‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’

‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:

Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’

and

‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’

‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’

‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’

‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’

‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’

To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law12was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpiafuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’

Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in hermots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.

There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’13but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr.Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’14and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.

When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.15There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.

Her palace in Piazza Navona became in 1695 the residence of Lord Castlemaine, ambassador of James II. to the Holy See. He had an ox roasted whole before it, and other bounties distributed to the people on occasion of the birth of ‘The Pretender.’↑

6A certain Niccolo Caferri was much ridiculed for the spirit of adulation with which he pretended to trace up Innocent X.’s genealogy to Pamphilus, king of Doris, 300 years before the birth of Rome. But the Pope himself was so little ashamed of his origin that Cancellieri tells us he took a piece of cloth for one of his armorial bearings in memory of it.↑

7This date, however, must be incorrect, as Innocent X. only began to reign in 1644. This grandiose Campanile is described at length, and a plate of it given in Fontana, ‘Descrizione del tempio Vaticano,’ p. 262,et seq.It was 360 ft. in height.↑

8He does not specify what pope, and the wording used seems to imply Innocent X., but this aqueduct is always ascribed to Paul V., twenty years earlier, and is called theAcquaPaola.↑

9Described in Cancellieri, ‘Descrizione delle Cappelle Ponteficie,’ cap. x.↑

10In Melchiorri’s table of Roman moneys he gives the value (in 1758, a hundred years later) of adoppioas 4 scudi 40 bajocchi; and of adoppiaat 6 scudi, 42 bajocchi. It appears to be the latter the Pope sent for.↑

11Dyer says it was theStadiumof Domitian, and Becker, that there is no proof it was ever a circus.↑

12Cancellieri calls Innocent hercognato, andcognatoin common conversation now is used for a cousin. Bazzarini explains it as ‘any relationship by marriage.’↑

13MS. life of his successor Alex. VII. by Card. Pallavicini, quoted by Novaes: Storia de’ Sommi Pontefici, x. 61.↑

14Nothing better than deal, I believe.↑

15Mercato, § xxi.↑

THE MUNIFICENCE OF PRINCE BORGHESE.[If the Romans remember the vices of their princely families, they are proud of storing up the memory of their virtues too; and the following narrative was told me with great enthusiasm.]Liberality is a distinguishing characteristic of the Borghese family. It was always a matter of emulation who should get taken into their service, and no one who was once placed there ever let himself be sent away again, it was too good a thing to lose.There was a man-servant, however, once who gave the Prince, I think it was the father of this one, an insolent answer, and he turned him off.No one would take that man. Wherever he applied, when they asked him, ‘Where have you lived?’ and he answered, ‘in casa Borghese,’ everyone answered, ‘Oh, if you couldn’t live with Borghese, I’m sure I’ve nothingbetter to offer you!’ and the door was shut in his face. It wasn’t in one place or two, buteverywhere, Borghese’s character is so well known in Rome. As he couldn’t get a place, however, he was reduced to near starvation, and he had a wife and six children, all with nothing to eat. Every article of furniture went to the Monte di Pietà, and almost every article of clothing; and yet hunger stared them in the face.Then the man got desperate, and he went out one night and waited for Borghese in a lonely street in the dark, with a knife in his hand, and said, ‘Your purse!’Borghese thought he had a gang behind him, round the corner, and handed him his purse. But the man only took out three pauls and gave it back, and he looked so thin and haggard that Borghese could not but notice it, dark as it was, though he had forgotten his face.‘That is not a thief, he is some poor fellow who wants relief,’ said Borghese to his servant. ‘Go after him and see what he does, but take care not to be seen,’ and he walked home alone. In less than half an hour the servant came back. He had seen him spend the three pauls in food; had seen him take it home to his family; had seen them scarcely covered with rags; had seen the room denuded of furniture; had heard the man say, as he put the food on the table, ‘Here is wherewith to keep you alive another day, and to-morrow I die in sin, for I had to steal it.’Then Borghese called up the steward (Maestro di Casa), and told him to go to the house and find out who the man was, and leave them what was wanted for the night.The steward did as he was told, and left a scudo that the man might get a supper without eating stolen food, but without saying who sent him, for he had learnt by his inquiries that he was the servant whom Borghese had sent away.The next day Borghese sent and clothed all the family; furnished their place again for them; put the children to schools, and gave the parents ten scudi a month. He wouldn’t take the man back, having once had to send him away—for that was his rule—but he gave him a pension for the rest of his life.

THE MUNIFICENCE OF PRINCE BORGHESE.

