Rome (Bloom's Literary Places)

Bloom’s Literary Places

DUBLIN LONDON NEW YORK PARIS ROME ST. PETERSBURG

Map of Rome engraving by Joris Hoefnagel from Civitates Orbis Terrarum.

Bloom’s Literary Places

ROME

Brett Foster and Hal Marcovitz Introduction by

Harold Bloom

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS

VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse BLOOM’S LITERARY PLACES

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Matt Uhler EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Sarah Sharpless SERIES AND COVER DESIGNER Takeshi Takahashi PHOTO EDITOR Sarah Bloom LAYOUT EJB Publishing Services ©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

http://www.chelseahouse.com First Printing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foster, Brett. Rome / Brett Foster and Hal Marcovitz. p. cm. — (Bloom’s literary places) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-7839-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 0-7910-8383-7 (pbk.) 1. Rome (Italy)—Guidebooks. 2. Rome (Italy)—Civilization. 3. Literary landmarks—Italy—Rome—Guidebooks. 4. Rome (Italy)—In literature. I. Marcovitz, Hal. II. Title. III. Series. DG804.F75 2005 809’.8945632—dc22 2005013294 ISBN-10: 0-7910-7839-6 (hc), 0-7910-8383-7 (pb) ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-7839-6 (hc), 978-0-7910-8383-3 (pb) All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

TAB LE O F C O NTE NTS

CITIES OF THE MIND HAROLD BLOOM

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INTRODUCTION HAROLD BLOOM

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CHAPTER ONE

To See Rome Is to See Everything

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CHAPTER TWO

Encountering Rome: Ancient Origins

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CHAPTER THREE

The Imperial Made Sacred: Early Christian Rome

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Cow Hills and Belltowers of Medieval Rome

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CHAPTER FIVE

Being Geniuses Together: Early and High Renaissance Rome

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CHAPTER SIX

The Grand Tourists Arrive in Rome

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Romantic Poets in Rome

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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Americans Arrive

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CHAPTER NINE

City of Romance, City of Mystery

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PLACES OF INTEREST

166 182 184 187

WORKS CITED FURTHER READING INDEX

HA R O LD B LO O M

Cities of the Mind

It could be argued that the ancestral city for the Western literary imagination is neither Athens nor Jerusalem, but ancient Alexandria, where Hellenism and Hebraism fused and were harvested. All Western writers of authentic aesthetic eminence are Alexandrians, whether they know it or not. Proust and Joyce, Flaubert and Goethe, Shakespeare and Dante rather uneasily share in that eclectic heritage. From the mid-third century before the Common Era through the mid-third century after, Alexandria was the city of the spirit and mind and where Plato and Moses did not reconcile (which would be impossible) but abrasively stimulated a new kind of sensibility that we have learned to call Modernism, now twenty-six centuries old. The first Modernist was the poet Callimachus, who said that a long poem was a long evil, and together with his colleagues were approvingly named as neoteroi (modernists) by Aristarchus, the earliest literary critic to attempt making a secular canon. Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boileau, Sainte-Beuve, Lessing, Coleridge, I.A. Richards, Empson, and Kenneth Burke are descendants of Aristarchus. F.E. Peters, in his lucid The Harvest of Hellenism, summarizes vii

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the achievement of Hellenistic Alexandria by an impressive catalog: “Gnosticism, the university, the catechetical school, pastoral poetry, monasticism, the romance, grammar, lexicography, city planning, theology, canon law, heresy and scholasticism”. I don’t know why Peters omitted neo-Platonism, inaugurated by Plotinius, and I myself already have added literary criticism, and further would list the library. Alexandria has now exiled its Greeks, Jews, and mostly everyone else not an Arab, and so it is no longer the city of the mind, and of the poetic tradition that went the long span from Callimachus to Cavafy. Yet we cannot arrive at a true appreciation of literary places unless we begin with Alexandria. I recommend the novelist E.M. Forster’s guide to the city, which deeply ponders its cultural significance. We are all Alexandrians, as even Dante was, since he depended upon Hellenistic Neo-Platonic interpretations of Homer, whose poetry he had never read. Virgil, Dante’s guide, was Hellenistic in culture, and followed Theocritus in pastoral and Alexandrian imitations of Homer in epic. But though our literary culture remains Alexandrian (consider all our ongoing myths of Modernism), we follow St. Augustine in seeing Jerusalem as the City of God, of King David and his martyred descendant Jesus of Nazareth. Our universities, inescapably Alexandrian in their pragmatic eclecticism, nevertheless continue to exalt the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as the city of cognition and of (supposed) democracy. The actual Periclean Athens was a slave-owning oligarchy and plutocracy, which still prevails in much of the world, be it Saudia Arabia or many of the Americas. Literary Athens, in its Golden Age, built on Homer and produced the only Western drama that can challenge Shakespeare: Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and the divine Aristophanes (I follow Heinrich Heine who observed that: “There is a God and his name is Aristophanes”). Athens now slumbers except for Olympic games and tourism, while Jerusalem is all too lively as the center of IsraeliArab contention. Alas, their literary glories have waned, but so have those of Rome, where Virgil and even the Florentine

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Dante are little read or emulated. Cities of the mind are still represented by Paris and London, both perhaps at this moment in cognitive decline. The international language is now American English, and New York City is therefore the literary placeof-places. That, of necessity, has mixed consequences, but those sharpen my renewed comparison to ancient Alexandria, which mingled inventiveness with high decadence, at the end of an age. Alexandria was consciously belated and so are we, despite our paradoxical ecstasy of the new. 2

Is a literary place, by pragmatic definition, a city? Pastoral, like all other literary forms, was an urban invention. The Hebrew Bible, redacted in Babylonian exile, has as its core in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, the Yahwist’s narrative composed at Solomon’s highly sophisticated court in Jerusalem. We cannot locate the inception of what became Iliad and Odyssey, but the Greece they taught centered at Athens and Thebes. Florence exiled Dante and Cavalcanti, yet shared all further vernacular literary development with Rome and Milan. If Montaigne tended to isolate himself from embattled Paris, he knew his readers remained there. Elizabethan-Jacobean literature is virtually all fixated upon London, and centers upon Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. If the American Renaissance emanates out of the Concord of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, it is equally at home in the New York City of Whitman, Melville, and the burgeoning James family. Though Faulkner kept, as much as he could, to Oxford, Mississippi, and Wallace Stevens to Hartford, if I had to nominate the ultimate classic of the United States in the twentieth century, unhesitatingly I would choose the poetry of Hart Crane, Whitman’s legitimate heir as the bard of New York City. Kenneth Burke, whenever I saw him from 1975 on, would assure me again that Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and Hart Crane’s The Bridge were the two greatest American poems. Our best living novelists—Philip Roth, Pynchon, DeLillo—

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have become inseparable from the ethos of New York City. Only the elusive Cormac McCarthy, seer of Blood Meridian, keeps far away from the city-of-cities, which has displaced London and Paris as the world’s imaginative capital. 3

However solitary a major writer is by vocation, he or she tends to find a closest friend in a contemporary literary artist. Perhaps rivals attract: Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Byron and Shelley, Hawthorne and Melville, Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, Eliot and Pound, Hart Crane and Allen Tate are just a few pairings, to stay within Anglo-American tradition. Yet the tendency is everywhere: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Swift and Pope, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Henry James and Edith Wharton, and many more, too numerous to list. The locales waver: Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris, Byron and Shelley in Italian exile together, Eliot and Pound in London. There are giant exceptions: Cervantes, Milton, Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, Joyce and Beckett (though only after their early association). Cities are the essential requisite for literary relationships, including those dominated by a father-figure, the London assemblage of the Sons of Ben Jonson: Carew, Lovelace, Herrick, Suckling, Randoph and many more, or Dr. Samuel Johnson and his club of Boswell, Goldsmith, Burke, among others, or Mallarmé and his disciples, including Valéry, who was to surpass his master. Modernist London always calls up Bloomsbury, with Virginia Woolf as its luminous figure, the ornament of a group that in its own idiosyncratic mode saw E.M. Forster as its patriarch. Even in the age of the computer screen, proximity is essential for literary fellowship. But so far I have considered the city as literary place only in regard to writers. As subject, indeed as the given of literature, the city is a larger matter. The movement from garden to city as literary focus is powerfully clear in the Hebrew Bible, when Yahweh moves his abode from Mount

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Sinai to Mount Zion, and thus to Solomon’s Temple. As the mountain of the Covenant, Sinai stands at the origin, but surprisingly Ezekiel (28:13 following) locates “Eden, the garden of God” as a plateau on Zion, both cosmological mountain and paradise. When Yahweh takes up residence in the Temple, his Eden is close by, yet nevertheless the transition from garden to city has been accomplished. This is the Holy City, but to the literary imagination all the great cities are sacred: Paris, London, Dublin, Petersburg, Rome, and New York are also sanctified, whatever suffering and inequity transpire in them. 4

In the United States the national capital, Washington D.C., is scarcely a city of the mind, not only when contrasted to New York City, but also to Boston, Chicago, San Francisco. Paris, London, and Rome are at once capitals and literary centers, but Washington D.C. has harbored few major American writers and has provided subjects only for political novelists, like Henry Adams and Gore Vidal. The Great American Novel perpetually remains to be written, despite such earlier splendors as The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Portrait of a Lady, and a handful of later masterpieces from As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, on to Gravity’s Rainbow, Sabbath’s Theater, Underworld, and Blood Meridian. I rather doubt that it will take Washington, D.C. as subject, or be composed by an inhabitant thereof. The industrialization of the great cities in the nineteenth century gave us the novels of Victor Hugo, Dickens, Zola which produced a realism totally phantasmagoric, now probably no longer available to us. Computer urbanism does not seem likely to stimulate imaginative literature. Visual overdetermination overwhelms the inward eye and abandons us to narrative or the formal splendors of poetry and drama. There is something hauntingly elegiac about fresh evocations of literary places, here and now in the early years of the twenty-first century.

HA R O LD B LO O M

Introduction

It is the sublime peculiarity of Rome as a literary city that it has been more international than Italian. Anyone who has lived in Rome returns into time, passing through the strata of the ruins of Rome, from the Etruscans through the ancient Romans, of Republic and Empire, onto Christianity early and late. During my own two separate spans of teaching at the University of Rome, I have been haunted by the paradox that the major later writers of Rome were the varied company that includes Du Bellay, Crashaw, Montaigne, Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Hawthorne, and Henry James. The greatest of the Italian literary imaginations—Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Leopardi, Manzoni, Montale—centered elsewhere, whether in Florence, Milan, Ferrara, Venice, Bologna, Genoa, Naples or wherever. Italy, a cohesion to passionate pilgrims from abroad, in the spirit remains an uneasy confederation of city-states. The Roman Elegies of Goethe, the superb essay “Of Vanity” by Montaigne, Shelley’s Adonais, Browning’s The Ring and the Book, Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Henry James’s “Daisy Miller”: these are among the glories of Rome as a literary city. Is it that the spiritual and temporal dominance of the Vatican xiii

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inhibited the Italian literary imagination? Or is it that any descent into time, such as the interior journey that inspired Montaigne and Goethe, Byron and Shelley, Hawthorne and James, simply was a redundancy for the Italian imagination? Leopardi, the major poet of Italy after Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso, came to Rome in the hope of breaking out of his deathly isolation, but found that: “Here in Rome I am not a writer ... but a scholar ...” When one reads Leopardi’s letters from Rome, all that is encountered is despair and bewilderment, except for his visit to the tomb of Tasso: On Friday, the 15th of February 1823, I went to see the tomb of Tasso—and I wept there. This is the first and only pleasure that I have felt in Rome. Montaigne and Henry James found in the Forum what Byron also discovered, decay and vanity, a negative grandeur. But these are the visions of outsiders. Though Petrarch went to Rome to be crowned with the laurel, his own idea of culture was elsewhere, in the lands of the Tuscans and Lombards. The ultimate literary pilgrimage in Rome is to the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats and Shelley are buried, and which I cannot visit without musing on the high irony that neither poet was a Christian believer. That returns me to a more pervasive irony. Rome forever is the city of ancient emperors and Renaissance and modern Popes. And yet the Italian literary imagination is democratic and secular, even in the devout Manzoni, magnificent historical novelist, who lived in Milan and in Paris. As a literary city, Rome belongs to the French and Germans, the English and the Americans. It is in Italy, but not of it.

