Mistress of the Vatican (10 page)

The writer Aretino told the story of one Roman nobleman who couldn’t afford to feed his servants. Before ringing the bell, he would hide their bridles, saddles, and stirrups so they weren’t ready to ride in fifteen minutes. But Pamphilio Pamphili no longer had need for such ruses. Armed with Olimpia’s money, he hired more servants and purchased expensive horses, which he had to board a block away as his tiny courtyard was not big enough for them.

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After her arrival in Rome, Olimpia must have enjoyed the pageantry of religious and political celebrations in the Eternal City, the likes of which she had never seen in Viterbo. Some three months after her wedding Olimpia experienced her first Roman Carnival—that uproarious celebration right before Ash Wednesday. Carnival was permitted by papal edict for a specific number of days—usually ten—but permission was withheld if the Papal States were suffering from plague, war, or famine. A sorrowful face, liberally bedaubed with ashes, was more likely to win God’s forgiveness than a jester’s hat with jingling bells.

Carnival began with the tolling of a bell on a Saturday and a procession of city officials. Two days later naked Jews were forced to race along the Corso, the main thoroughfare of Rome and the heart of Carnival, to the cheering of thousands of spectators who pelted them with eggs, vegetables, and dead cats. But this was not meant as a special denigration to Jews. On other days there were naked races of old men, cripples, little boys, whores, buffaloes, jackasses, and riderless horses with tacks stuck in their backs to make them run faster, and everyone got pelted. Called
palios
, the races were considered great fun for all— except, perhaps, for the horses—and the prizes were valuable bolts of cloth. One race was reserved for naked hunchbacks, “very remarkable for the variety of their humps.”
⁵

A popular parade featured the King of the Defecators, hoisted aloft on a toilet chair and farting loudly. Horses, decked out with jingling silver bells and tall feathered headdresses, pulled extravagantly decorated floats through town. Carts rolled through the streets, some with musicians and others with costumed revelers. Jousts were held in large piazzas, including the Piazza Navona, along with mock naval battles as ships drawn on wheels shot firecrackers at one another. At night the entire city was illuminated with lanterns and torches, and fireworks were set off.

Day and night, costumed revelers thronged the Corso and surrounding streets and squares. Some paraded as doctors, lawyers, Jews, animals, and devils. Some men dressed as women, and some women dressed as men. All wore masks, and many were armed with syringes—the seventeenth-century version of a water pistol—which they squirted at one

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another. They also pelted passersby with oranges and painted eggs filled with scented powder, jam, perfume, or water. One popular prank was to pour honey out of an upper window onto the heads of pedestrians below.

On Ash Wednesday the boisterous extravagance of Carnival disappeared, replaced by the funereal atmosphere of Lent, which commemorated Jesus’ forty days in the desert. During this time, Romans wore black, ate no meat, attended no festivities, and meditated on the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. One Turkish ambassador visiting Rome was absolutely perplexed by the riotous Carnival followed by the sudden solemnity of Ash Wednesday. He wrote the sultan in Constantinople that Carnival was a ten-day mania that afflicted the Christians annually and was only cured by the application of ashes to the face.

Communion, which had been taken frequently in the early centuries of Christianity, had almost stopped completely by the sixteenth century. Catholic theologians argued loudly that the consecrated bread really
was
the body of Christ; this terrified people who thought it a desecration to have something so holy slide down their gullets, rumble into their stomachs, and come shooting out the other end.

Given the widespread fear of the Eucharist, the Council of Trent mandated that Catholics must confess and receive communion at least once a year. According to custom, most Catholics, having abstained from sex for three days, did this on the Thursday before Easter. The faithful received only bread as their communion, as the wine was reserved for priests. Laypeople with their clumsy hands could drop the chalice, thereby literally spilling the blood of Christ all over again.

In 1614 Olimpia would have noticed a novelty in her Easter confession, a grille between her and the priest. Pope Paul V had issued an edict mandating that all confessionals be outfitted with grilles because of the many complaints he had received from women who, when they confessed their sexual sins in graphic detail, suddenly found themselves pawed and groped by hormonally overwrought priests who could no longer contain themselves.

Olimpia would have seen many festivities taking place right in front of her house. The Piazza Navona was the heart of Rome’s powerful

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Spanish community. Here the Spanish ambassador lived, and right across from Olimpia’s home was the Church of Saint James, the Spanish national church. Every June 28 the Spanish ambassador started out from his home with a cavalcade of some three hundred carriages headed for the Vatican. There he presented the pope with a beautiful white horse, the
chinea,
the nominal rent that Spain paid for the kingdom of Naples, which was, technically, the territory of the pope. It is likely that the ambassador’s neighbors Pamphilio and Olimpia hitched up their carriage and joined in the procession.

Every August 7, Rome’s Spaniards and their friends celebrated the Feast of Our Lady in the Piazza Navona by giving dowries to young women of Spanish descent who otherwise would not be able to marry. In 1613, twenty-seven women processed through the piazza and entered the Church of Saint James to receive dowries raised by the confraternity. Olimpia, if she watched from her drawing room window, must have been pleased.

q

Olimpia and Pamphilio were not the only Pamphili family members living in the Piazza Navona house. Pamphilio’s younger brother Gian-battista also lived there. Gianbattista had been blindsided by his brother’s sudden decision to marry. The writer of an anonymous document in the Pamphili family archives asked Gianbattista if he had been consulted about the marriage. The monsignor replied that he had been completely left out of the decision. But, he added, he had always known that if and when Pamphilio married, it would be a “most noble wife,” that he approved of the bride wholeheartedly and wanted his brother to be happy.
⁶

As head of the family, Pamphilio had a higher rank than Gian-battista. Pamphilio and Olimpia took the more important suite of rooms facing the Piazza Navona and wrapping around the side of the house. Gianbattista lived in the less honorable but more spacious suite of rooms in the rear.