[If the Romans remember the vices of their princely families, they are proud of storing up the memory of their virtues too; and the following narrative was told me with great enthusiasm.]Liberality is a distinguishing characteristic of the Borghese family. It was always a matter of emulation who should get taken into their service, and no one who was once placed there ever let himself be sent away again, it was too good a thing to lose.There was a man-servant, however, once who gave the Prince, I think it was the father of this one, an insolent answer, and he turned him off.No one would take that man. Wherever he applied, when they asked him, ‘Where have you lived?’ and he answered, ‘in casa Borghese,’ everyone answered, ‘Oh, if you couldn’t live with Borghese, I’m sure I’ve nothingbetter to offer you!’ and the door was shut in his face. It wasn’t in one place or two, buteverywhere, Borghese’s character is so well known in Rome. As he couldn’t get a place, however, he was reduced to near starvation, and he had a wife and six children, all with nothing to eat. Every article of furniture went to the Monte di Pietà, and almost every article of clothing; and yet hunger stared them in the face.Then the man got desperate, and he went out one night and waited for Borghese in a lonely street in the dark, with a knife in his hand, and said, ‘Your purse!’Borghese thought he had a gang behind him, round the corner, and handed him his purse. But the man only took out three pauls and gave it back, and he looked so thin and haggard that Borghese could not but notice it, dark as it was, though he had forgotten his face.‘That is not a thief, he is some poor fellow who wants relief,’ said Borghese to his servant. ‘Go after him and see what he does, but take care not to be seen,’ and he walked home alone. In less than half an hour the servant came back. He had seen him spend the three pauls in food; had seen him take it home to his family; had seen them scarcely covered with rags; had seen the room denuded of furniture; had heard the man say, as he put the food on the table, ‘Here is wherewith to keep you alive another day, and to-morrow I die in sin, for I had to steal it.’Then Borghese called up the steward (Maestro di Casa), and told him to go to the house and find out who the man was, and leave them what was wanted for the night.The steward did as he was told, and left a scudo that the man might get a supper without eating stolen food, but without saying who sent him, for he had learnt by his inquiries that he was the servant whom Borghese had sent away.The next day Borghese sent and clothed all the family; furnished their place again for them; put the children to schools, and gave the parents ten scudi a month. He wouldn’t take the man back, having once had to send him away—for that was his rule—but he gave him a pension for the rest of his life.

[If the Romans remember the vices of their princely families, they are proud of storing up the memory of their virtues too; and the following narrative was told me with great enthusiasm.]

Liberality is a distinguishing characteristic of the Borghese family. It was always a matter of emulation who should get taken into their service, and no one who was once placed there ever let himself be sent away again, it was too good a thing to lose.

There was a man-servant, however, once who gave the Prince, I think it was the father of this one, an insolent answer, and he turned him off.

No one would take that man. Wherever he applied, when they asked him, ‘Where have you lived?’ and he answered, ‘in casa Borghese,’ everyone answered, ‘Oh, if you couldn’t live with Borghese, I’m sure I’ve nothingbetter to offer you!’ and the door was shut in his face. It wasn’t in one place or two, buteverywhere, Borghese’s character is so well known in Rome. As he couldn’t get a place, however, he was reduced to near starvation, and he had a wife and six children, all with nothing to eat. Every article of furniture went to the Monte di Pietà, and almost every article of clothing; and yet hunger stared them in the face.

Then the man got desperate, and he went out one night and waited for Borghese in a lonely street in the dark, with a knife in his hand, and said, ‘Your purse!’

Borghese thought he had a gang behind him, round the corner, and handed him his purse. But the man only took out three pauls and gave it back, and he looked so thin and haggard that Borghese could not but notice it, dark as it was, though he had forgotten his face.

‘That is not a thief, he is some poor fellow who wants relief,’ said Borghese to his servant. ‘Go after him and see what he does, but take care not to be seen,’ and he walked home alone. In less than half an hour the servant came back. He had seen him spend the three pauls in food; had seen him take it home to his family; had seen them scarcely covered with rags; had seen the room denuded of furniture; had heard the man say, as he put the food on the table, ‘Here is wherewith to keep you alive another day, and to-morrow I die in sin, for I had to steal it.’

Then Borghese called up the steward (Maestro di Casa), and told him to go to the house and find out who the man was, and leave them what was wanted for the night.

The steward did as he was told, and left a scudo that the man might get a supper without eating stolen food, but without saying who sent him, for he had learnt by his inquiries that he was the servant whom Borghese had sent away.

The next day Borghese sent and clothed all the family; furnished their place again for them; put the children to schools, and gave the parents ten scudi a month. He wouldn’t take the man back, having once had to send him away—for that was his rule—but he gave him a pension for the rest of his life.

‘POPE JOAN.’‘You know, of course, that there was once a Papessa? They have putthatin the books, I suppose?’‘I know there is such a story, but learned writers have proved it was a mere invention.’‘Well, I daresay it isn’t true; but there’s no one in Rome who has not heard of it. And what makes them believe it is this.1Outside of St. Peter’s somewhere there’s a statue of her all among the apostles and saints; and they say it’s because a Pope must have a statue, and they didn’t dare to puthers insidethe church, so they put it upoutside. And if it isn’t a Papessa, what is a woman’s statue doing there, for it wasn’t the Madonna, that’s certain?’‘Oh! that’s a statue of Religion, or the Church.2There never was a woman-pope.’‘Ah, well! you read books. I dare say you know best; but, anyhow, that’s what they say. And, after all, who knows!’1An argument worthy to take rank beside the famous one of ‘Mrs. Brown’ concerning Noah’s Ark.↑2I said this, really thinking at the moment there was such a statue surmounting the apex of the pediment of the façade; but it afterwards came to mind and I have since verified it on the spot, that the statues on the pediment represent the twelve Apostles with Christ in the centre, and there is no female figure there. Among the numerous statues of saints surmounting the colonnade, are a small proportion of female saints, but nooneat all prominent.↑

‘POPE JOAN.’