C HA P TE R | O N E

To See Rome Is to See Everything

You, o visitor to Rome, are only the latest of many, many before you. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims undertook journeys to Rome from the far reaches of Christendom, sometimes taking several months to reach their sacred destination. Once there, they venerated the apostles’ relics, or the legendary places where saints and martyrs met their deaths, or the countless churches of Europe’s spiritual capital, the Mother City of the Catholic Mother Church. Alcuin, the great medieval scholar from York, England, who himself visited Rome twice in his life, describes this Rome as the “monumental city” of holy thresholds and “tremulous walls of the brazen temples.” The sight of Rome’s towers and steeples in the distance often stopped such pilgrims in their tracks, and they would delay their lengthy journeys, often made entirely on foot, to sing “Te Deums” as thanks for safe travels and as praise for the holy city just ahead of them. After a few more miles walking along the Via Flaminia, a Roman thoroughfare built in the third century B.C., the pilgrims would presently enter the northernmost gate, the Porta

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del Popolo, which today displays its statues of saints Peter and Paul within an enduring exterior of sixteenth-century grandeur. Consciously resembling a triumphal arch of imperial Rome, the gate also features decorations by the famed Baroque artist Bernini on its inner wall, right beside which in the church Santa Maria del Popolo reside two masterpieces by the late Renaissance painter Caravaggio, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. An Egyptian obelisk, more than 3,000 years old and among the military spoils of the Emperor Augustus, gives the broad, open space of Piazza del Popolo a focal point, one at once steadfast and exotic. Pope Sixtus V relocated the obelisk to this piazza in 1589. It and several other such monuments erected around the city announced the Counter-Reformation church’s triumph over paganism (and, by corollary, over more recent Protestant heresies), a gesture of militant bravado that Sixtus himself personified well: this pope oversaw one of the most extensive and breathtaking set of urban changes Rome in its long history had ever experienced. Taken all together, then, this initial locale is a fitting, transhistorical hodgepodge, an emblematic welcome to a city whose chronological variety—and resulting sense of vertigo—is unmatched by any place in the world. As the Romantic poet Goethe once declared, “He who has seen Rome has seen everything.” Occasionally a modern traveler enters Rome in an altogether more individual, perilous fashion. The British travel writer and photographer Freya Stark, for example, on a “lark” drove from Perugia to the Eternal City on a Vespa, the ubiquitous, minimotorcycles that flit all around Rome. Stark, in a letter, vividly captured the chaotic, even Darwinian, environment of Roman motorists: “We got here for tea and risked our lives across Rome where no one thinks of traffic rules but only gives a look to see whether the opposing vehicle is bigger or smaller; of course the Vespa is fair game for anyone to run at!” Today, however, you are more likely to arrive, like other international visitors to Rome, via the Fiumicino Airport

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southwest of the city, and once there you may appreciate a little better the Roman writer Pliny’s peculiar estimation of the city as the “capital of the world, sixteen miles from the sea.” The airport, also known as “Leonardo da Vinci” in honor of Italy’s great Renaissance artist, inventor, and early theoretician of flight, is near the Tyrrhenian Coast and Ostia, a well-preserved ancient town and former colony. The Roman Republic conquered Ostia in the fifth century B.C., when it served as a valuable port and defensive site at the mouth of the Tiber River. Pius II, a humanist pope of the early Renaissance, memorably elegized Ostia’s ruins, decrepit even then, six and a half centuries ago. It is commonplace to speak of Rome’s ever mutable, rising and declining, straw-to-marble-to-dust landscape, through which the unchanging, resolute Tiber serenely passes. But this is not so. Today grasslands surround Ostia, due to the gradual, centuries-long silting of its harbor. More dramatically, a violent flood in 1557 (relatively recently, by geological standards) caused the river to steer a new course away from the Roman outpost. In Rome itself, nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban projects have led to the channeling of the river, usually by concrete embankments, as protection against severe flooding. Thus not even the resolute river has evaded the dizzying sense of change and historical progress that will greet you upon entrance to the city proper. But first, you may experience an equally dizzying feeling— the feeling that everything at first looks rather more familiar than you had anticipated. Having landed at the thoroughly modern, recently expanded airport, you might make the short trip to Rome by taxi or rental car (the latter by no means recommended!) along a thoroughly modern highway, or more prudently you may wish to take a train: from the international terminal, one can easily catch a shuttle to Ostiense Station, on Rome’s southern edge. Again, a sense of the familiar may strike you as you proceed northward. From the train window you’ll notice the outlying high-rises, tenements, and general urban sprawl that plague many a modern, world-class city, and that

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has greatly changed Rome’s urban identity following World War II. This atmosphere was captured powerfully, as early as 1948, in Vittorio De Sica’s classic neo-realist film, The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette). Today more than three million people live in the city, which spreads across 580 square miles. You may see hanging from many windows—punctuating the visual monotony of sandstone and granite—bright, rainbow-colored flags declaring in Italian (passionately, one imagines) Pace! (Peace!) The present, too, necessarily invests itself in the Eternal City, something these flags of protest remind you of, those modestly anonymous responses to a post-millennial, martial age. From Stazione Ostiense, a succession of long elevators connects you to the Piramide Metro station. (Rome’s subway system is called the Metropolitana.) Or perhaps you simply cannot wait any longer to place your own two feet on Italy’s terra aeterna. If the weather is pleasant (and it likely is, especially if you’re fortunate or cunning enough to have traveled in May or September), you may prefer the three-block walk above-ground. And if you are burdened with luggage, rest for a moment at a kiosk on the way, where you are advised to purchase a scheda or carta telefonica. These inexpensive phone cards will conveniently allow you to make any initial arrangements in the city, although if you’re planning a longer stay, you can now rent a telefonino, or cell phone, for even greater convenience. A SCENIC TOUR

You are now a mere metro ticket or bus ride away from Rome’s most famous historical and literary sights. For example, there is the Palazzo Venezia in Piazza San Marco, Rome’s de facto city center, from whose balcony Benito Mussolini fed his Fascist followers with wild gesticulations and dreams of a new Roman empire. Just a few blocks southeast along the Via dei Fori Imperiali looms the Colosseum, the iconic landmark of ancient Rome, built by the Emperor Vespasian in the first century.

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More than fifty thousand spectators filed in through this grand amphitheatre to witness battles between gladiators, animals fighting, or even a mock sea battle. (Today visitors will see mock gladiators eager to pose with you in a photo, occasionally taking a break to chat on their cell phones.) It is also the climatic, moonlit setting in Henry James’s great novella, Daisy Miller: The evening was perfect and he promised himself the satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past the vaguely-lighted monuments of the Forum. Above was a moon half-developed, whose radiance was not brilliant but veiled in a thin cloud-curtain that seemed to diffuse and equalise it. When on his return from the villa at eleven o’clock he approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum the sense of the Romantic in him easily suggested that the interior, in such an atmosphere, would well repay a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches, near which, as he observed, an open carriage—one of the little Roman street-cabs—was stationed. Then he passed in among the cavernous shadows of the great structure and emerged upon a clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade while the other slept in the luminous dusk.

In his later work Italian Hours (1909), James admitted that expressing such delight in ruins seemed a “heartless pastime” and showed “the note of perversity,” yet in this passage, just before Mr. Winterbourne notices Daisy Miller with her Roman host Giovanelli, the prose invests the setting (or the setting the prose?) with powerful strains of lyrical elegy. Of course the energy and industry of James’s touring Americans modulate the scene: “Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight—that’s one thing I can rave about!” says the ebullient Daisy, soon to die. If instead from Piazza San Marco you walk northeast along

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Via Nazionale, you will encounter in the colonnaded Piazza della Repubblica a marble-topped McDonalds on one side, and on the other the entrance to the Baths of Diocletian—the sort of temporal and cultural confusion that is altogether typical in Rome. From the baths’ heights the medieval poet and early humanist scholar Petrarch surveyed the city and reanimated, through his erudition and imagination, its ancient republican and imperial heroes (and apostolic heroes, too, a fact often overlooked), now walking and breathing again hic ... hic ... hic (Here ... here ... here). The vast grounds of the baths today house a sixteenth-century church (Santa Maria degli Angeli) and the National Roman Museum, where you should not miss the stunning relief, The Birth of Aphrodite, likely from the fifth century B.C. The baths also lend their name to the nearby Stazione Termini, Rome’s main train station with destinations throughout Italy and Europe. Farther north lies the Villa Borghese and its park, where within you can behold Bernini’s liquefactious masterpiece, the sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, and without on the bucolic grounds you can pay homage to the statues of two great Romantic writers forever identified with Rome—the larger-than-life writer Goethe and the notorious poet and adventurer Lord Byron. (Winterbourne, once inside the Colosseum in James’s Daisy Miller, finds himself reciting Roman lines from Byron’s verse drama “Manfred”—“the place / Became religion, and the heart ran o’er / With silent worship of the Great of old,— / The dead, but sceptred, Sovereigns, who still rule / Our spirits from their urns.”) The installation of Byron’s monument in 1959 signaled a resurgence of his literary reputation, and the pedestal features lines from his poem Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, whose fourth canto features one of the most extended poetic evocations of Rome in the English language. The lines reflect well Byron’s highly memorable, emotionally pitched Romantic persona: But I have lived, and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,

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And my frame perish even in conquering pain, But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire ...

Earlier in the canto Byron’s brooding pilgrim considers Rome “the garden of the world,” and in its midst he stands as “A ruin amidst ruins; there to track / Fall’n states and buried greatness ...” The speaker sees in Rome’s ghostly majesty a suggestive figure for his own perishing soul, a setting that is at least enduring and even beautiful in its decay, if not ultimately redemptive: Oh Rome! my country! City of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O’er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day— A world is at our feet as fragile as the clay.

If you walk southward next, approaching the Quirinale hill, take a right on Via del Tritone: soon you will be in the vicinity of Trevi Fountain, whose fame belies its surprisingly recent foundation (1762). Its marble Neptune marking the terminus of an ancient aquaduct, this fountain was immortalized by Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s film of 1950s Roman decadence and ennui, La Dolce Vita (1960). Today you see there instead hordes of tourists, depositing coins as an assurance they will once again return to Rome. The herding effect and rout of trinket carts at the fountain may soon compromise your initial appreciation of the landmark itself; if so, simply wander among the narrow, tightly turning streets surrounding it until you re-experience the first thrill of discovery, entering again into the fountain’s piazza and hearing the fall of water. “It seems to me so characteristic of Rome that this romantic vision

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should be tucked away behind narrow streets,” writes H.V. Morton in his popular book, A Traveller in Rome (1957), “and in a piazza only just large enough to contain it. Where but in Rome would anyone have dreamed of erecting such a monument in such a place?” Continue westward from the fountain and cross the city’s highly commercial north-south thoroughfare, the Via Corso, along which the Jews of Renaissance Rome were forced to race, often after being stripped, during Carnival season. Alongside the glistening ritual of early modern pageants and the Belle Epoque cafés of the late nineteenth century, dark intersections occupy this historical street, as they do the city generally. Next you will enter the original abitato, or inhabited area of the city, Rome’s heart cradled by a seemingly providential bend in the river. The neighborhood around the Pantheon, Rome’s most preserved ancient temple, is one of the most dense and diverse in the city. Next to Il Gesù, the Jesuits’ Baroque flagship church funded by the powerful Farnese family, are Saint Ignatius Loyola’s surprisingly austere rooms, where he must have administered his rigorously meditative Spiritual Exercises before his death in 1556. The Roman College, more sternly abutting the curvaceous theatricality of the rococo Piazza di San’Ignazio, lies just a few blocks to the north. Here Ignatius’s Jesuits carried out their educational innovations, and by doing so attracted students from across Renaissance Europe and beyond. As you walk between these two sites, be sure to pay knowing homage to the innocuous “pie di marmo,” a large marble foot that seems to have strayed from its siblings in the Capitoline museums, in order to hide out in a random Roman street. Nearby in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, an art gallery features the portrait of Innocent X, a 1650 masterpiece by Velázquez. Yet there are plenty of signs of the contemporary city as well. The Palazzo di Montecitorio, built by Bernini and Fontana in the seventeenth century, today houses Italy’s parliament, around the corner from which is the stock exchange (La borsa). Its façade is uniquely Roman, comprising eleven

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Corinthian columns that once adorned a temple to the emperor Hadrian. If you’ve grown weary by this point, two blocks east of the exchange seek out La Tazza d’Oro, a café whose highly regarded espresso will effectively jumpstart your explorations. Meandering again, you now find yourself in the area around Piazza Navona, one of Rome’s most famous spaces. Approaching the piazza from the south, opera lovers should not fail to visit Sant’Andrea della Valle, where Puccini set the first act of Tosca. (If overly devoted visitors try to find his fictional Attavanti chapel, however, they will be disappointed.) A Baroque wonder, Piazza Navona retains the oval shape of Domitian’s first-century stadium, although today it is most associated with Bernini’s fountain of the rivers. The eighteenth-century English traveler and writer Tobias Smollett reserved high praise for this spot in his Travels Through France and Italy (1766), all the while judging it by his high London standards: The noble Piazza Navona is adorned with three or four fountains, one of which is perhaps the most magnificent in Europe, and all of them discharge vast streams of water: but, notwithstanding this provision, the piazza is almost as dirty as West Smithfield.

Until the nineteenth century this area of Rome was also prone to flooding, and in many old paintings one sees aristocrats’ carriages crossing the piazza with their wooden axles submerged, behind which the less affluent paddle in boats. If you can tear yourself away from Bernini’s masterfully flowing marble, and evade the enticing toy store at the top of the piazza, you will soon, proceeding northward, encounter the Hostaria dell’Orso. Legend has it that the great Italian poet Dante stayed in this medieval inn, and with more certainty Rabelais and Montaigne are known to have stayed there as well. (Sorry, but literaryminded travelers can no longer imitate those recumbent writers; today the old hostel is a restaurant.)

