Mistress of the Vatican (8 page)

When Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople in a.d. 330, the
agoni
stadium fell into disuse. Enterprising builders recognized it immediately as a free quarry, as most of imperial Rome had become. They arrived with horse-drawn carts, pried off the travertine blocks, and hauled them off to be used in houses and churches.

By the fifth century a tradition had arisen that a fourteen-year-old Christian virgin named Agnes had been martyred in the stadium in a.d. 303 during the persecution of Emperor Diocletian. When the executioner exposed Agnes nude to the hoots of the crowd, the angels made copious waves of hair sprout from her scalp to hide her nudity. But the angels didn’t stay the headsman’s axe. It is almost certain that the fictional Agnes developed from a corruption of the word
agoni.

A little chapel was made to honor the saint under an arch in the decaying amphitheater, which in time became the tiny Church of Saint Agnes, located a few doors from Olimpia’s new home. Those who still venerate Agnes’s purported skull today must be aware that something is remarkably odd about it, since it is the skull of a seven-month fetus. But some legends are just too good to let facts interfere with them.

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By the Middle Ages, silt deposited from recurring floods had raised the ground level of the old amphitheater by at least fifteen feet. Houses were built over the old stadium seats, many of which can still be seen in basements. The square began to be called the Piazza Agona and was further corrupted into Piazza Navona.

Around 1470, Antonio Pamphili came to Rome from the town of Gubbio, 130 miles to the north, and worked for Pope Sixtus IV as fiscal procurator of the Apostolic Camera—in other words, he was a Vatican tax collector. He bought a small town house first recorded in 1367 on the Via dell’Anima, the street that runs behind the Piazza Navona. Whenever a neighboring house came on the market, Antonio, as well as his son and grandson in later years, eagerly snatched it up, knocking out interior walls to incorporate the small houses into one larger house. By the time Olimpia moved in, the residence had its main entrance on the more impressive Piazza Navona and was the last house on the corner, with three sides overlooking streets.

Olimpia was probably not thrilled with her new home. The central location was excellent, but the building was a far cry from sumptuous, well laid out, or airy. A sketch from 1612 shows the house was narrow and four stories tall. It’s faÇade had irregularly spaced windows of various sizes on different levels, and the
piano nobile
had three small windows fronting onto the Piazza Navona from two small rooms. Many of the rooms were not rectangular but trapezoidal, the result of cobbling together separate buildings in various stages of decrepitude.

The majority of rooms were on the side of the house, on the Via Pas-quino, with another suite of apartments in the rear, on the Via dell’Anima. The rooms were grouped around a tiny courtyard and well, entered from a little alley on the Piazza Navona. The Casa Pamphili, called Casa—house—because it wasn’t big enough to be a palazzo—was a huge step down from the Nini home in Viterbo, with its spacious entry hall, sweeping staircase, and elegant layout. But with her money, Olim-pia could fix it up and decorate it, and keep her eye on neighboring houses that might come on the market.

It was difficult, however, to create a noble showplace on the very piazza where the Roman vegetable market took place every Wednesday.

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Donkeys drank from three low fountains, one of them in front of Olim-pia’s main entrance. Farmers loudly hawked their produce, and at the end of the day the piazza was littered with manure, wilted lettuce, rotten tomatoes, and the enormous horseflies that buzzed around them. Olimpia detested the market.

Just as bad as the noise and crowds from the market out front were the noise and crowds around the statue of Pasquino located just behind her house. In 1501 when the Orsini family was expanding their palace, workmen unearthed a noseless, armless, horribly mutilated fragment of a third-century b.c. Greek sculpture of Hercules. It had almost certainly once been part of the statuary adorning the Domitian stadium. The statue was placed on a pedestal and began to be called Pasquino after a nearby papal tailor who, it was said, couldn’t keep his mouth shut about Vatican gossip.

Almost immediately students began hanging virulently antigovernment poems and placards on the statue. These anonymous insults—on papal corruption, gluttony, sodomy, and incest—became known as pas-quinades. Given the absence of a free press, by Olimpia’s time writing a pasquinade was the only opportunity to express one’s negative opinion of the government and have fellow citizens read it. And read it they did. They gathered around the statue at all times of the day and night to laugh, drink, socialize, and copy down the cruel poems so they could be read in taverns.

Pasquino had a friend. In the sixteenth century, a mostly intact colossal statue of a reclining river god was unearthed and placed at the foot of Capitoline Hill. He was called Marforio because he had been found in the forum (
foro
) of the temple of Mars. Marforio would “talk” to Pasquino, asking him his opinion of the pope, a cardinal, or a foreign ambassador. People would then run across town to see Pasquino’s response. By the time they raced back to Marforio, his response to Pas-quino’s response would be posted. Other statues began talking to Pasquino.

Most popes usually let Pasquino and his friends have their say as a means of venting popular discontent against high taxes and injustice. But a few particularly annoying pasquinade writers had been incinerated at

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the stake. Even an execution didn’t seem to dampen the ardor of would-be political columnists, and the crowds outside of Olimpia’s back windows never seemed to go away.

Next to Pasquino was Rome’s only post office. Here, before residents picked up their mail, or before their mail was sent abroad, inspectors opened letters and packages to search for heresy, libel, and treason. They compared book titles with the ever-growing list on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books. Though usually, for the price of a scudo an inspector would forget to look in a particular satchel.

Olimpia’s Rome was a far cry from that shining marble metropolis of one million inhabitants under the Roman emperors. In the heady days of Emperor Trajan, who reigned from a.d. 98 to 117, eleven aqueducts pumped sparkling water to thirteen hundred fountains as well as countless public baths, swimming pools, and gardens. Eight sturdy stone bridges allowed pedestrians, horses, and carts laden with goods to cross the Tiber. But when Emperor Constantine left town, everybody who was anybody went with him, including almost all of the civil servants who had kept Rome running.