‘You know, of course, that there was once a Papessa? They have putthatin the books, I suppose?’‘I know there is such a story, but learned writers have proved it was a mere invention.’‘Well, I daresay it isn’t true; but there’s no one in Rome who has not heard of it. And what makes them believe it is this.1Outside of St. Peter’s somewhere there’s a statue of her all among the apostles and saints; and they say it’s because a Pope must have a statue, and they didn’t dare to puthers insidethe church, so they put it upoutside. And if it isn’t a Papessa, what is a woman’s statue doing there, for it wasn’t the Madonna, that’s certain?’‘Oh! that’s a statue of Religion, or the Church.2There never was a woman-pope.’‘Ah, well! you read books. I dare say you know best; but, anyhow, that’s what they say. And, after all, who knows!’

‘You know, of course, that there was once a Papessa? They have putthatin the books, I suppose?’

‘I know there is such a story, but learned writers have proved it was a mere invention.’

‘Well, I daresay it isn’t true; but there’s no one in Rome who has not heard of it. And what makes them believe it is this.1Outside of St. Peter’s somewhere there’s a statue of her all among the apostles and saints; and they say it’s because a Pope must have a statue, and they didn’t dare to puthers insidethe church, so they put it upoutside. And if it isn’t a Papessa, what is a woman’s statue doing there, for it wasn’t the Madonna, that’s certain?’

‘Oh! that’s a statue of Religion, or the Church.2There never was a woman-pope.’

‘Ah, well! you read books. I dare say you know best; but, anyhow, that’s what they say. And, after all, who knows!’

1An argument worthy to take rank beside the famous one of ‘Mrs. Brown’ concerning Noah’s Ark.↑2I said this, really thinking at the moment there was such a statue surmounting the apex of the pediment of the façade; but it afterwards came to mind and I have since verified it on the spot, that the statues on the pediment represent the twelve Apostles with Christ in the centre, and there is no female figure there. Among the numerous statues of saints surmounting the colonnade, are a small proportion of female saints, but nooneat all prominent.↑

1An argument worthy to take rank beside the famous one of ‘Mrs. Brown’ concerning Noah’s Ark.↑

2I said this, really thinking at the moment there was such a statue surmounting the apex of the pediment of the façade; but it afterwards came to mind and I have since verified it on the spot, that the statues on the pediment represent the twelve Apostles with Christ in the centre, and there is no female figure there. Among the numerous statues of saints surmounting the colonnade, are a small proportion of female saints, but nooneat all prominent.↑

GIACINTA MARESCOTTI.There was a prince Marescotti,1who had two daughters, Cecilia and Giacinta. From her childhood Cecilia had always been gentle and pious, and everyone said, ‘When she grows up she will be a nun.’ Giacenta was proud, handsome, and passionate, and everyone said, ‘She will be a leader of society, and woe betide whoso offends her.’But their father, good man,2knew them better, and one day he announced to them the choice of a state of life which he had made for them; for the pious, gentle Cecilia there was a great lord coming from abroad to make her his wife; but the proud, passionate Giacinta was to enter a convent.The one was as dismayed as the other at the time, though the event showed he had chosen right. Cecilia, who loved quiet and repose, tenderly entreated her father to let her off the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming the head of a great family, while Giacinta made a great noise3at the idea of her beauty and talents being laid up hidden in a nun’s cell. Nevertheless, in those days long gone by, girls were used to obey.4Cecilia married and proved herself an exemplary wife and mother, and carried respect for religion wherever she went.Giacinta, on the other hand, took all her worldly state into her convent with her; her cell was furnished like the drawing-room of a palace, and she insisted on having her maids to wait on her; the other nuns she scarcely spoke to, and treated as the dust under her feet.One day the bishop came to visit the convent. ‘What a smell!’5he said, as he passed the cell of Giacinta Marescotti.‘A smell, indeed! In my cell which is not only the sweetest in the convent, but which is the only one fit to go into!’ exclaimed poor Giacinta in deep indignation. ‘What can you possibly mean by “a smell!”’‘A smell of sin!’ responded the bishop; and it was observed that for a wonder Giacinta made no retort.‘A smell of sin,’ said Giacinta to herself, as she sat alone in her elegant and luxurious cell that night. The words had touched her soul and awakened a train of thoughts latent and undisturbed till then. Always hitherto she had ambitioned the loftiest, most refined objects of research, and thought she knew the secret of attaining them. The bishop’s words spoke to her of there being ‘a more excellent way’ yet. They cast a light upon a higher path than that which she was treading, and revealed to her that those who walked along it, lowly as they might seem, could afford to look down upon hers.She saw that those who despised distinctions were grander than those who courted them, to become, in the end, their slaves; that those who aspired to celestial joys were nobler than those who surrounded themselves with the most exquisite luxuries of earth.6From that day, little by little,7Giacinta’s cell grew nearer and nearer to the pattern of the House of Nazareth. The mirror, the cosmetics, and the easy couch made way for the crucifix, the discipline, and the penitential chain.8From having been shunned as a type of worldliness, she became to her whole order a model of humility and mortification.91The Marescotti were a noble family of Bologna, the second city of the Pontifical Dominions; there were two cardinals of the name.↑2‘Il buon uomo di loro padre.’↑3‘Faceva il diavolo,’ lit. ‘raised the devil.’↑4‘In quei tempi antichi ubbedirono le figlie, capisce.’ ‘Capisce,’ lit.‘understand,’ equivalent to ‘you see.’↑5‘Puzza—puzza di peccato!’ Lit. ‘It stinks—it stinks of sin.’ (See n. 5, p. 13.)↑6I give the story, as near as possible, in the words which the pious faith of the narrator prompted her to use. The success of the final results of a measure may prove that what seemed tyranny was really prudent foresight; the contemporary views of parental responsibility must also be taken into account. But it is impossible for the modern English mind to sympathise readily with so violent an interference with natural instincts.↑7‘A mano, a mano.’↑8‘Catenella,’ lit. ‘little chain,’ an instrument of penance worn by some persons on the arm or waist.↑9The following are briefly the authentic particulars of her life from Moroni, xxx. 194. She was daughter of Marc Antonio Mariscotti and Ottavia Orsini, born in 1535, and baptised by the name of Clarice. Although brought up in the fear of God and led to appreciate holiness, her youth was passed in worldliness and vanity. Her younger sister having been asked in marriage before her, she was so much vexed and annoyed that she became insupportable at home, on which account her father proposed to her to become a nun in the convent of S. Bernardino at Viterbo, where she had been educated, and she adapted herself to his counsel, though without any personal inclination for it. At the end of her noviciate she made her father arrange that she should have a room of her own magnificently furnished. Sister Giacinta lived ten years thus a religious in name but not in mind. Nevertheless she was not without virtue, for she was always obedient to her superior as she had been to her parents; and her modesty, purity, and respect for holy things was observed by all. A serious illness was to her the call of grace; having given up to the abbess of the convent all the things that had been brought in for her use by special privilege, she devoted herself to severe penance and continual meditation. On occasion of a contagious disease with which Viterbo was afflicted, she gave abundant proof of her charity towards her neighbour, for she founded two societies, the object of one of which was to collect assistance for the convalescent and those who had fallen into reduced circumstances; the other to support a hospital built to receive the sick. These two societies, which she called ‘Oblates of Mary,’ still continue (the date of Moroni’s work is 1845) in full activity.↑