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Despite the serpentine progress of the previous few paragraphs, your touring has not been without a destination, and as you pass the writers’ hostel and happen upon the Tiber, you see it now, there, sublime in the distance. (To witness it at sunset is to see its sublimity magnified still further.) The angel-lined Ponte San’Angelo one block ahead of you provides a fitting foreground for the exquisite view of St. Peter’s Church, the omphalos, or umbilical point, of Roman Christianity rising triumphantly before you. Just as the classical poet Horace, waxing poetic on the generosity of his patron Maecenas, described himself as bumping his head on the stars, so the 435-foot-tall dome of St. Peter’s seems to crowd the Italian heavens. (However, its designer Michelangelo never enjoyed such smooth relations with his patron popes, who were prone to spying and fistfighting, as we shall see.) The majesty of the cupola is matched by the vast marble grandeur of the basilica itself. To enter the church is to take in instantly a mix of marble, sunlight, an almost overwhelming architectural opulence and aesthetic richness, milling religious activity, and the unexpected sobriety that attends massive structures. You may feel at times as if you are walking in an enclosed city, so large are the church’s dimensions. For example, the two side aisles are more than 250 feet long and could easily contain many a freestanding church, yet in this grand context they are clearly peripheral to the great nave, mere appendages to the church’s eleven chapels and 45 altars. Michelangelo’s Pietà, his early masterpiece in marble, resides in the first chapel to the right. The stunning representation of Mary, forlornly holding the deposed Christ, still graceful in his disproportionate length, is now protected by glass after someone attacked it with an ax in 1972. At the church’s center lies the Papal Altar, whose sacred space is demarcated by Bernini’s extravagant Baldacchino. The twisting columns of this obsidian canopy mimic the traditional lines of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. The connection is fitting, for many Catholics believe that a New Jerusalem, or Christian Commonwealth, originates from this place atop the purported tomb of

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St. Peter. Putting aside cosmic coordinates for a moment, the sheer spectacle of the present moment can be breathtaking, for those fortunate to view the divine service in St. Peter’s. Not particularly pious, the Romantic novelist Stendhal nevertheless sounds an intoxicated note in his travel journal: I have just been witness to the proud ceremony at St. Peter’s; everything a wealth of solemn splendour, save the music. The sight of that venerable Pontiff, clad all in white silk, borne upon a sedilia which was given him as an offering by the Genoese, and distributing blessings within the precincts of that Sublime Temple—this constitutes one of the most impressive spectacles I have ever seen.

“Most impressive,” that is, until three days later, when Stendhal writes similarly, after watching similar ceremonies in the cathedral, “I have just beheld one of the most sublime, most moving sights that I have ever encountered in all my life.” Perhaps it is not surprising then, that one often hears of only mildly religious or even agnostic visitors experiencing some deepfelt stirring of the heart, an almost palpable presence of something more than human, in the sacred precincts of St. Peter’s. I myself have known a few low-church Midwestern Americans, who approached this Catholic holy place with a fair amount of Protestant suspicion (even if residual or subconscious), who nevertheless admitted later that a genuine religious feeling resulted from their visits. However, I have also known certain visitors who, while expecting to feel great admiration toward the wonders of the church, conversely found themselves suddenly repulsed by the wealth—the unapologetic opulence— that surrounded them and seemed to demand their pious subservience. For one visitor, passionate about Latin America, this domineering effect became even more repugnant when he recalled the extreme poverty of many Roman Catholics in those regions. Catholics naturally point in their defense to the matchless schools, charities, and social programs undertaken by their

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Church. The point I wish to emphasize, by way of concluding this initial literary tour of St. Peter’s and the city whose skyline it commands, is the consistency of such extreme reactions: for many centuries Rome and its landmarks have always made diverse visitors and writers opinionated, leaving them either enthusiastic or disgusted, or sometimes simply overwhelmed, even haunted. Some writers exalt the city and its imperial and ecclesiastical destinies, others just as vehemently invoke that sacred status only to invert it—to envision and condemn a city that is unmatched in its vicious corruption. A sacred city inverted is a diabolic city. Still others, internalizing these radically divergent attitudes, present a city that is finally a timeless rune, an urban mystery, characterized most by the profound ambivalence it brings forth.

C HA P TE R | T WO

Encountering Rome: Ancient Origins

For readers or travelers to appreciate the radically new sense of civic authority that characterized ancient Rome, they must first understand the convictions of its early citizens. Romulus and Remus, orphaned twins suckled by a she-wolf, legendarily founded the city some twenty-seven centuries ago, and from that time onward, till the late antique days of imperial decline, Romans increasingly felt as if they resided in a place providentially situated, uniquely capable of world governance, and possessing a singular political, military, and cultural destiny. The classical writer Vitruvius in his treatise On Architecture broadly contemplates Rome’s felicitous location, centrally situated on the Italian peninsula that itself represents a kind of geographical utopia—a paradisal region poised between less desirable extremes: “So Italy, lying between the North and South, combines the advantages of each, and her pre-eminence is well founded and beyond dispute.” Wise Italians, by the “divine intelligence” that placed them there, thus were able to repel the “assaults of northern barbarians” and the “ploys” of intemperate, idle southerners. Or more specifically, consider Cicero’s powerful evocation of Rome and its surroundings in his Republic: 13

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How, then, could Romulus have acted with a wisdom more divine, both availing himself of all the advantages of the sea and avoiding its disadvantages, than by placing his city on the bank of a never-failing river whose broad stream flows with unvarying current into the sea? Such a river enables the city to use the sea both for importing what it lacks and for exporting what it produces in superfluity; and by means of it likewise the city can not only bring in by sea but also obtain from the land, carried on its waters, whatever is most essential for its life and civilization. Consequently it seems to me that Romulus must at the very beginning have had a divine intimation that the city would one day be the seat and hearthstone of a mighty empire; for scarcely could a city placed upon any other site in Italy have more easily maintained our present widespread dominion. (2.5)

Cicero’s praise of Rome’s “divine” location between land and sea, along with his more pragmatic attention to importing and exporting, nicely looks back to a pre-Romulan presence, which he and his peers could not entirely imagine—an “urban” foundation, primordial and protohistorical on the Tiber’s banks, so modest that its domain belongs to modern anthropologists rather than classical rhetoricians. THE FOUNDING OF ROME

One such modern author, Alexandre Grandazzi, asks bluntly of the earliest travelers along the Tiber: Why did they stop at the future site of Rome rather than somewhere else? He points out that Tiber Island, in the curve of the river’s second loop, created a convenient place for crossing, and in 291 B.C. a temple to Aesculapius, god of healing, was dedicated on the island to mark the end of the plague. A charitable hospital, founded by a confraternity in the sixteenth century, is a large presence on the island today and continues its medicinal associations. A shoreward façade of travertine used to encircle the island, resembling the stern and prow of a ship, and to employ a different image,

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one might speak of this modest, surprisingly tranquil space as the true cradle of Roman civilization. From one side of the island the Ponte Cestio conveys explorers to Trastevere, while on the other side the first-century B.C. Ponte Fabricio, the oldest bridge in Rome still in use, leads to the alluvial plain (eventually known as the Campus Martius) that welcomed these pre-historical travelers with its large expanse of land. So the site itself had its benefits, but they can only be considered beneficial if the regular crossing of the Tiber was of great importance. What was the benefit of such movement? Grandazzi believes mountain shepherds sought out the salt fields near the coast and Ostia, fields that provided a valuable commodity in which these ancient tribes trafficked. The name of an ancient route into Rome, Via Salaria (from Latin “sal,” or salt), offers proof for this theory: ancient road names indicated destination, and so the name “Salaria” suggests the trade route itself was of prime interest, and was well established before the city’s founding— otherwise the road would be called Via Romana. Our current word “salary” reinforces the economic importance of the salt trade. The attractive site that was to become Rome likely offered yet another valuable resource, forests, which made Latium a region famed among other great cultures including the Etruscans, Greeks, and Phoenicians. (Camilla’s famous speech from Livy’s On the Founding of the City, in which he urges his fellow Romans to remain in their city, describes the “woods and marshes” of the area, features that have long since vanished from the Roman countryside.) The literal founding of Rome likely occurred in the eighth century B.C. when several villages along this bend in the river joined together to defend more formidably these resources against competitors and invaders. One infers this defensive impulse from the traditional narrative of Romulus’s founding of the city in 753 B.C., an event marked by the raising of municipal walls and ramparts. In the visionary sixth book of his Aeneid, Virgil describes how Anchises and Aeneas, Rome’s Trojan forefather, witness in the Underworld a procession of heroes representing Rome’s great

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destiny, to commence upon Aeneas’s arrival in Italy. Under Romulus’s rule, explains Anchises, Illustrious Rome will bound her power with earth, Her spirit with Olympus. She’ll enclose Her seven hills with one great city wall, Fortunate in the men she breeds. (6.1048–52; tr. Robert Fitzgerald)

Continuing his earlier praise of Romulus and Rome’s location, Cicero in his Republic also addresses the city’s defenses, both natural and man-made: As to the natural defenses of the city itself, who is so unobserving as not to have a clear outline of them imprinted upon his mind? The line and course of its walls were wisely planned by Romulus and the kings who succeeded him, being so placed on the everywhere steep and precipitous hillsides that the single approach, which lies between the Esquiline and the Quirinal hills, was girt about by a huge rampart facing the foe and by a mighty trench; and our citadel [the Capitoline Hill] was so well fortified by the sheer precipices which encompass it and the rock which appears to be cut away on every side that it remained safe and impregnable even at the terrible time of the advent of the Gauls. In addition, the site which he chose abounds in springs and is healthful, though in the midst of a pestilential region; for there are hills, which not only enjoy the breezes but at the same time give shade to the valleys below. (2.6)

Romulus’s “clear outline” for his walls formed Roma Quadrata, around which the Pomoerium marked the nascent city’s sacred boundaries. The imperial historian Tacitus described the “original plan of the precinct, as it was fixed by Romulus,” as follows:

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From the ox market [or Forum Boarium], where we see the brazen statue of a bull, ... a furrow was drawn to mark out the town, so as to embrace the great altar of Hercules; then, at regular intervals, stones were placed along the foot of the Palatine hill to the altar of Consus, soon afterwards, to the old Courts, and then to the chapel of Larunda. The Roman forum and the Capitol were not, it was supposed, added to the city by Romulus, but by Titus Tatius. In time, the precinct was enlarged by the growth of Rome’s fortunes. (Annales, 12.24)

This impression of modesty probably reflects well the overall character of Rome’s first political age, that of the Seven Kings— Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Martius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Tarquininus Superbus, whose son Sextus gained infamy in the works of many poets, including Shakespeare’s, as the violator of the chaste Roman wife Lucrece. With adroit verbal doubling, Shakespeare describes the villain of “The Rape of Lucrece”: Such hazard now must doting Tarquin make, Pawning his honour to obtain his lust, And for himself himself he must forsake: Then where is truth, if there be no self-trust? When shall he think to find a stranger just When he himself himself confounds, betrays To slanderous tongues and wretched hateful days? (155–61)

But Tarquinius’s “inflamed” rapist son was far from the first scoundrel in Rome. One scholar calls the earliest inhabitants of Rome “down-and-outs and criminals,” and what’s worse, it appears they were exclusively male—a problem that gave rise to a memorable solution. Romulus invited the entire population of nearby Sabinum to games and a festival in the new city, but the invitation was merely a ruse to abduct female mates, as Livy recounts:

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At a given signal, the young Romans dashed into the crowd and grabbed the hold of the Sabine girls. Mostly they took the ones who happened to be nearest. The prettier ones, though, had been earmarked as senators’ property; they were taken away by specially recruited gangs.... The festival broke up in a panic. The girls’ parents rushed off in a terrible state, complaining that the laws of hospitality had been broken. (On the Founding of the City, 1.9)

Naturally battles between the Romans and Sabines ensued, and the new city also had to defend itself against rival Alba Longa to the south. During the latter kings’ reigns, however, Roman expansion also occurred: Servius raised further walls (although tufa fragments of “Servian” walls still visible in the city today are often sections rebuilt during the later Republican age), and the younger Tarquin drained nearby swampland—the “pestilential region” mentioned by Cicero—and developed it into a forum, or marketplace, by means of the Cloaca Maxima, a great sewer that still forms part of modern Rome’s drainage system. Despite this growth, Rome was not yet independent; it was dominated by the more powerful Etruscan people to the north (in what is today Tuscany), so much so that the Tarquins were in essence Etruscan despots. This colonization only ended when the stern Junius Brutus toppled the latter Tarquin in 510 B.C. Rome’s rich collections of Etruscan artifacts include those of the Villa Giulia, the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, and of course, the Vatican Museums. The city was henceforth governed by a Curia, or Senate; Rome’s Republican era had begun, and its austerity is suggested by the simple lines of the Senate House that stands in the western half of the Roman Forum. (The building is actually a relatively recent replica of a later senate house rebuilt by Diocletian in the third century.) WARS OF THE REPUBLIC

During the next four hundred years, the Roman Republic’s consolidation of power gradually increased. Following the heroism