In the fifth and sixth centuries, Goths, Vandals, and Lombards surrounded the walls of Rome and cut the aqueducts, destroying most of the city’s water supply. Swamps spread out over leaking pipes and became home to malarial mosquitoes, which caused massive epidemics. With no water, the famous Seven Hills were abandoned. For a thousand years, almost all Romans huddled around the Tiber River for water.

The empty imperial edifices on the Seven Hills were raided for materials to construct new buildings. Trees and vines covered what was left of them. Cows grazed in the formerly splendid Roman Forum, which became known as the Cow Field. The neglected Roman bridges collapsed of their own accord or were swept away in floods, until only two remained. By the twelfth century there were a mere thirty thousand inhabitants.

In 1309 the popes left Rome for Avignon and through a series of mishaps did not return for good until 1443. By this time wolves prowled the streets, digging up the dead and maiming the living. Those who

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entered the Eternal City in the returning pope’s train were shocked at its utter ruin. The writer Aretino described Rome not by its impressive ancient title of
caput mundi
—the head of the world—but as
coda mundi
—the rear end of the world.

The narrow thoroughfares of Rome were often obstructed by mountainous heaps of ancient buildings collapsed by earthquakes or time. Streets were also choked by man-made obstructions: porticoes, or walkways over the street connecting houses, and balconies jutting out well into the street. Sometimes a road was completely blocked when a home owner, eager for a larger house, built an addition
across
the entire street.

Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484) began an ambitious program to clean and widen the roads, a program that succeeding popes would continue. The
maestri di strada,
or street controllers, arranged for ancient rubble blocking the thoroughfares to be carted away. They tore down all the illegal home additions that had obstructed city roads. They forced citizens to clean up the manure, sewage, and refuse they had thrown into the street, and then imposed a hefty fine. The city hired dust carts to pick up the garbage and dump it where it was supposed to go—into the Tiber River, the main source of water for household consumption.

Fortunately, Sixtus and the popes who followed him repaired aqueducts, opening up new areas of the city for home building and commerce. Starting in the sixteenth century, cardinals built sumptuous palaces on the hills, enjoying fresh breezes and the cachet of living where Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Cato had lived fifteen hundred years earlier. Artists flocked to Rome from Florence and Venice, highly paid by popes to turn the heap of ruined monuments into a cultural center worthy of its glorious past. The population increased, art flourished, and business thrived.

But in 1527 Rome was invaded by a new horde of plundering barbarians, the troops of Emperor Charles V, who was angry at Pope Clement VII for siding with France in a political dispute. They murdered tens of thousands of citizens, stole their wealth, and destroyed some thirty thousand houses, or about half the buildings in the city. The German

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Lutheran battalions vandalized papal tombs, using one pope’s skull as a football, and massacred five hundred citizens who had gathered for protection around the altar of Saint Peter’s. After the foreign soldiers left Rome, staggering under the weight of their plunder, the city was attacked by typhoid, famine, and flood. Anyone who could afford to leave the city—including the artists, architects, merchants, and bankers— fled, and Rome was once again moribund.

It took a decade for the city to get over the shock of the Sack and its aftermath. But Rome had, by now, some experience in cleaning up a moldering ruin. Rubble was carted away. The sounds of hammering and the sight of ropes and pulleys were everywhere as new buildings went up. The Roman pontiffs laid out wide roads to ease street congestion because the newfangled invention, the carriage, was choking narrow medieval roads. And every time a road was laid or a foundation dug, builders found the exquisite detritus of the previous civilization— marble columns, gorgeous statues, and mosaic floors. These were hoisted up and sold to the highest bidder—usually a cardinal—who integrated them into his own palazzo.

Despite the flurry of building, by the time Olimpia came to Rome in 1612, the city boasted only 100,000 inhabitants. The center of Christen-dom was only half the size of London and a fourth the size of Paris. Most neighborhoods were semirural in character. In the south and east of the city were orchards and farms. Monasteries and convents, set in large gardens, covered much of the western section.

Olimpia’s house was in the most urban area of Rome. It was a short carriage ride from the Piazza Navona to the street of locksmiths, the street of booksellers, and streets reserved for rosary makers, glove makers, jewelers, carriage mechanics, and barbers who could shave a man’s face, open a vein, and pull his rotten tooth with equal aplomb. Each establishment had a sign depicting the services offered within—a pipe for the tobacconist, a bleeding arm for the surgeon—so that illiterate Romans could find the shop they needed.

Rome made no products for export, such as cloth, ships, or guns. The economy was primarily focused on the church and its bureaucrats and the services that supported them. Architects, masons, carpenters, painters,

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and roofers built palaces for high-level Vatican officials. Cabinetmakers and drapers furnished them. Artists, sculptors, and gardeners adorned them. Tailors, seamstresses, hatmakers, cloak makers, and shoemakers dressed those who lived and worked in them. Grocers, butchers, bakers, and fishmongers fed them. A large chunk of the population worked as domestic servants for the rich—a cardinal usually employed a staff of two hundred individuals, many of whom took care of his one hundred horses and numerous carriages.

But Rome had countless poor citizens unable to find work in wealthy households. In Olimpia’s time, the disparity between rich and poor was as great as it would ever be. The rich few lived in sumptuous palaces, gorged themselves to vomiting at banquets, rode in the finest carriages, and wore satins and silks embroidered with gold and pearls. The poor fretted over the number of ounces in the brown bread they bought on the street, a small loaf called the
pagnotta.
The price was fixed at one
bajocco,
which might translate into a penny, but the weight of the bread was determined by papal decree.