GIACINTA MARESCOTTI.

There was a prince Marescotti,1who had two daughters, Cecilia and Giacinta. From her childhood Cecilia had always been gentle and pious, and everyone said, ‘When she grows up she will be a nun.’ Giacenta was proud, handsome, and passionate, and everyone said, ‘She will be a leader of society, and woe betide whoso offends her.’But their father, good man,2knew them better, and one day he announced to them the choice of a state of life which he had made for them; for the pious, gentle Cecilia there was a great lord coming from abroad to make her his wife; but the proud, passionate Giacinta was to enter a convent.The one was as dismayed as the other at the time, though the event showed he had chosen right. Cecilia, who loved quiet and repose, tenderly entreated her father to let her off the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming the head of a great family, while Giacinta made a great noise3at the idea of her beauty and talents being laid up hidden in a nun’s cell. Nevertheless, in those days long gone by, girls were used to obey.4Cecilia married and proved herself an exemplary wife and mother, and carried respect for religion wherever she went.Giacinta, on the other hand, took all her worldly state into her convent with her; her cell was furnished like the drawing-room of a palace, and she insisted on having her maids to wait on her; the other nuns she scarcely spoke to, and treated as the dust under her feet.One day the bishop came to visit the convent. ‘What a smell!’5he said, as he passed the cell of Giacinta Marescotti.‘A smell, indeed! In my cell which is not only the sweetest in the convent, but which is the only one fit to go into!’ exclaimed poor Giacinta in deep indignation. ‘What can you possibly mean by “a smell!”’‘A smell of sin!’ responded the bishop; and it was observed that for a wonder Giacinta made no retort.‘A smell of sin,’ said Giacinta to herself, as she sat alone in her elegant and luxurious cell that night. The words had touched her soul and awakened a train of thoughts latent and undisturbed till then. Always hitherto she had ambitioned the loftiest, most refined objects of research, and thought she knew the secret of attaining them. The bishop’s words spoke to her of there being ‘a more excellent way’ yet. They cast a light upon a higher path than that which she was treading, and revealed to her that those who walked along it, lowly as they might seem, could afford to look down upon hers.She saw that those who despised distinctions were grander than those who courted them, to become, in the end, their slaves; that those who aspired to celestial joys were nobler than those who surrounded themselves with the most exquisite luxuries of earth.6From that day, little by little,7Giacinta’s cell grew nearer and nearer to the pattern of the House of Nazareth. The mirror, the cosmetics, and the easy couch made way for the crucifix, the discipline, and the penitential chain.8From having been shunned as a type of worldliness, she became to her whole order a model of humility and mortification.9

There was a prince Marescotti,1who had two daughters, Cecilia and Giacinta. From her childhood Cecilia had always been gentle and pious, and everyone said, ‘When she grows up she will be a nun.’ Giacenta was proud, handsome, and passionate, and everyone said, ‘She will be a leader of society, and woe betide whoso offends her.’

But their father, good man,2knew them better, and one day he announced to them the choice of a state of life which he had made for them; for the pious, gentle Cecilia there was a great lord coming from abroad to make her his wife; but the proud, passionate Giacinta was to enter a convent.