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of its great general Scipio Africanus in the Second Punic War and the end of the Third Punic War with the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C., Rome solely ruled the western Mediterranean world. It had reached this dominance, however, only after a dizzying number of triumphs and setbacks. Sometimes these occurred in the same year: in 494 B.C. the consuls established the lex latina (or Latin Law), a high point for the Republic, but they were also nearly overthrown by soldiers who were underfed and felt underappreciated—only Menenius Agrippa’s parable about the belly and limbs of the body politic, which Shakespeare made famous in his play Coriolanus, prevented a military revolt. (In later centuries the Gracchi brothers and Sparticus would lead—and be punished for—similar plebian uprisings.) The Temple of Castor and Pollux, whose three remaining fluted columns are among the most photogenic in the Forum, was founded in the early fifth century to commemorate victories against other Latin tribes; it joined the nearby Temple of Saturn, which was associated with the Romans’ ritual of feasting and sacrifice, the Saturnalia, and which is today a prominent ruin with its eight columns and entablature. In 396 B.C. the Romans definitively defeated the Etruscans by taking their city of Veii, but only six years later Rome itself was invaded by the Gauls. At one point loud geese on the Capitol hill warned Romans about the siege; it makes for a nice story, but in reality it did not prevent the inevitable sacking of the city, when many buildings were burnt and measureless records of early Roman history laid waste. Camillus, who chastised his countrymen and kept them from fleeing the city, soon became known as the Second Founder of Rome, and he was a heroic figure later emperors such as Caesar and Augustus would symbolically appropriate. The city continued to fight many wars with its Italian neighbors (Latium, Samnium), and during the third century B.C. it ruled a unified peninsula; by 168 B.C. it had also conquered Greece. Rome at this time began to assume its opulent, cosmopolitan character, as Metellus’s spoils from Syracuse and others’ treasures poured

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into the city. Strabo states in his Geography, “And indeed, of the other works of art in Rome, the most numerous and the best came from Corinth” (8.6.23). However, it would be misleading to mention this new cultural sophistication while overlooking Rome’s practical advancements in civil engineering, best symbolized by the Via Appia, a major roadway to the south begun by a consul in 312 B.C., and the contemporaneous creation of vast aqueducts, traces of which remain visible throughout the city. FROM THE PYRAMID TO THE MOUTH OF TRUTH

Let us return south to the Pyramide Metro station at the foot of the Aventine hill. We will explore the Aventine in more detail later, but it is also a convenient entry point to some of Rome’s most ancient sites. Doubtless you will notice a rather hard-tomiss large pyramid in white marble, intersected by the later, Aurelian wall beside the Porta San Paolo. The pyramid memorializes Caius Cestius, an otherwise forgettable bureaucrat who died in 12 B.C. Renaissance humanists, armed with new skills to read Latin epigraphs, triumphantly determined the pyramid’s true inhabitant, thus contradicting a longstanding association of the tomb with Romulus’s brother, Remus. The Protestant Cemetery just behind this site will be dear to any lover of English poets Shelley and Keats, who are both buried amid its cypress trees. Keats’s grave is in the oldest part of the cemetery, and upon learning of his death in 1821, Shelley, living in Pisa at the time, wrote his famous elegy “Adonais”: Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth, Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright. Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre, Oh, not of him, but of our joy: ’tis nought That ages, empires and religions there Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; For such as he can lend—they borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey;

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And he is gather’d to the kings of thought Who wag’d contention with their time’s decay, And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

Shelley’s own tomb features Ariel’s lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” Shelley’s death by drowning gives the lines a grim—but finally affirming—resonance. If one proceeds eastward you will encounter a neighborhood, grid-like and unassuming, of local pizzerias and now the occasional Internet Café. This area is anchored by a strange hill known as Monte Testaccio, formed in the first century B.C. by pottery fragments (or testae). How to explain this? Romans dumped here their discarded earthenware, which was used to package wine, oil, lamps, etc. In other words, the 120-foot high hill is composed of the Roman equivalent of our cardboard and Styrofoam. Today the hill is ringed with hip new restaurants and nightclubs—modern, neon versions of the hill’s caverns that were once notorious as secret wine bars. Next walk to the north until you encounter the Tiber—“the river that flows with gentle stream through the fair city,” in the words of the ancient Roman poet Ennius. If you walk along the river, proceeding to the northeast, you will soon arrive in the Piazza della Bocca della Verità, named after the most popular site in the area—a drain cover or, according to one seventeenthcentury English traveler, a gutter spout. This is not a joke. Within the portico of the admirably spare sixth-century church Santa Maria in Cosmedin, there is usually a line of tourists awaiting to confront the Mouth of Truth (or Bocca della Verità), part of a circular, face-shaped cover or fountain piece from the Republican era. Since the Middle Ages citizens and visitors have been proving their veracity by placing their hands in the gaping mouth—legend says it will snap shut upon any hand belonging to a liar. Thus spouses sometimes verified the faithfulness of their mates, and Roman parents continue to threaten suspect children with a visit to the Bocca, which reveals all. In the film

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Roman Holiday, a lovely scene between Gregory Peck and a skittish Audrey Hepburn occurs before the hollow eyes and stern mouth of the landmark. In other respects the square represents a panoply of Roman eras—the late Baroque Fontana dei Tritoni, the Renaissance façade of San Giovanni Decollato, the Romanesque bell towers of Santa Maria and San Giorgio in Velabro, the general influence of the Greek Byzantines who fled the medieval iconoclast emperors, the late antique and formidable Arch of Janus, and most prominently, Rome’s best preserved Republican temples: the Temple of Portunus, the god of rivers, and the circular Temple of Hercules, often confused with the Forum’s Temple of Vesta, which it resembles. The nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt enthused that the latter temple was “not unlike an hour-glass—or a toadstool; it is small but exceedingly beautiful.” Mussolini restored these edifices early in his rule, stripping them of their Christianizing accretions. This area, the Forum Boarium, is the same “ox market” that Tacitus described earlier as being at the center of Rome’s original parameter, and one can get a sense of its long existence by looking out across the Tiber, to the forlorn Ponte Rotto, or broken bridge, just upstream, a powerful image of Tempus edax—time the devourer. In the 1920s Mussolini was also responsible for uncovering the Area Sacra, a complex of other Republican temples, several blocks to the north in a terribly congested central piazza, Largo Argentina. The remains of two marble lavatories can be seen here, a rather funny reminder of the city’s increasingly opulent character in the days just before the Imperial era. Rivalries between Marius and Sulla, and then Pompey and Julius Caesar, led to competitive urban patronage that encouraged monumental and luxurious projects throughout the first century B.C.—loggias, vaulted arches, grandiose edifices, marble embellishments of various kinds. Nearby the Largo Argentina, along Via Monte della Farina, was the site of the Curia Pompeia, where Caesar, as he was cut down by Brutus, Cassius, and others, uttered his famous words often echoed by the betrayed:

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“Et tu, Brute?” After the assassination, Mark Antony mounted the Imperial Rostra in the Forum and delivered a famous speech, which Shakespeare made more so: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them: The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. (Julius Caesar, 3.2.82–86)

Shakespeare and Rome William Shakespeare wrote about Rome in his dramas Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare researched Rome by reading the work of Seneca, Ovid, and Plautus and was very influenced by their work. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Venus and Adonis contain references to Ovid, and A Comedy of Errors was based on a play written by Plautus, whose comedies were very popular in ancient Rome. Seneca’s stories often centered on revenge and murder and frequently featured ghosts and men absorbed by their own ambitions. It doesn’t take long to see his influence on Julius Caesar as well as Macbeth, Hamlet, and other tragedies by Shakespeare. Seneca himself met a tragic end that Shakespeare probably would have appreciated; robbed of his wealth by Nero, he was implicated in a plot to kill the emperor, and forced by Nero to commit suicide. The Greek Plutarch was also an influence on Shakespeare. His Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of ancient leaders and heroes, served as a major source for the historical research Shakespeare used when writing Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.

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Antony, along with Octavian and Lepidus (the Second Triumvirate), executed the orator and politician Cicero the following year, placing his head and hands on the Rostra, whose name came from the captured ships’ prows (rostra) that decorated the dais. Caesar’s memory lived on in the massive Basilica Julia, the remains of which are just south of the Rostra, and the Julian Forum near the corner of Piazza Venezia and the Via dei Fori Imperiali, appropriately in the very center of the city. Of course Augustus also glorified his kin during and after the seventeen years of civil war that followed Caesar’s death. We will consider in our final survey of the Capitoline and Palatine hills this Augustus, the first and greatest Roman Emperor who, in his own words, found Rome brick and left it marble. THE HILLS OF ANCIENT ROME

Cicero’s and Tacitus’s descriptions (above) indicate the importance of hills to Rome’s geographical character. They are prominently discussed in nearly every survey of the city, including this passage from Christopher Marlowe’s Renaissance play Doctor Faustus in which the demon Mephistopheles presents Rome to the damned protagonist: But now, my Faustus, that thou may’st perceive, What Rome contains for to delight thine eyes. Know that this city stands upon seven hills, That underprop the ground-work of the same. Just through the midst runs flowing Tiber’s stream, With winding banks that cut it in two parts; Over the which two stately Bridges lean, That make safe passage, to each part of Rome. Upon the Bridge, called Ponto Angelo, Erected is a castle passing strong, Where thou shalt see such store of ordinance, As that the double cannons forged of brass, Do watch the number of the days contained,

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Within the compass of one complete year. Beside the gates, and high pyramide, That Julius Caesar brought from Africa. (“B-Text” [1616], 3.1.30–44)

Looking out from the “goodly palace of the Pope” (likely meant to indicate the gallery of the Belvedere, at the Vatican palace), the pair notices the Castel Sant’Angelo and the obelisk (Renaissance English, “pyramide”) just recently relocated to Piazza San Pietro when Marlowe was writing. The two bridges represent a mistake from an earlier source, or perhaps simply a printing mishap; most early modern descriptions of the city speak of its four bridges, at least. But to return to Rome’s topography: by the Republican era its seven principal hills, as if one for each of its previous kings, were long-inhabited locations within the city—the Palatine, Aventine, Capitoline, Celian, Esquiline, Viminal, and Quirinal. Rome’s sixth king, Servius, is credited with annexing, settling, and fortifying these three final hills, while the Palatine and the Capitoline were the ones occupied first. They remain the places where travelers can still encounter most fully Rome’s origins and its rich tapestry of classical history—from the immemorial days of primitive huts atop the Palatine to the Capitoline’s Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, whose famed golden roof appeared in the first century B.C., and whose destruction by fire in the following century deeply affected much of the world. This loss likely seemed a portent to northern Gothic tribes, encouraged that Rome’s glory was indeed passing. The fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus nevertheless defended the Capitol’s sacred ground, “by which Rome maintains her claim to eternity,” but less than a hundred years later, in 455 A.D., a Vandal leader stripped the Temple of Jupiter of its gilded roof, and the disappearance of statues during the following century reduced its grandeur still further. A different kind of portent marked the early consecration of Jupiter’s Temple by the final Roman king Tarquinius Superbus. Then, as Livy reports it,

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it is said that a human skull came to light, its features perfectly preserved. This discovery announced in unambiguous fashion that this place would be the seat of empire and the capital of the world.

This mysterious severed head [Latin, “caput”] provides the etymological basis for the Roman hill’s name, as well as for our English word “capitol.” The site of the vanished temple now lies underneath one of the Capitoline museums (the Palazzo Nuovo), near the southwest corner of the hll. The steep face of this corner, called the Tarpeian Rock, is also associated with Tarquin, and it supposedly derives its name from Tarpeia, a traitorous watch-keeper who, once bribed, handed over the hill to the Sabines during the time of Romulus. Subsequently Rome executed its criminals by throwing them from this very cliff. On a lighter note, enthusiasts of Rome’s ancient culture should not miss the treasures of classical statuary found on the Capitoline. H.V. Morton in A Traveller in Rome describes the Michelangelo-designed Capitol piazza as a serene place where “the philosopher rides his golden horse,” a reference to the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius recently returned to the center of the piazza. No one has praised the piazza and its main landmark more eloquently than the late Russian poet and Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky. Inside the Palazzo dei Conservatori, also designed by Michelangelo, one can see another famed bronze—the Etruscan (or perhaps Greek) She-Wolf, under which tiny casts of twins were later added to complete Rome’s narrative of foundation. A reproduction of this sculpture can also be seen outdoors, on the left side of the Palazzo Senatori, adjacent to the museum. Do not miss the Spinario, a bronze of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, or the petite Esquiline Venus, or Carvaggio’s painting of St. John the Baptist, as provocative as the first two are charming. In a courtyard reside colossal fragments, including a giant hand made famous by Henri Fuseli’s drawing, “The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Antique Fragments.” The oft-photographed head is a fourth-

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century bust of Constantine II, whose large eyes and “mild might” thrilled the English novelist George Eliot. Across the piazza in the Palazzo Nuovo, Nathaniel Hawthorne first conceived of his novel The Marble Faun: “I went today to the Sculpture Gallery of the Capitol [the Palazzo’s Hall of Philosophers], and looked pretty thoroughly through the busts of Illustrious Men,” he writes in his notebook. “I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles; because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a little romance about it.” The novel opens in this gallery and describes three statues—the Faun, the Human Soul, and the Dying Gladiator, the last of which is arguably the most prized piece of art in the museum. Florence Nightingale wrote powerfully and knowingly on it in 1847: You see a dying man, the body dying in every sense and power, and yet you see the spirit, not there, but far away. It seems almost a miracle, and I lingered in that room, wondering at that art ... [it] has succeeded in enchaining all our sympathies to the soul, which yet hardly seems to animate that body which we see, but to be far off. The double life in that countenance, or rather the death in the face and the eternal life in the expression, is really like inspiration. (Nightingale in Rome, 93–94)