It is amusing that the relationship of Olimpia and her brother-in-law, which would ultimately scandalize all Europe, got off on the wrong

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foot. When Olimpia first arrived at the Piazza Navona after her wedding, she swept through the rooms and joyfully exclaimed that all the lovely furniture was
hers
, including the room where Gianbattista had stacked his furniture to get it out of the bride’s way. He had bought some fine pieces with his salary as a canon lawyer or had received them as gifts from Uncle Girolamo.

Evidently, in a moment of weakness Gianbattista, reluctant to anger his brother and frightened by his imperious new sister-in-law, told her she could have it. But he soon regretted it and put his position in writing. He had not given Olimpia the furnishings, he explained to Pam-philio, “but I placed them in the last room of the Piazza Navona house before Signora Olimpia came to Rome, along with my other things, to empty the rooms for the occasion, and if Signora Olimpia says that I gave them to her, I imagine that I only could have said so out of fear or persuasion of Signor Pamphilio. But I insist that it be returned to me at all costs.”
⁷
It is not known exactly how the issue was resolved, but events proved it was patched up with no hard feelings.

Gianbattista had been the favorite of the late Cardinal Girolamo, who had recognized his diligence and intelligence while he was still a child. Girolamo encouraged him to study canon law at the finest school in Rome, the Jesuit Collegio Romano. At the age of twenty, Gianbattista received his doctorate in law. Though he took holy orders in 1597, he did not seem to have an inclination for the ecclesiastical life. Like most young noblemen of his time—lay or religious—he excelled in dueling, drinking, and womanizing, which earned him the nickname “Monsieur Pastime.” The ambassador of Venice reported, “He had little capacity for such [scholarly] tasks and applied himself slowly to studies, passing his youth more in the pastimes of a cavalier than in learning the law. Despite his uncle’s assiduous efforts, he could not make him forget his nocturnal pleasures.”
⁸

Uncle Girolamo was particularly concerned about Gianbattista’s gaudy Spanish hairstyle—long frizzed ringlets—and his refusal to wear church robes. He implored his Vatican friends to persuade his nephew to adopt a more serious look, suitable for a priest and lawyer. Their persuasions had an effect; one summer when Girolamo was

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vacationing outside Rome his nephew appeared wearing the long dark robes of a canon lawyer, and had lost the curls and frizz. After that, his days and nights of debauchery were over, and a new, sober Gian-battista won the immediate approval of his uncle and his church colleagues.

The new look boosted his career immediately. In 1601 Pope Clement VIII, Uncle Girolamo’s good friend, appointed Gianbattista a consisto-rial lawyer. Three years later, when Girolamo was named cardinal, the pope arranged for Gianbattista to take his uncle’s position as an auditor of the Rota, the Vatican court that heard civil cases relating to matrimony, financial issues, and other matters.

When Olimpia first met Gianbattista, he was thirty-eight years old, tall and well built, but not handsome like his brother. He had a wide forehead, often puckered into a scowl, and small hazel eyes. Even in youth his beard, that benchmark of seventeenth-century male beauty, had never been thick and silky but rather was straggly and sparse.

Gianbattista was learned, courteous, and by now, sober. He was also indecisive to the point of paralysis, deeply suspicious of others, and subject to gloomy silent depressions. Over time, he had developed a highly effective defense to prevent others from seeing the doubts that lurked inside him—a wall of inscrutable dignity. Cloaked in ugly majesty, he never showed his weaknesses to other men, whom he regarded as backstabbing competitors.

Throughout his long life, Gianbattista was more prepared to trust women than men, as women could not compete with him in a man’s world. But it is likely that he was also searching for a surrogate mother, having lost his own in 1580, when he was six. Gianbattista could confide in women, let down his guard, and openly discuss his fears. He was extremely close to an older sister, Agatha, a nun in Rome’s Tor de’ Spec-chi Convent, and visited her frequently for long talks in the convent parlor.

Suddenly, this new sister-in-law bolted into his life like a ray of sunshine. Olimpia was charming, amusing, and highly intelligent. We can imagine that one day over lunch, when Pamphilio was in his office in the Campidoglio, Gianbattista first spoke to Olimpia of the lawsuits

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before him. Most women would have been bored to tears by such a topic, but Olimpia’s dark eyes would have sparkled with interest. Perhaps Gianbattista laid out the case, and the several possible decisions he could make, and the problems associated with each one. Perhaps he confided his horror of making the wrong choice. Olimpia’s sharp mind would have cut through the cobwebs of Gianbattista’s indecision, pointing out to him exactly the right choice to make.

Greatly relieved at the sudden clarity, Gianbattista would report to his office and do exactly as Olimpia had instructed him, and she was almost always right. He increasingly grew to rely on her and began spending several hours every day with her discussing his business. And it became clear to Olimpia how she would get political power. Not in Rome’s civil government through Pamphilio, but in the Catholic Church, through Gianbattista. Moreover, the church was far more powerful than civil authorities because the church
ran
the civil authorities.

Olimpia was absolutely thrilled that
her
guidance was being employed in the Vatican courts. And Gianbattista was thrilled to have such an excellent counselor. Here, finally, was a person he could trust, a person who had only his best interests at heart. According to Gregorio Leti, Gian-battista “never undertook anything without consulting her beforehand as if she were the world’s greatest oracle, and followed all her advice and her instructions.”
⁹
In addition to helping Gianbattista’s career, Olimpia was the only person who could pluck the taciturn monsignor out of his depression and, with her wit and cheerfulness, make him laugh.