The one was as dismayed as the other at the time, though the event showed he had chosen right. Cecilia, who loved quiet and repose, tenderly entreated her father to let her off the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming the head of a great family, while Giacinta made a great noise3at the idea of her beauty and talents being laid up hidden in a nun’s cell. Nevertheless, in those days long gone by, girls were used to obey.4Cecilia married and proved herself an exemplary wife and mother, and carried respect for religion wherever she went.

Giacinta, on the other hand, took all her worldly state into her convent with her; her cell was furnished like the drawing-room of a palace, and she insisted on having her maids to wait on her; the other nuns she scarcely spoke to, and treated as the dust under her feet.

One day the bishop came to visit the convent. ‘What a smell!’5he said, as he passed the cell of Giacinta Marescotti.

‘A smell, indeed! In my cell which is not only the sweetest in the convent, but which is the only one fit to go into!’ exclaimed poor Giacinta in deep indignation. ‘What can you possibly mean by “a smell!”’

‘A smell of sin!’ responded the bishop; and it was observed that for a wonder Giacinta made no retort.

‘A smell of sin,’ said Giacinta to herself, as she sat alone in her elegant and luxurious cell that night. The words had touched her soul and awakened a train of thoughts latent and undisturbed till then. Always hitherto she had ambitioned the loftiest, most refined objects of research, and thought she knew the secret of attaining them. The bishop’s words spoke to her of there being ‘a more excellent way’ yet. They cast a light upon a higher path than that which she was treading, and revealed to her that those who walked along it, lowly as they might seem, could afford to look down upon hers.

She saw that those who despised distinctions were grander than those who courted them, to become, in the end, their slaves; that those who aspired to celestial joys were nobler than those who surrounded themselves with the most exquisite luxuries of earth.6

From that day, little by little,7Giacinta’s cell grew nearer and nearer to the pattern of the House of Nazareth. The mirror, the cosmetics, and the easy couch made way for the crucifix, the discipline, and the penitential chain.8From having been shunned as a type of worldliness, she became to her whole order a model of humility and mortification.9

1The Marescotti were a noble family of Bologna, the second city of the Pontifical Dominions; there were two cardinals of the name.↑2‘Il buon uomo di loro padre.’↑3‘Faceva il diavolo,’ lit. ‘raised the devil.’↑4‘In quei tempi antichi ubbedirono le figlie, capisce.’ ‘Capisce,’ lit.‘understand,’ equivalent to ‘you see.’↑5‘Puzza—puzza di peccato!’ Lit. ‘It stinks—it stinks of sin.’ (See n. 5, p. 13.)↑6I give the story, as near as possible, in the words which the pious faith of the narrator prompted her to use. The success of the final results of a measure may prove that what seemed tyranny was really prudent foresight; the contemporary views of parental responsibility must also be taken into account. But it is impossible for the modern English mind to sympathise readily with so violent an interference with natural instincts.↑7‘A mano, a mano.’↑8‘Catenella,’ lit. ‘little chain,’ an instrument of penance worn by some persons on the arm or waist.↑9The following are briefly the authentic particulars of her life from Moroni, xxx. 194. She was daughter of Marc Antonio Mariscotti and Ottavia Orsini, born in 1535, and baptised by the name of Clarice. Although brought up in the fear of God and led to appreciate holiness, her youth was passed in worldliness and vanity. Her younger sister having been asked in marriage before her, she was so much vexed and annoyed that she became insupportable at home, on which account her father proposed to her to become a nun in the convent of S. Bernardino at Viterbo, where she had been educated, and she adapted herself to his counsel, though without any personal inclination for it. At the end of her noviciate she made her father arrange that she should have a room of her own magnificently furnished. Sister Giacinta lived ten years thus a religious in name but not in mind. Nevertheless she was not without virtue, for she was always obedient to her superior as she had been to her parents; and her modesty, purity, and respect for holy things was observed by all. A serious illness was to her the call of grace; having given up to the abbess of the convent all the things that had been brought in for her use by special privilege, she devoted herself to severe penance and continual meditation. On occasion of a contagious disease with which Viterbo was afflicted, she gave abundant proof of her charity towards her neighbour, for she founded two societies, the object of one of which was to collect assistance for the convalescent and those who had fallen into reduced circumstances; the other to support a hospital built to receive the sick. These two societies, which she called ‘Oblates of Mary,’ still continue (the date of Moroni’s work is 1845) in full activity.↑

1The Marescotti were a noble family of Bologna, the second city of the Pontifical Dominions; there were two cardinals of the name.↑

2‘Il buon uomo di loro padre.’↑

3‘Faceva il diavolo,’ lit. ‘raised the devil.’↑

4‘In quei tempi antichi ubbedirono le figlie, capisce.’ ‘Capisce,’ lit.‘understand,’ equivalent to ‘you see.’↑

5‘Puzza—puzza di peccato!’ Lit. ‘It stinks—it stinks of sin.’ (See n. 5, p. 13.)↑

6I give the story, as near as possible, in the words which the pious faith of the narrator prompted her to use. The success of the final results of a measure may prove that what seemed tyranny was really prudent foresight; the contemporary views of parental responsibility must also be taken into account. But it is impossible for the modern English mind to sympathise readily with so violent an interference with natural instincts.↑