A final inspiration for readers and travelers is the Palatine Hill, scenic, surprisingly quiet, yet haunted by imperial ghosts. Visitors can approach this ancient place—“ancient” even by Roman standards—by a path (the Clivus Palatinus) that ascends from the Arch of Titus in the eastern half of the Roman Forum. Eleanor Clark in her timelessly intelligent Rome and a Villa describes a common first impression: “you go not expecting much in the way of current tranquility, in which to contemplate a history lacking in any, and so are almost neurotically grateful for what you find.” Realizing this was the fashionable quarter during the Imperial Age, you can almost sense as you leave the Forum the well-to-do Romans’ exclusive repose, which only

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wealth can buy, as they left behind the hustling bustle of the commercial area below. Today those who make the climb are still greeted by acanthus and many other flowers. If the Forum were Rome’s boulevard or “the strip,” then the Palatine was the garden resort of the classical city. Later emperors, ignoring Augustus’ relative frugality, chose instead to construct immense, extravagant palaces, the skeletons of which can still be viewed at the back of the hill. A decadence—a sense of privilege—is still present in these broken-down forms, and Clark rightly points out that the “frugal” Augustus still placed a fifty-foot-tall bronze statue of himself in his Palatine reading room. It all brings to mind the poet Thomas Hardy’s wry reaction from 1887: And each ranked ruin tended to beguile The outer sense, and shape itself as though It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle. (“Rome: On the Palatine,” 5–8)

More memorably, however, visitors may find themselves overcome with a sense of solitude, of loss, right here atop the main hill of the sprawling, modern city of Rome. The sunlight beats upon you, the dust dries your throat, and you may share Thomas Hobbes’ elegiac conviction: “From this place Nero made a Gallery to his Palace, upon Mons Palatinus, whereof there is now nothing remaining, but some few Pillars which bore it up, very great ones, and marble.” Remains of the houses of Augustus and Livia and of the Palace of Septimus Severus, resembling in some ways giant sandstone beehives, sit atop the hill and tower over the Circus Maximus below, a place that once held some 350,000 spectators who cheered on charioteers and athletes, or marveled at grand animal fights. By the time Augustus built his marble Imperial box there (the first corporate box seats, perhaps), the circus was clearly a place of great social activity. The first-century satirist Juvenal did not find it all clean fun: “all Rome / Is in the Circus today. The roar that assails my

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eardrums / means, I am pretty sure, that the Greens have won ... // The races are fine for young men: / They can cheer their fancy and bet at long odds and sit / with some smart little girl-friend ...” (Satire 11.196–98, 201–3, tr. Peter Green). Despite the poet’s hints at profligacy, sexual promiscuity, and noise pollution, the Circus had its virtues: Romans were clearly passionate about their contests, and this pastime represented a powerful source of civic identity—sometimes one third of the city would fill the grandstands. Today this long, vacant space appears most like a dusty football field in a tiny American town during a summer of drought. Dried up. Overlooked. A final kind of contrast is found on the other side of the Palatine, supposed location of the Iron-Age huts of Romulus—mythic site of Rome’s first, primitive foundations. In Book 8 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Romulus’s abode appears “newly thatched and rough” on Aeneas’s prophetic shield. This sacred space appears earlier in the eighth book as well, when the Arcadian shepherd Evander guides Aeneas around Pallanteum, the wooded spot, and embryonic version, of the future imperial city: “Then he showed the wood / That Romulus would make a place of refuge ...” (8.451–52). “Austere” Evander’s house, furthermore, poetically duplicates that original hut: “Friend, have the courage / To care little for wealth,” the shepherd admonishes Aeneas. “Do not come / disdainfully into our needy home” (482–85). Virgil alludes here to his patron Augustus, whose residence on the Palatine had been consciously built upon the presumed spot of Evander’s “needy home.” Similarly, the emperor cultivated an image as another founder of Rome, a second coming of Romulus. But was this merely flattery? Would Evander warn Aeneas of wealth if Virgil’s Rome were not corrupted by it? And notice above that Romulus seeks a place of refuge—he does so because he must; he has just killed his brother Remus. Others were not as subtle in serving up these inconsistencies, and Catharine Edwards in Writing Rome persuasively shows how the mischievous poet Ovid also critiques Augustus’s posture of noble simplicity. No

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stranger to scandal, Ovid was eventually banished to the Black Sea. In Letters from Pontus he writes: From my own home, I turn to the sights of splendid Rome, and in my mind’s eye I survey them all. Now I remember the fora, the temples, the theatres covered with marble, the colonnades where the ground has been leveled—now the grass of the Campus Martius and the views of the noble gardens, the lakes, the Waterway, the Aqua Virgo ...

Ovid’s passionate recollections of his beloved city—forever distant to him in his exiled state—provide a poignant glimpse of classical Rome’s allure.

C HAPTE R | TH R E E

The Imperial Made Sacred: Early Christian Rome

No matter the epoch under consideration, Rome is a city defined by recurring sevens—the number of fortune and eternity: its first seven kings, the seven hills central to its foundation legends, and later in the twilight of antiquity, as the Christian city arose literally on top of its classical predecessor, its seven principal churches soon frequented by endless lines of pilgrims. Certain maps of Rome represent only these most holy basilicas: St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, which housed the sanctified heads of their eponymous apostles; Santa Maria Maggiore; St. John Lateran, Rome’s official cathedral and the premier church during the Middle Ages; San Lorenzo, whose namesake was burnt on a gridiron in 258; San Croce in Gerusalemme, so named for its chief relic, a piece of the cross on which Christ was crucified, which tradition says was obtained by the emperor Constantine’s devout mother, Helena; and San Sebastiano, which originally functioned as a shelter for catacombs at the southern periphery of the city. This final church was eventually named for a Roman soldier pierced by arrows because of his Christian profession; a popular subject for Renaissance and Baroque painters, numerous artwork Sebastians can be viewed throughout the 31

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city. Beginning at St. Peter’s at daybreak, an intrepid pilgrim can still visit all seven churches in a single day, although subway lines, buses, and even rented Vespa cycles offer less ambitious visitors some transit shortcuts—modern equivalents to the earlier habit of visiting the seven sites on horseback. (The Renaissance painter and art biographer Giorgio Vasari spent a day with Michelangelo in this fashion.) Citizens and visitors throughout the Middle Ages imagined the city as in forma leonis, or in the shape of a lion, an image-outline informed by these seven holy locales. During the controversies of the Reformation, however, Protestant detractors vehemently upturned Rome’s association with the number seven. Condemning an unholy city of the wicked, idolatrous Catholic Church, they easily interpreted St. John’s following vision from the Book of Revelation as critically relevant to Rome: “I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, which had seven heads, and ten horns” (17:3). The biblical text itself identifies these heads with mountains and kings, and in the staunchly Protestant Geneva Bible (1560), a commentator emphasizes the hills “which are about Rome,” and explains the image thus: “The beast signifieth the ancient Rome: the woman that sitteth thereon, the new Rome that is the Papistrie [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church].” Despite the allegorical “bad press,” the Eternal City continued and continues to embrace the numerical association, and these same seven churches remained the principal holy sites during the recent millennial Jubilee in 2000. COMPETING HOLY CITIES

The city clings as tenaciously to its seven hills; never mind that it also boasts other famous hills, including the Vatican (yes, it’s a hill too, not just a church), the Pincio across the city with its stunning views, and the Janiculum rising above Trastevere, which, according to some legends, is the site of the god Saturn’s even earlier “founding” of Rome during the mythic Golden Age. (Some syncretic myths developed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance connect this god to the ancient figure of

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Janus, and even to a son of the biblical Noah.) Whatever the realities of geography, Rome’s hills are traditionally seven, and so they will remain. Other cities, following Rome’s lead, have also claimed to be founded on seven hills, as if the fact itself somehow bestowed civic authority, a greatness of destiny: Rio de Janeiro; Prague; Athens; Amman; Lisbon; Moscow; Istanbul; Kiev; Edinburgh; as well as the less illustrious Veszprém, Hungary; Thiruvananthapuram, India; Kampala, Uganda; Bristol, England; and in the United States, Cincinnati, Ohio; Elicott City, Maryland; Marshall, Texas; and Worcester, Massachusetts. Rome’s neighbor Siena has made this claim, as has its South Atlantic doppelganger, Rome, Georgia. (The American writer David Leavitt has a short story in which Rosa, a Roman girl, marries a soldier and returns to his hometown—Rome, Kansas; Leavitt declines to say whether it too has seven hills.) Most importantly, Jerusalem also was founded upon seven hills, and from the earliest days of Roman Christianity such parallels between the two holy (and sometimes competing) cities have proliferated. The Medievalist Chiara Frugoni defines the two cities well, and not without additional complexity: ... there is only one city, a city more conceptual than real: the heavenly Jerusalem; the Jerusalem on earth, goal of primarily spiritual pilgrimages; Rome, the eternal city, which through its imposing ruins, and as the center of the Christian religion, transformed the myth of empire into that of spiritual magisterium.

As the Church grew, Rome assumed the role of the more powerful successor of Christianity’s birthplace in Palestine, eventually overrun by Muslim rulers. Thus St. Peter’s church was thought to replace, and in some sense fulfill, King Solomon’s temple. In other words, the Western site completed its Eastern counterpart and situated it in a greater salvation history, much like the Greek New Testament represented for Rome’s Christians a typological “reckoning” of the covenant and promises of

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the Hebrew Bible. Likewise, the city’s many biblical relics were presumably brought over (or “translated”) to a safer, more holy location, whether by divine power or simply by enthusiastic believers with a hankering for travel and dearth of scruples. Near St. John Lateran, for example, a chapel holds the holy stairs (or Scala Sancta) upon which Christ supposedly climbed within the Jerusalem palace of Pontius Pilate. Pilgrims to this day pay homage by ascending the stairs on their knees, a practice that led Anthony Munday, an English traveler to Renaissance Rome, to comment that “with the number that creep up and down these stairs daily, they are kept as clean as the fine houses in London, where you may see your face in the boards.” In fact the beginnings of Christian Rome, as this chapter will demonstrate, were much more modest and violent, and even its medieval continuance proved more precarious and unpredictable than one might imagine, considering it was the Age of the Church. During the Middle Ages Rome’s population dwindled, its opulent piazzas became hills where cattle grazed, and its once impenetrable precincts suffered repeated invasions and destruction. Yet the earlier ministry and crucifixion (upside down, at his request) of Christ’s apostle Peter, along with the spiritual witness of other persecuted followers, nevertheless left an indelible mark on this pagan city of emperors, so much so that it eventually boasted of a different kind of empire—a spiritual dominion present on earth. Rome for European Christians soon became simply “The City” (Urbs), unrivaled in its ceremony, majesty, and authority. Truly a paradox, late antique and medieval Rome remains visible—and readable—to travelers to this day. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF EMPERORS

Let’s begin again at the city’s monumental heart. Proceed to the foot of the Colosseum, with the busy Via dei Fori Imperiali at your back, and before you—among many other things at this spot of dense tourism—some of the city’s famed stray cat population, either utterly unconcerned by your presence as they lie

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on the dark, ancient stones, or else quite enchanted by you, as if eager to pose in your photo for a few Italian lira. From this spot, you can quickly gather a sense of Rome’s oscillating political and architectural fortunes in the centuries following the Augustan peace. Even as the empire achieved its greatest territorial domination in the first century, it suffered from a series of debauched, crazed emperors that most citizens would not wish on their enemies—Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and the other cruel profligates that followed. The crimes and excesses of Nero were grand, even by imperial standards. Becoming emperor at 16, he eventually arranged for the deaths of his mother and wife, and murdered his pregnant mistress himself. Yet Nero fancied himself a sensitive artist, and spent many hours writing poetry and playing the harp. A huge fire ravaged Rome in 64, and rumors soon circulated that Nero watched the destruction happily, doing nothing more than singing of the fall of Troy. (There’s long been a tradition that he witnessed this conflagration from atop the Torre delle Milizie, a tower near the city center, but it was not built till the thirteenth century.) This incident explains our current idiom for inaction, “playing the fiddle while Rome burns,” recently given new technological life by Nero, aptly named computer software for copying—or burning—CDs. The young emperor actively rebuilt the city, two-thirds of which was destroyed, but he directed most of his resources and attention to his Golden House (Domus Aurea), an almost inconceivably large pleasure palace spreading across the Esquiline, Celian, and Palatine hills. The inordinate luxury and decadence of the place are vividly brought to mind by the Roman historian Suetonius: In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved all day and night, like the

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heavens. He had baths supplied with sea water and sulphur water (Life of Nero, 31).

Suetonius confirms Nero’s megalomania by quoting his response to this finished palace, with its brothel of aristocratic women: at last, he said, he was beginning to live like a human being. The tyrant imported exotic animals and created elaborate grottos in the wooded valley between the Esquiline and Palatine, in the exact spot where you are standing. He also made an artificial lake there, near a colossal bronze statue of himelf, 120 feet tall. Nero met a violent end in 68, but his colossal statue nevertheless lent its name to the Colosseum, the enduring structure built by Vespasian (a successor and much better emperor) after he had drained his wicked predecessor’s lake. Sigmund Freud invokes this change in a famous comparison in Civilization and Its Discontents. There he imagines Rome with its many architectural layers as the human psyche, “in which nothing that has come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development exist alongside the later ones.” He continues by meditating upon the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus: ... and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed the Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes. Where the Colosseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House ... (257–58)

Far more akin to forward-looking Vespasian than to memoryhaunted Freud, later emperors also proved eager to erase Nero’s taint from the city: Titus and Trajan constructed baths on the palace’s foundation, and Hadrian consecrated a civic-conscious Temple of Venus and Rome, a “gigantic piece of engineering” (as the anonymous Historia Augusta deems it) where Nero’s vestibule once stood. You can gain a terrific view of this temple’s

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enormous dimensions from the upper tier of the Colosseum, adjacent to it on the Forum’s edge. The benevolent Trajan, particularly, did much to restore Rome’s urban fabric—his threetiered market is today used as an elegant backdrop for exhibits, and just to the west he erected in 113 an exquisite marble column, with its detailed scenes of his military campaigns

Suetonius, the Gossip Born in 69 A.D., Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus kicked around Rome for years searching for his true calling. He failed at the practice of law and then tried a career in the military, but that didn’t work out either. Next, he found a place in the Roman hierarchy as private secretary to Emperor Hadrian, but was fired when he was rude to the empress. Nevertheless, as Hadrian’s secretary, he was given access to the emperor’s libraries, where he learned the dark secrets of the rulers of Rome. Armed with that knowledge, Suetonius produced The Lives of the Caesars, a biography of twelve rulers of Rome—including Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—that may have gone down in history as man’s first attempt at tabloid journalism. Indeed, Suetonius filled his biography with juicy gossip and conflicting facts about the ugly, scandalous side of the Roman rulers. There are tales of adultery, murder, and perversion, to be sure, but Suetonius had an eye for somewhat more humorous details as well. Julius Caesar, for example, fretted over losing his hair. Caligula wanted to promote his horse to the rank of counsel. And, according to Suetonius, Nero did sing while Rome burned. Two prominent translations of Suetonius’s book include Lives of the Caesars, edited by Catharine Edwards, and The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, in which Graves drew heavily on Suetonius’s portrait of Claudius.

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spiraling upward. Modern Rome has seemed embarrassed of Nero too; ruins of the Golden House were only recently reopened to the public, and the otherwise pleasant walking space of the Oppian hill, just to the northeast of the Colosseum, still attracts many of Rome’s down-and-out population. If you instead walk up the hill due north, you will soon see the church San Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains), built by Pope Leo I in the fifth century. It is so named because it houses links of the captive apostle’s chains, as well as a must-see from a later age, Michelangelo’s sculpture Moses. EMPERORS OF DECLINE

A few good emperors served Rome in the second century, among them Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, whose own column rises above the Piazza Colonna to the north, but overall we now enter into what the great historian Edward Gibbon famously called the “decline and fall” of the Empire, the tumultuous, rudderless time of Commodus (recently brought back to cruel life in the movie Gladiator), Caracalla, and Helagabalus. Gibbon eloquently judged it a lascivious, despotic age. In 238 alone Rome endured no less than six emperors, and throughout the century it faced financial crises, the loss of its outer territories, and threats from its own generals. Even the architectural accomplishments of this age have a certain edge to them: the Baths of Caracalla, just south of the Celian Hill, possess a vastness that one suspects was born of imperial anxiety (and indeed, invading Goths eventually destroyed the complex). Similarly, Aurelian’s newly fortified walls transmitted a clear message to the skeptical writer Claudian: Rome has added to her hills and presents herself to view as greater than she ever was. The new walls, completed because of reports of the Goths, have given her this fair new face. Fear has served as the architect of beauty: and a miraculous change has caused Rome to slough off the old skin of peace ... (On the Sixth Consulship of Stilicho, 529–36)

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Diocletian restored some stability to the empire after 284, not only by strengthening its military and its provincial governance, but also by aggressively seeking to eradicate a growing religious cult with Eastern origins and socially modest followers. These men called themselves Christians, and the emperor viewed them as a threat to civic unity and traditional Roman religion. ROME AND CHRISTIANITY

Diocletian was far from the first emperor to persecute Rome’s nascent Christian community; Tacitus tells how Nero made them scapegoats for the fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64, and he also entertained himself by turning wild dogs on these believers, or burning them as lamps in his garden. Marcus Aurelius, Decius, and Valerian also carried out pogroms in the name of social order, and many of the persecuted met their deaths in the Colosseum. Such violence is forever linked to this monument and hovers behind contemporary happenings there, including the pope’s traditional visit to this “station of the cross” during Easter week, whereby these early martyrdoms are associated with Christ’s Passion, or, in a more secular spirit, as an ironic site for a recent concert against capital punishment. Despite cycles of persecution, as many as 30,000 Christians were residing in the city by the beginning of the fourth century, and Rome had already seen some thirty-three Christian bishops, the pope’s earliest predecessors. Within a few years, an emperor named Constantine would be responsible for making Christianity a legitimate state religion, and thus expanding its influence dramatically. Legend says in 312 he saw a flaming cross in the sky above the Mulvian Bridge, where he defeated Maxentius to become emperor; he promptly professed the Christian faith thereafter. Constantine became a patron of Christian worshippers in Rome, although he had to remain sensitive to the powerful Roman families that still despised this upstart religion. This difficulty explains why so many of the earliest Christian sites exist beyond Rome’s southern boundary, close to the Via Appia, the Via Latina, and the Via Taranto—

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Constantine provided places for Christian worship and burial that were safely—non-confrontationally—beyond the city limits. The massive triumphal arch beside the Colosseum commemorates this emperor, so pivotal to Rome’s history, and if one has time for a long walk southward, along the Via Claudia and eventually through the Porta San Sebastiano, one should not miss the best of the Christian catacombs fittingly located among the mournful cypresses—those of San Sebastiano and San Callisto. The latter’s four levels, cut from soft tufa rock, feature primitive Christian symbols—fish, lamb, the good shepherd— astonishing in their simplicity and (then) secret meanings. On the return walk, you may wish to catch your breath at the austere fourth-century basilica of Saints Nero and Achilles (named for neither the emperor nor Greek hero, but two early martyrs), under which are found the catacombs of Domitilla, Rome’s largest series of underground tombs. As you traverse the Celian Hill again, you will also walk by two fifth-century Christian churches, San Stefano Rotondo (known for its memorable circular design) and SS. Giovanni e Paolo. All three of these churches feature graphic “martyr frescos” by the Counter-Reformation painter Pamarancio, and they provide a far less tranquil vision of the trials of early Christianity in Rome. The Marquis de Sade—of all writers!—disapproved of these grisly images, and with a strangely wild, “red-blooded” tone, Charles Dickens in his Pictures from Italy spoke of “such a panorama of horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig, raw, for supper.” Constantine’s presiding over 250 Christian bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325 has been regarded as the fundamental commencement of the Middle Ages, but the present disintegration of the Roman Empire was equally decisive, and far more traumatic culturally. However much the emperor renovated Rome, he also carried out an East-West imperial division his predecessor Diocletian had acknowledged as defensive strategy. To be closer to the farthest borders, Constantine created a Byzantine court on the Bosporus, establishing an Eastern capital

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called Constantinople, or “New Rome.” Even in the West, Milan and Ravenna were challenging Rome as more favorably and efficiently located seats of empire. The symbolic harm to Romans is hard to imagine, but it was shortly punctuated with great physical damage as well: in 410 the Visigoths, led by Alaric, occupied the city, while Gaiseric and his Vandal warriors sacked Rome with greater ferocity in 455. Furthermore, in 476 the German warrior Odoacer deposed a weak young emperor (Romulus, ironically) to become Rome’s first barbarian king. The empire was no more, and these seismic events shook Western Christians, many of whom viewed Rome’s might as the sole restraint on the reign of the Antichrist. (See 2 Thessalonians 2:7, in the New Testament, for one explanation.) St. Jerome’s sense of loss upon hearing of Alaric’s invasion rings with poignancy—“I forgot even my own name,” he says, “long did I remain silent, knowing that it was a time to weep”—and apocalyptic overtones can also be heard: ... when the brightest light of the world was extinguished, when the very head of the Roman empire was severed, the entire world perished in a single city.... and there is no part of the earth where Romans are not in exile. (Commentary on Ezekiel, prologue; Epistles 128)

The comment’s universalizing quality also prefigures a famous medieval epigraph on that same grand monument before you: While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls—the World.

The sentiment was first recorded by the Venerable Bede, an eighth-century English historian, and is given above in an admirably compressed rendering by Lord Byron. St. Augustine in his City of God, a great work by Jerome’s contemporary,

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responded to Rome’s fall more complexly, and finally more influentially. Augustine’s monumental meditation on empire, civilization, and salvation history served as a defense—many Romans had blamed their misfortunes on the rise of Christianity and the corresponding neglect of the pagan gods, who were thought to be punishing the city. Rejecting this view, Augustine distinguished between Rome the Earthly City, which had fallen, and Rome the Heavenly City, or New Jerusalem, whose citizens were spread across the earth, uncircumscribed by mere city walls or time’s vicissitudes. Consequently, he approached Rome’s empire and the city itself rather skeptically, beginning with its very origins: “Rome was founded when Remus was killed by his brother Romulus, as Roman history asserts” (15.5), he writes, moreover associating Rome’s founder with the biblical Cain, killer of his brother Abel. Built upon a fratricide, Rome less than surprisingly has gained power through glorified thievery (4.4) and “is itself ruled by its lust for ruling” (1.prologue). Although Augustine contrasted a worldly Rome with a spiritualized citizenry, a “pilgrim City of Christ the King” and “stranger in the world” (1.35), at the same time Roman Christianity was enjoying significant improvements in leadership and an expanded physical presence in the city. Often the two factors were inseparable. Constantine’s daughter (or perhaps granddaughter) played some role in a pair of fourth-century basilicas, both a decent walk to the northeast from the city center along the Via Nomentana. Traditionally she built Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura, and the gorgeous Santa Costanza nearby was originally meant to be her mausoleum. Lovers of mosaics must not forego a visit: the former features a seventh-century apse mosaic of St. Agnes as a Byzantine empress, a sign of the strong influence of the East on Rome at the time, and the latter features on its outer ceiling original mosaics of flowers and fruit, cupids and birds— images more aligned with the naturalist Roman poet Lucretius than with any medieval Christian saint. Georgina Masson, author of a still very readable 1960s Companion Guide to Rome,

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declared these the city’s most beautiful mosaics, “graceful and free in their design and execution.” Medieval visitors also marveled at a porphyry sarcophagus in one of the niches, although the original was relocated to the Vatican in 1790. If this pair of churches proves too far afield, you may also satisfy a mosaic craving by visiting the more proximate Esquiline hill. Its central church, Santa Maria in Maggiore, has gorgeous fifth-century mosaics above the architrave, and it is impressively flanked: down the hill there is Santa Pudenziana, another fourth-century church whose early mosaic of the apostles, clad in Roman togas, strikingly reflect the then-dominant pagan culture; and up the hill lies the ninth-century Santa Prassede, itself built upon a second-century Christian site. The mosaics there, with their bright colors and glister, again exemplify the later tastes of their Byzantine artists. More influential advocates—primarily a series of more powerful, visible popes—were catalysts for grander building projects as well as protectors of existing churches. St. Damasus founded the modest San Lorenzo in Damaso, now connected to that Renaissance gem, Palazzo della Cancelleria, which was less modestly founded with a cardinal’s gambling jackpot. This pope also influenced the building and design of San Paolo, far south of the city and with a grandeur befitting the burial place of its apostle. Although much of this principal basilica burnt down in the nineteenth century, it still boasts mosaics and sculptures by Rome’s two great artists of the later Middle Ages, Pietro Cavallini and Arnolfo di Cambio. Conversely, the protectors included Innocent I and Leo I, whose charisma and authority benefited the city even during dark times. Leo somehow convinced Attila the Hun, who had already sacked several towns in northern Italy, to refrain from attacking Rome, and he later ensured certain concessions during Gaiseric’s occupation, including the sparing of the oldest basilicas. Similarly, Innocent likely influenced Rome’s first invader, Alaric, who showed a strange deference toward Christian sites, and was most bent instead on demolishing pagan temples. In this the invader

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reflected the changing values of Romans themselves: two years previously a decree prohibited religious practices in all temples, and less than two decades after the Visigoths stormed Rome, there arose one of the most breathtaking of early Christian churches, Santa Sabina, its austerely late antique elements at home atop the residential tranquility of the Aventine Hill. This charming area of Rome deserves your further exploration. From the Colosseum proceed southwest past Constantine’s Arch, the Porta Capena, and the edge of the Circus Maximus. Continuing along the Viale Aventino, turn right on the Via San Anselmo and climb the hill. You will soon notice the surprising quiet and lovely gardens of the Aventine streets, and eventually arrive at the Piazza of the Knights of Malta. Amid cypress and palm trees, the larger-than-life entrance to the Maltese Villa and the piazza’s walls with their obelisks and trophies reflect the eccentric genius of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the eighteenthcentury artist. Although you may feel initially foolish, you really must kneel at the priory door (No. 3) and peer through the famed keyhole. Santa Sabina beckons a short way down the street. One of the wooden portico doors features diverse biblical scenes, including one of the earliest representations of Christ’s Crucifixion. Within, note the twenty-four fluted Corinthian columns along each side of the wide nave, as well as the play of light in this well-proportioned interior, which seems to reflect the serenity of the hill itself. Once outside, do not miss the quirky “mask” fountain in the church’s courtyard, nor the adjacent Parco Savello, a favorite place of the writer Elizabeth Bowen. This public park is a brighter counterpart to the church, with its orange trees, palms, and bougainvillea, as well as stunning views of the Janiculum Hill, St. Peter’s, and on this side of the Tiber, Sant’Andrea della Valle and the Pantheon. The Dominicans took over Santa Sabina in the thirteenth century, and Alan Epstein in As the Romans Do, a book full of breezy stories about transplanted life in Rome, conveys its paradoxical religious power. Hearing chants on a Sunday morning and concerned for a sick loved one, Epstein says the church does not

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make you ponder the everlasting, as he believes any church is supposed to do, but rather what you feel when you light a candle ... is so awe-inspiring that it fulfills you on the spot, making you forget about what comes next. Who needs to think about what comes next? Who knows if there even is a next? All you know is that the sounds and images of this city are so sublime that you want to embrace everything to do with the senses and never let go or look back. Artists have come to Rome because for all the “Thou shalt nots,” it remains the repository of “Thou shalt.”