7‘A mano, a mano.’↑

8‘Catenella,’ lit. ‘little chain,’ an instrument of penance worn by some persons on the arm or waist.↑

9The following are briefly the authentic particulars of her life from Moroni, xxx. 194. She was daughter of Marc Antonio Mariscotti and Ottavia Orsini, born in 1535, and baptised by the name of Clarice. Although brought up in the fear of God and led to appreciate holiness, her youth was passed in worldliness and vanity. Her younger sister having been asked in marriage before her, she was so much vexed and annoyed that she became insupportable at home, on which account her father proposed to her to become a nun in the convent of S. Bernardino at Viterbo, where she had been educated, and she adapted herself to his counsel, though without any personal inclination for it. At the end of her noviciate she made her father arrange that she should have a room of her own magnificently furnished. Sister Giacinta lived ten years thus a religious in name but not in mind. Nevertheless she was not without virtue, for she was always obedient to her superior as she had been to her parents; and her modesty, purity, and respect for holy things was observed by all. A serious illness was to her the call of grace; having given up to the abbess of the convent all the things that had been brought in for her use by special privilege, she devoted herself to severe penance and continual meditation. On occasion of a contagious disease with which Viterbo was afflicted, she gave abundant proof of her charity towards her neighbour, for she founded two societies, the object of one of which was to collect assistance for the convalescent and those who had fallen into reduced circumstances; the other to support a hospital built to receive the sick. These two societies, which she called ‘Oblates of Mary,’ still continue (the date of Moroni’s work is 1845) in full activity.↑

PASQUINO.11‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’2‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]1The statue called by this name was not originally found in its present situation. The shop of the tailor Pasquino was in the Via in Parione, a turning out of the Via del Governo Vecchio, some little distance off, nor was it discovered at all till after Pasquino’s death. At his time it was buried unperceived in the pavement of the street, and the inequalities of its outline afforded stepping-stones by means of which passengers picked their way through the puddles! Cancellieri (Mercato, appendix, N. iii.)]quotes a passage from a certain Tibaldeo di Ferrara, quoted in a book, his dissertation concerning the author of which is too long to quote. This Tibaldeo, however, says, ‘as the street was being repaired, and I had the shop that was Pasquino’s made level, the trunk of a statue, probably of a gladiator, was found, and the people immediately gave it his name.’ He, however, quotes from other writers mention of other sites for its discovery mostly somewhat nearer to the present situation. The site of the present Palazzo Braschi was then occupied by the so-called Torre Orsini, a building of a very different ground-plan. Cancellieri quotes from more than one MS. diary that at the time the Marquis de Créquy came to Rome as ambassador of Louis XIII. in 1633, the Palazzo de’ Orsini, where he was lodged, was designated as ‘sopra Pasquino.’ And again from another MS. diary, that in 1728, when the palace was bought by the Duca di Bracciano-Odoscalchi, the same designation remained in use. In the Diary of Cracas, under date March 19, 1791, is an entry detailing the care with which the Pasquino statue was removed to a pedestal prepared for it in front of Palazzo Pamfili during the completion of the contiguous portion of the Palazzo Braschi, and its restoration is duly entered on the 14th March of the same year.2It was Adrian VI. (not Alexander VI. as Murray has it), who proposed to throw it into the Tiber. Adrian VI. was a victim of pasquinades for two reasons,—the first, because born at Utrecht and tutor of Charles V., and afterwards viceroy in Spain, during all Charles’ absence in Germany Rome feared at his election that he would set up the Papal See in Spain; and it is not altogether impossible that the popular satires may have had some influence in deciding him on the contrary to repair immediately to Rome,—the second, because he was an energetic and unsparing reformer; and those who were touched by his measures were just those who could afford to pay the hire of the tongues of popular wags.Nor was it only during his life that he was the subject of such criticisms. When his rigorous reign was suddenly brought to a close after he had worn the tiara but twenty months, on the door of his physician was posted this satire, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S.P.Q.R.’3; and his tomb in St. Peter’s, between that of Pius II. and Pius III., was disgraced with this epitaph: ‘Hic jacet impius inter Pios,’ till some years later, when his body was removed to a worthier monument in S. Maria del Anima.↑2There is clearly a typographical error about one of these dates, which could doubtless be corrected by reference to ‘Notizie delle due famose statue di un fiume e di Patroclo dette volgarmente di Marforio e di Pasquino,’ by the same author, Rome, 1789, which I have not been able to see. Moroni, vi. 99, gives 1791 as the year in which it was bought by Duke Braschi, the nephew of Pius VI. while the Pope was in exile in France, and the completion by the rebuilding must, therefore, have been some years later.The date of its discovery is told in the following inscription by the cardinal inhabiting Torre Orsini at the time, and who saved it from destruction:—Oliverii CaraffaBeneficio hic sumAnno Salvati Mundi—MDI.↑3Giovio; Vit. Hadr. VI.↑

PASQUINO.11‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’2‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]

1‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’

1

‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’

‘No, I can’t say I remember any pasquinades, not to repeat; but I know what happened once when they tried to stop them.

‘There had been so many one time that the Government put a guard all round about Pasquino to watch and see who did it, but for a long time they saw no one.