After this repose, turn left at the end of the street and descend the wooded, enchanting Clivio Rocca Savella, which will deliver you back to real time, to the bank of the slow-moving, ever flowing Tiber.

C HA P TE R | F O U R

The Cow Hills and Belltowers of Medieval Rome

One could argue that Rome embraced its Christian character, and fully inaugurated its medieval phase, in the sixth and seventh centuries. In 553 the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter fell, its golden roof stripped the century before by invading Vandals, and fifty years later the grand pagan temple to “all gods,” the Pantheon, was converted into a Christian church, Santa Maria ad Martyres, soon known more generally as Santa Maria in Rotondo because of its huge, round dome. (Today the Pantheon’s lively piazza features this monument opposite a McDonald’s, a wry example of monoliths from two opposed ages confronting each other.) Medieval pilgrims found this structure sublime, and more worldly Renaissance travelers such as William Thomas declared it “the perfectest of all the antiquities” in his History of Italy (1549), the first work of its kind in English: It is round and hath but one gate to enter in at; the doors whereof are of brass, very great and antique. The circuit withinforth is very large, and the height proportionable. The roof is all vaulted like the half of an egg, of so great compass 46

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that it is a wonder to behold, and in the very top is a great round hole, through which the Temple receiveth light. For other window it hath none, and yet is the light so much that if all sides were made in windows it could give no more; under the which, in the midst of the floor, is such hollow provision made that the rain passeth away without offending the eye or the place. Finally, the walls are furnished round about with fair marble and a number of goodly pillars, so that the Temple, being old, is yet thought goodlier than any new building that can be found ... (37)

Those brass doors, weighing some eight tons, are still imposing to visitors today, and Thomas’s imprecise, rather comical comparison of the temple’s vaulting to an egg suggests the limited language for architectural description in early modern English. (He also describes the Duomo in Florence with this image!) In his defense, however, he was also facing a structure that seems to draw out visitors’ imaginations: later, Nathaniel Hawthorne envisioned “angels bearing prayers upward” along the ray of light descending from the temple’s oculus, or opening, and the sunbeam itself seemed to him “those rays of divine intelligence” that allowed viewers to appreciate the wonder surrounding them. Although his precursor Agrippa’s name adorns the pediment atop the famously immense portico, the emperor Hadrian deserves credit for rebuilding the Pantheon, which remains heavily visited today (as many as 3.5 million people per year) in part because it holds the tomb of Raphael. The Pantheon’s Christianization, then, was a watershed of sorts. Pagan edifices had been converted into churches during the previous century, including some halls and the Senate House in the Forum, but this temple was the first place of pagan worship cleansed and ennobled by the “true faith.” Other religious sites followed eventually, including the thirteenth-century church Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (that is, “over the temple to Minerva”), just to the left and around the corner from the Pantheon. The domed temple may literally overshadow this

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Dominican church, but the latter too should not be missed. Note especially Filippino Lippi’s frescoes of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Caraffa chapel; the tombs of many celebrated Italians, including St. Catherine of Siena; the Dominican painter Fra Angelico; and Pietro Bembo, an influential Renaissance writer and cardinal; and out front, Bernini’s quirky marble elephant saddled with an Egyptian obelisk. Even the most sacred temples on the Capitoline hill began to show signs of the new religion of Christ—chapels were constructed inside the temple of Juno Moneta, as well as within the very ruins of Jupiter’s temple. Edward Gibbon’s overhearing monks in this latter chapel (or so he thought it was this chapel) led to a few pensive moments, and the genesis of one of the greatest works of history and of literature, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88): It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. (302)

Those intrigued by the time-bending, elegiac atmosphere of Gibbon’s setting will find its visual equivalent in J.M.W. Turner’s stunning painting, Forum Romanum, for Mr. Soane’s Museum. Here Christian activity—a procession and a friar’s blessing of a kneeling woman—are nearly lost in the scene’s classical dominance: the Arch of Titus predominates visually in the left foreground, the vast barrel-vaulted arches of Constantine’s and Maxentius’s Basilica impose from the right, and a stone arch, painted as if just above the viewer, encloses from above the painting’s entire length. Gibbon’s and Turner’s visions remain so enduring and compelling, one senses, because they strike at the heart of Rome’s multiform landscape with its medley of temporal presences (and absences), a place at once timeless and capriciously ravaged by time. Although never to disappear entirely, Rome’s classical culture

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was fading away. The early Christian writer Tertullian, who sounded merely grandiloquent in his third-century Apology for the new faith, must have seemed increasingly prophetic: “We are but of yesterday, and we have filled everything of yours— cities, islands, forts, towns ... even the camps, tribes, courts, palace, senate, Forum,” he taunts. “We have left you only the temples.” In the seventh century, his final comment would have acquired a further sting by being no longer true. Moreover, this new Christian culture asserted its dominance by belittling the earlier gods that once inhabited Rome’s temples. One technique was to render them diabolical in retrospect. For example, a legend arose that Satan created the opening in the Pantheon’s dome, for he had been forced to flee Boniface IV’s consecration of the temple. In a similar spirit (and about similar spirits!), a highly popular twelfth-century guidebook, the Marvels of Rome (Mirabilia Urbis Romae), describes how the Pantheon’s demons attacked Christian passersby until the site became a church—an architectural exorcism, so to speak. ROME’S CULTURAL CONVERSION

The formidable pontificate of Gregory I (590–604) did much to hasten this cultural conversion in the seventh century. He served as pope with canny wisdom born of previous political experience, administrative rectitude, and a concern for the poor that merited the title Gregory the Great. The papacy increased its authority during his reign, and his missionary energies had the after-effect of attracting many pilgrims from far lands to Rome. Syrian and Greek monastic communities sought refuge there, and Gregory with a famous pun remarked about some English slaves, “Non angli, sed angeli”—that is, “They are not English, but angels.” This encounter commenced a regular British presence in Rome, from the lowest to the highest social strata, and it would remain visible for the next few centuries. A line of Anglo-Saxon kings set the precedent for royal pilgrimages to the city. Cadwalla, king of the West Saxons, abdicated in 688 to make the journey, eventually being buried in St. Peter’s.

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(Bede’s record of his verse epitaph constitutes, in the scholar George Parks’ words, “our earliest document of the English in Rome.”) Cadwalla’s successor, Ine of Wessex, followed suit, wishing to spend time “in the neighborhood of the holy places.” The medieval chronicler Matthew of Paris credits him with the building of the Schola Anglorum, a busy English hospice just to the southeast of St. Peter’s. Becoming the general hospital of Santo Spirito in 1200 and recently under restoration, the building continues to commemorate that earlier foreign community, as does the very name of the walled area around the Vatican—Borgo, derived as it is from the Old English word for “town” (burg). Another “Great” ruler, Alfred, and his countryman Cnut were later Anglo-Saxon kings who also visited medieval Rome. The writer Alcuin of York traveled twice there (in 766 and 780) and left significant written impressions, which unsurprisingly venerate Rome. He was also the author of a frequently imitated epigram: Rome, head of the world, the world’s ornament, golden Rome, Now all that remains of you is a wild ruin.

Centuries of invasions and increased internal strife largely explain the city’s diminished physical state, the “wild ruin” that Alcuin memorably laments. WAR AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Even before Gregory the Great’s brief bright mark, the “Gothic wars” between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantine emperor raged during the first half of the sixth century; between 536 and 552 control of the city changed hands five times, and with each change Rome’s erstwhile defender became an invader anew. The Lombard invasions followed on the heels of this violence, and even Rome’s supposed allies proved harmful: Constans II, another Byzantine emperor, visited in 667, leaving graffiti on monuments and stripping

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bronze from the Pantheon’s roof. In the following century Rome’s popes resisted the severe iconoclasm of yet another Byzantine emperor, but as Paul Hetherington summarizes in Medieval Rome, “Romans were never to be allowed to be masters of their own destiny for very long.” For a time the city ignobly bought its safety from the Lombards, who nevertheless attacked again in 753. Pope Stephen II sought help from Pepin, King of the Franks, who roundly defeated the invaders. Henceforth Rome’s political status, and Europe’s political landscape generally, would never be the same. Pope Leo III, besieged by Rome’s own now-powerful baronial dynasties, similarly called upon Pepin’s son and successor, Charlemagne (or Charles the Great), whose coronation by the pope in 800 both revived the old empire and created from it a new, Christianized model—the Holy Roman Empire. The nineteenthcentury historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, whose magisterial history of the medieval city earned him Roman citizenship, vividly narrates this historic crowning of the new emperor during the Christmas mass at St. Peter’s: Leo, moved as it were by divine inspiration, placed a golden diadem on his head, and, at the same moment, the assembled multitude, who awaited the signal and understood the significance of the act, made the church resound with the shout which had formerly hailed the elevations of Caesar: “Life and victory to Charles the most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-giving emperor of the Romans.” Twice was the shout repeated, the multitude in this, the most eventful moment that Rome was to witness for centuries, being carried away in a transport of enthusiasm, while the pope, like another Samuel, anointed the new Caesar of the West and his son Pipin. Leo invested Charles with the imperial mantle, and, kneeling before him, adored the head of the Roman Empire, crowned of God by his hand. (60)

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Gregorovius credits the Roman populace with immediate awareness: the multitude knew then it was witnessing an act of “significance,” and apart from its symbolic power—its revival of Rome’s old, dear imperial dreams—Charlemagne’s crowning also asserted the pope’s temporal authority (the emperor was crowned “by his hand,” emphasizes Gregorovius), and it offered Romans fresh promises of political and military protection. However, what is sometimes called the “Carolingian renaissance” proved short-lived. Imperial protection was not great enough to prevent another pillaging of Rome in 846, this time by Saracens advancing from Sicily. These Muslim forces invaded with a new degree of ferocity, desecrating straightaway the holy sites of St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s, rather than sparing them as the northern tribes before them had done. Clerics had enough notice to remove the apostles’ heads from the church reliquaries, but the Saracens did destroy St. Peter’s tabernacle and ransack the saint’s grave. Surely citizens reeled from the violence, both literal and symbolic. The industrious pope Leo IV wanted to ensure St. Peter’s church would never again be so easily sacked, and to this end he raised the tall, fortified walls that continue to define the Vatican’s municipal jurisdiction. The district was for a long time known popularly as the “Leonine City.” Yet Leo’s accomplishment failed to prevent the Church’s further decline, and it, along with the empire’s shortcomings, allowed Rome’s powerful families to seize power. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, according to Hetherington, “the papacy sank to its lowest levels,” with feudal nepotism guiding the election of new senators and even popes, and rival “anti-popes” arising to challenge these nominations. Fickle popes alienated the emperors Otto II and Otto III, and thus they lost imperial support and became utterly defenseless before the angry, marshaling Roman aristocracy. Other stronger-willed popes such as Sylvester II and Gregory VII aggressively asserted the papacy’s singular authority by excommunicating political rulers. Even if this led initially to great spectacle and papal propaganda—the image of emperors

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humbling themselves before the pontiff—frequently this royal submission was fleeting, and shortly the pope and Rome would find themselves invaded once more. The empire in effect complicated, and “triangulated,” traditional tensions between the papacy and city, and Rome itself was split between its baronial families and the general populace. This landscape became even messier under Gregory VII, who, driven from St. Peter’s by emperor Henry IV, called upon Norman forces in southern Italy. The Normans rescued the besieged pope in 1084, but they also sacked the city for good measure. Consequently the Romans hated Gregory, and he left the city regretfully with his destructive “allies.” All of these violent divisions, which continued throughout the twelfth century, took their toll on the city’s fabric and appearance. Two decades after the Norman invasion (only the most recent of many), a French visitor, Hildebert de Lavardin, brooded upon the state of the city and composed a famous Latin diptych, or “two-sided” poem. The first part, Par tibi, reacts to the “wild ruins” noted previously by Alcuin: Nothing equals you, Rome, although almost completely a ruin; Broken, you show how great you were whole.... Each pole of the world sent timber and stone, workmen, And money; the very site did offer itself for walls.... The City has fallen, about which, if I attempt to say Anything worthy, I may say this: Rome was, and is no more. Nevertheless, neither the procession of years, nor flame, nor sword Could destroy this splendour utterly. The efforts of men managed to make Rome so great That it could nor be unmade by the efforts of the gods.... ... Nor can the ruin alone be restored. So much still remains, so much is ruined, that neither what stands