‘One night, at last, a clownish countryman came by with a bundle of hay on his back, drivelling and half silly. “Let me sit here a bit to rest; I’m so weary with carrying this load I can’t go any farther; but I won’t do any harm.”

‘The guards laughed at the poor idiot’s simplicity in fancying they could expect such as he to be the author of the witty, pungent sort of wares they were on the search for, and said with contemptuous pity, “Yes, yes;youmay sit there!” And the stupid old countryman sat down at the foot of the statue.

‘“Heaven reward you for your kindness!” he said, when he got up after half-an-hour’s rest.

‘“Don’t mention it; go in peace!” returned the guards, and the man passed out of sight.

‘Next morning, high over head of Pasquino floated a gay paper balloon.

‘“The balloon! the balloon!” screamed the street urchins.

‘“The balloon! the balloon!” shouted a number of men, assembled by preconcerted arrangement, though seemingly passers-by attracted by the noise.

‘The clumsy clodhopper of overnight was an adroit fellow disguised, and he had attached the string of the balloon to the statue.

‘To seize the string, pull down the balloon, and burst it was quick work; but out of it floated three hundred and sixty-six stinging pasquinades, which were eagerly gathered up.’

2‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]

2

‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]

‘Many a time a simple exterior is a useful weapon; but when a man who is really simple pretends to be clever he is soon found out. For another time there had been a pasquinade which so vexed the Government that the Pope declared whoever would acknowledge himself the author of it should have his life spared and five hundred scudi reward.

‘One day a simple-looking rustic came to the Vatican, and said he was come to own himself the author of the pasquinade. As such he was shown in to the Pope.

‘“So you are the author of this pasquinade, are you, good man?”

‘“Yes, Your Holiness, I wrote it,” answered the fellow.

‘“You are quite sure you wrote it?”

‘“Oh, yes, Your Holiness, quite sure.”

‘“Take him and give him the five hundred scudi,” said the Pope.

‘An acute Monsignore, who felt convinced the man could not be the author of the clever satire, could not refrain from interposing officially when he found the Pope really seemed to be taken in.

‘“They have their orders,” said the Pope, who was no less discerning than he.

‘A chamberlain took the man into a room where five hundred scudi lay counted on the table, and at the same time put on a pair of handcuffs.

‘“Halloa now! What is this? It was announced that the man who owned himself the author of the Pasquinade should have his life free and five hundred scudi.”

‘“All right; no one is going to touch your life, and there are the five hundred scudi. But you couldn’t imagine that the man who wrote that satire would be allowed to go free about Rome. That was self-evident—there was no need to say it.”

‘“Oh, but I never wrote a word of it, upon my honour,” exclaimed the countryman.

‘“I thought not,” said the Pope, who had come in to amuse himself with the fellow’s confusion. “Now go, and another time don’t pretend to any worse sins than your own.”’

[The ‘Pasquino’ statue was not only the receptacle of the invectives of the vulgar, it often served also to mark the triumphs of the great. The first time it was put to this use was in 1571, on occasion of the triumph of M. A. Colonna, when the parts wanting were restored, and it was clad in shining armour. On various occasions, as a new pope went in procession from the Vatican to perform the ceremony called ‘taking possession’ of St. John Lateran, it was similarlyrisanato del suo stroppio ordinario(healed of the usual lameness of its members), and made to bear a sword, a balance, a cornucopia, and other emblematical devices, which are given at great length by Cancellieri.

The opinions of Winkelman, and others, concerning the great artistic merits both of this statue and that called ‘Marforio,’ do not belong to our present aspect of it. Sprenger, ‘Roma nuova,’ says that besides these two there was another statue which used to take part in this satirical converse, namely, that of the Water-seller, with his barrel (commemorative of a well-known, though humble character), opposite the Church of S. Marcello, in the Corso, which the present rulers, ignorant of Roman traditions, removed. The Romans, however, clamoured against its destruction, and it is now replaced round the corner, up the Via Lata.]

1The statue called by this name was not originally found in its present situation. The shop of the tailor Pasquino was in the Via in Parione, a turning out of the Via del Governo Vecchio, some little distance off, nor was it discovered at all till after Pasquino’s death. At his time it was buried unperceived in the pavement of the street, and the inequalities of its outline afforded stepping-stones by means of which passengers picked their way through the puddles! Cancellieri (Mercato, appendix, N. iii.)]quotes a passage from a certain Tibaldeo di Ferrara, quoted in a book, his dissertation concerning the author of which is too long to quote. This Tibaldeo, however, says, ‘as the street was being repaired, and I had the shop that was Pasquino’s made level, the trunk of a statue, probably of a gladiator, was found, and the people immediately gave it his name.’ He, however, quotes from other writers mention of other sites for its discovery mostly somewhat nearer to the present situation. The site of the present Palazzo Braschi was then occupied by the so-called Torre Orsini, a building of a very different ground-plan. Cancellieri quotes from more than one MS. diary that at the time the Marquis de Créquy came to Rome as ambassador of Louis XIII. in 1633, the Palazzo de’ Orsini, where he was lodged, was designated as ‘sopra Pasquino.’ And again from another MS. diary, that in 1728, when the palace was bought by the Duca di Bracciano-Odoscalchi, the same designation remained in use. In the Diary of Cracas, under date March 19, 1791, is an entry detailing the care with which the Pasquino statue was removed to a pedestal prepared for it in front of Palazzo Pamfili during the completion of the contiguous portion of the Palazzo Braschi, and its restoration is duly entered on the 14th March of the same year.2It was Adrian VI. (not Alexander VI. as Murray has it), who proposed to throw it into the Tiber. Adrian VI. was a victim of pasquinades for two reasons,—the first, because born at Utrecht and tutor of Charles V., and afterwards viceroy in Spain, during all Charles’ absence in Germany Rome feared at his election that he would set up the Papal See in Spain; and it is not altogether impossible that the popular satires may have had some influence in deciding him on the contrary to repair immediately to Rome,—the second, because he was an energetic and unsparing reformer; and those who were touched by his measures were just those who could afford to pay the hire of the tongues of popular wags.Nor was it only during his life that he was the subject of such criticisms. When his rigorous reign was suddenly brought to a close after he had worn the tiara but twenty months, on the door of his physician was posted this satire, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S.P.Q.R.’3; and his tomb in St. Peter’s, between that of Pius II. and Pius III., was disgraced with this epitaph: ‘Hic jacet impius inter Pios,’ till some years later, when his body was removed to a worthier monument in S. Maria del Anima.↑2There is clearly a typographical error about one of these dates, which could doubtless be corrected by reference to ‘Notizie delle due famose statue di un fiume e di Patroclo dette volgarmente di Marforio e di Pasquino,’ by the same author, Rome, 1789, which I have not been able to see. Moroni, vi. 99, gives 1791 as the year in which it was bought by Duke Braschi, the nephew of Pius VI. while the Pope was in exile in France, and the completion by the rebuilding must, therefore, have been some years later.The date of its discovery is told in the following inscription by the cardinal inhabiting Torre Orsini at the time, and who saved it from destruction:—Oliverii CaraffaBeneficio hic sumAnno Salvati Mundi—MDI.↑3Giovio; Vit. Hadr. VI.↑

1The statue called by this name was not originally found in its present situation. The shop of the tailor Pasquino was in the Via in Parione, a turning out of the Via del Governo Vecchio, some little distance off, nor was it discovered at all till after Pasquino’s death. At his time it was buried unperceived in the pavement of the street, and the inequalities of its outline afforded stepping-stones by means of which passengers picked their way through the puddles! Cancellieri (Mercato, appendix, N. iii.)]quotes a passage from a certain Tibaldeo di Ferrara, quoted in a book, his dissertation concerning the author of which is too long to quote. This Tibaldeo, however, says, ‘as the street was being repaired, and I had the shop that was Pasquino’s made level, the trunk of a statue, probably of a gladiator, was found, and the people immediately gave it his name.’ He, however, quotes from other writers mention of other sites for its discovery mostly somewhat nearer to the present situation. The site of the present Palazzo Braschi was then occupied by the so-called Torre Orsini, a building of a very different ground-plan. Cancellieri quotes from more than one MS. diary that at the time the Marquis de Créquy came to Rome as ambassador of Louis XIII. in 1633, the Palazzo de’ Orsini, where he was lodged, was designated as ‘sopra Pasquino.’ And again from another MS. diary, that in 1728, when the palace was bought by the Duca di Bracciano-Odoscalchi, the same designation remained in use. In the Diary of Cracas, under date March 19, 1791, is an entry detailing the care with which the Pasquino statue was removed to a pedestal prepared for it in front of Palazzo Pamfili during the completion of the contiguous portion of the Palazzo Braschi, and its restoration is duly entered on the 14th March of the same year.2

It was Adrian VI. (not Alexander VI. as Murray has it), who proposed to throw it into the Tiber. Adrian VI. was a victim of pasquinades for two reasons,—the first, because born at Utrecht and tutor of Charles V., and afterwards viceroy in Spain, during all Charles’ absence in Germany Rome feared at his election that he would set up the Papal See in Spain; and it is not altogether impossible that the popular satires may have had some influence in deciding him on the contrary to repair immediately to Rome,—the second, because he was an energetic and unsparing reformer; and those who were touched by his measures were just those who could afford to pay the hire of the tongues of popular wags.

Nor was it only during his life that he was the subject of such criticisms. When his rigorous reign was suddenly brought to a close after he had worn the tiara but twenty months, on the door of his physician was posted this satire, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S.P.Q.R.’3; and his tomb in St. Peter’s, between that of Pius II. and Pius III., was disgraced with this epitaph: ‘Hic jacet impius inter Pios,’ till some years later, when his body was removed to a worthier monument in S. Maria del Anima.↑

2There is clearly a typographical error about one of these dates, which could doubtless be corrected by reference to ‘Notizie delle due famose statue di un fiume e di Patroclo dette volgarmente di Marforio e di Pasquino,’ by the same author, Rome, 1789, which I have not been able to see. Moroni, vi. 99, gives 1791 as the year in which it was bought by Duke Braschi, the nephew of Pius VI. while the Pope was in exile in France, and the completion by the rebuilding must, therefore, have been some years later.

The date of its discovery is told in the following inscription by the cardinal inhabiting Torre Orsini at the time, and who saved it from destruction:—

Oliverii CaraffaBeneficio hic sumAnno Salvati Mundi—MDI.↑

3Giovio; Vit. Hadr. VI.↑

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