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May be equalled, nor what is fallen be remade ... O happy City, if either that City had no masters, Or if those masters felt it shameful to break faith. (Tr. George Hugo Tucker)

In the second part, Dum simulacra, Hildebert personifies Rome, and the city, even in her brokenness, conveys a greater impression of Christian consolation. ROME SPEAKS As long as statues, as long as vain gods delighted me, I was great in my warfare, in my people, in my walls.... I scarcely know what I was; I, Rome, scarcely remember Rome; My downfall scarce allows me even to remember myself. This loss is more pleasing to me than those successes; I am greater lying ruined and poor than standing and rich.... Standing, I conquered lands, fallen, I strike at hell; Standing, I governed bodies, lying broken, I govern souls. Then I ruled the wretched people, now, the princes of darkness; Then, cities, now, heaven, is my realm.... (Tr. George Hugo Tucker) Although Hildebert ultimately privileges Rome’s spiritual identity and heavenly orientation, his poem remains so enduring because of the speaker’s realization, expressed with poignant immediacy, of how she has fallen from her previous worldly glory: “I scarcely know what I was; I, Rome, scarcely remember Rome; / My downfall scarce allows me even to remember myself.” ABANDONMENT AND DECAY

How had Rome forgotten itself? And how did the capitol of a mighty empire now appear before Hildebert “lying ruined and poor”? A topographical overview of medieval Rome will suggest

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the surprising extent of its diminishment. The change can be summed up tidily in two words: disappearance and decay. Throughout the previous centuries Rome experienced significant decreases in population, so that the Aurelian walls, built to protect more than one million citizens, soon contained as few as 30,000 people. Consequently vast areas of the city proper were abandoned (Disabitato, this region was named) and left uncultivated, including most of the areas east of the Forum, and many of Rome’s best known hills—the Esquiline, Palatine, Viminal, Quirinal, Caelian, and Pincio. New place names suggest just how rural or pastoral certain parts of the city had become, and how much their weed-ridden appearance had settled within the imaginations of residents: the bustling Forum was now Campo Vaccino, or cow pasture; the Tarpeian Rock became Monte Caprino, or Goat Hill; and the Quirinal was renamed Monte Cavallo. (This final name, however, more precisely reflected the presence there of two ancient statues—the Dioscuri—popularly called the “horse-tamers.”) The area surrounding Diocletian’s baths had devolved into a hunting preserve, and in winters hungry wolves were sometimes seen prowling near the Vatican. The scholar Charles L. Stinger observes that a medieval traveler would have seen “before him a cityscape not remarkably different from the countryside he had just traversed.” Rome’s once golden and marble monuments, now dismantled, shattered, or overgrown with foliage, lent a melancholy air of cultural decay to these otherwise rustic spaces. In the Forum, dirt and mud gradually accumulated, covering up monuments or leaving them truncated, only their top half or third visible. Maurice Andrieux in his study of Rome explains several factors that caused this pile-up—constant dust, mud-blocked sewers, the return of low-lying areas to swampland, weeds and brambles providing a solid bed for further soil, the eventual use of this area as a city garbage dump. Soon the bases of these monuments were buried as much as thirty feet below the mud fields and pasturelands on which cows now grazed. Where are the roads of yesteryear? a sensitive Roman must have occasionally asked. The

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ruin of classical infrastructure, primarily the acquaducts, also offers one explanation for Rome’s dwindling medieval population and its shifting from the eastern hills to a concentrated area near the Tiber: the Aqua Virgo was the only one, of eleven ancient acquaducts, still in working order, which meant citizens began to rely on the river for their water supply. This led to further crowding in an area already burdened by a labyrinth of narrow streets, as well as the porches, balconies, stairs, and thatched roofs that extended from buildings and blocked alleyways. Thoroughly unsanitary conditions prevailed, caused not only by human inhabitants and their livestock, but also by the proximity of certain tradesmen such as tanners, butchers, and fishmongers, who did not hesitate to throw the filthy remnants of their work directly into the streets. Rains that washed away this detritus must have been welcomed, but this too had its dangers; this dense urban area was also a low-lying plain, so regular flooding added to the squalor and misery. Not only were the centuries ravaging the less-than-eternal city, but Rome’s own citizens were destroying its monumental past with far greater alacrity. Local artisans and papal architects alike stripped these classical landmarks to obtain raw material for churches and houses, both in Rome and beyond. They even built furnaces near the most ample sites—the disintegrating palaces, baths, or huge basilicas—to facilitate their plundering. (Street names or churches with alle carcare in them reflect this medieval staple, the lime furnace.) Relatedly, the seizure of monuments by the city’s baronial families confirmed their political power. In these cases the landmarks, rather than being stripped or demolished, were instead recklessly converted into makeshift fortresses, palaces, or more primitive lean-to structures. For example, the Pierleoni family, followed by the Savelli, built a residence atop the Theatre of Marcellus, while the Orsini inhabited Pompey’s Theatre. The Colonnas in the north possessed the Tomb of Augustus and Constantine’s Baths on the Quirinale. The powerful Frangipani possessed the entire Colosseum—until the Annibaldi took it over. (At other times these

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structures served more utilitarian purposes: the Colosseum once comprised a large number of apartments, not unlike the large churches splintered into condo units in American cities today, and one could regularly see ancient sarcophagi around the city—used as pigs’ troughs.) Undeterred, the Frangipani also transformed the arches of Titus and Constantine into lookout bases, from which the family could control traffic through the Forum—for a time the entire Palatine area constituted their sprawling, dynastic compound. The palaces of these families featured fortifications characteristic of the age: barbican windows and crenellations along the walls. Churches, too, often shared this defensive look, and some similarly appropriated—if less destructively—Rome’s classical monuments. The Church of SS. Sergio e Bacco developed around and above the Arch of Septimius Serverus, and the clerics of San Silvestro in Capite, near the Corso, clearly “owned the rights” of the nearby column of Marcus Aurelius; they charged pilgrims admission to climb its interior stairs, and they warned potential despoilers that they would be “eternally damned” for harming their “temple.” Similarly, many of the famous antiquities now in the Capitoline museums—the bronze wolf, Marcus Aurelius on horseback, Constantine’s head and hand, the Thornpuller— were assembled in front of the papal palace at St. John Lateran sometime between the tenth and twelfth centuries. This display represented a conscious effort to connect the medieval papacy with the glory and authority of its ancient predecessors, and sometimes religious devotion was upstaged: one twelfth-century Narracio, a narration of Rome’s marvels by an English cleric named Gregorius, shows surprising attention to classical landmarks at the expense of more recent Christian ones. As a famous epigram put it, “Rome’s very ruin shows how great she was.” The scholar Robert Brentano expands on essentially the same idea when he describes medieval Rome’s dilapidated character and explains why numberless visitors have found it enchanting:

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Rome is not a museum of ruins set within a modern town. It is a crumbling mixture of all its pasts, jumbled together and still living, never dead but never freshly alive ... All the great historians of postclassical Rome have been in love with the city. And, with the possible exception of the greatest among them, Ranke, they have been in love with its decay, been in love with it because it was a great thing dying. (Rome Before Avignon, 3–4)

Two things are worth observing here. First, Brentano emphasizes Rome’s temporally “mixed” nature, and few places better convey this nature to visitors than, again, St. John Lateran, with its fourth-century foundation; fifth-century octagonal baptistery; seventh-century mosaics in the San Venanzio chapel; thirteenth-century cloisters; fourteenth-century Gothic canopy above the pope’s altar, as well as the Lateran Palace built in the same century, which Domenico Fontana restored in the sixteenth-century; seventeenth-century interior redesigned by Borromini; and eighteenth-century eastern façade, bedecked with oversized statues of Christ and the apostles. These many changes are not surprising: at least two fires and two earthquakes have heavily damaged the church, and its own status is another factor—once Rome’s premier church, where the pope was crowned and resided, and from whose loggia he blesses believers, it became secondary to St. Peter’s during the Renaissance. (St. Peter’s in the Middle Ages was not nearly as impressive; James Reston, Jr. in The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D. describes it as “rectangular, simple, faced with crumbling, ocher brick, and vaguely Byzantine.”) Nearby San Clemente rivals St. John Lateran in its “multichronic” character. The current church dates from the twelfth-century, below which are traces of a fourth-century church, below which lies a Temple of Mithras, a Persian god popular in Rome in the first century B.C.. Visitors can see traces of each of these historical layers, as well as fifth-century catacombs and Masolino’s gorgeous fifteenth-century frescoes of St. Catherine. Second,

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Brentano’s framing of “decay” as an enduring feature of Rome reminds us that ruins did not just appear suddenly in the late medieval period. Classical monuments began to decay as early as the time of Constantine, and indeed, Roman ruins are not merely a “postclassical” notion, but in fact are pre-historical in at least a limited sense: Virgil in the Augustan age imagined ruins as already present when Aeneas, Rome’s mythic founder, first visited the site of the future city. There King Evander shows Aeneas those “walls / Long fallen down,” remnants of the ancient towns (even then!) Janiculum and Saturnia. In other words, Rome’s greatest poet could not conceive ruins, those signs of absence, as ever being absent from his city, even in its earliest periods. During the Middle Ages, then, ruined imperial fragments may have assumed their full value by asserting the very brokenness or transience that most truly makes Rome itself. And this fundamental presence has not changed. Citing the estimated eighty million “important pieces” among Rome’s ancient remains, the New Yorker columnist William Murray attests: The great fact of life in Rome is residence among the ruins. Even if you live in one of the newer fashionable residential sections, such as the Parioli, or in the outskirts of the city, the chances are that somewhere in your neighborhood some memento of the past—the fragment of an ancient aqueduct, a ruined watchtower, a Roman tomb—will become a daily feature of your life. (City of the Soul: A Walk in Rome, 94, 101–2)

More simply and pragmatically, these ruins reminded Rome’s present popes, nobles, and citizens of their urban heritage— specifically how grand Rome had once been and, if order could be restored, could be still.

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RETURNING TO GLORY

Restoring order was never an easy task. Battles among Rome’s noble families, its populace, the papacy, and the empire raged intermittently from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Occasionally powerful popes arose to reclaim an earlier grandeur for the city, but typically with a cost—foreign military assistance, which more often than not led to unforeseen demands or even invasion. Empowered by growing guilds, Rome’s populace rebelled against the nobles in 1143, when it restored the ancient Senate. They also revived a device—

Boccaccio in Rome In 1353, the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio provided The Decameron to the library of world literature. The Decameron is a book of 100 short stories—ten told each day for ten days—by a group of ten people residing in a remote villa near Florence to escape the plague. The stories are funny, satirical, and often bawdy. One of the best-known stories of The Decameron is the second tale told on the first day. It involves a Jew named Abraham who travels to Rome and is shocked to find the city is not the urbane, metropolitan center of culture and the arts he believed it to be, but instead a squalid little town occupied by citizens who “from the highest to the lowest ... are generally and most unworthily indulged in the sin of lechery, not only in the natural way but sodomitically, without the slightest remorse or shame.” He also found them to be “gluttons, wine-bibbers and drunkards, and after lechery were, like brute beasts, more servants of their bellies than of anything else.” (Aldington, 57) As for the pope, Abraham suspects that he’s really the devil. What does Abraham do? He converts to Christianity, of course, explaining that any religion that could endure through such turmoil would likely endure forever.

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“S.P.Q.R.” (Senatus Popolusque Romanus)—that can still be seen today around the city, on municipal signs and manhole covers. By the end of the twelfth century the Church recognized the city’s rights, but the reigns of Innocent III and his successor Honorius III (1198–1227) also marked the apogee of the medieval papacy. The reforms and assertions of the Fourth Lateran Council symbolized this dominance, and Innocent III’s personality was the force that maintained it. Shortly, however, political imbroglios resumed. Gregory IX ruled ably but was challenged by Frederick II, a famous and unpredictable emperor, and the Romans introduced a powerful Bolognese Senator (Brancaleone) who soon controlled both the papacy and nobility in Rome. A later pope, Urban IV, sought outside help from French royalty, Charles of Anjou, who would eventually bend the papacy to France’s will in the next century. First, though, another series of Italian popes achieved a second papal high point at the turn of the fourteenth century. It was the worldly, provocative Boniface VIII (1294–1303) who most resembled his powerful predecessors. Resisting French influence and threatening excommunication, he issued the papal bull Unam Sanctam in 1302, which unequivocally declared the pope’s spiritual power to be greater than the earthly power of the emperor. Boniface also inaugurated the Jubilee, or Holy Year, in 1300. The related renovations and preparations attracted famous artists, such as Florence’s Cimabue and Giotto, whose purported fresco fragment of Boniface giving his blessing remains on display within St. John Lateran. The city swelled with as many as 200,000 pilgrims at one time, most visiting holy sites and seeking indulgences, or reductions of penance. The papacy’s coffers swelled as well. DANTE AND THE DIVINE COMEDY

Dante, greatest of medieval poets, captures well the ambivalence many felt toward this more worldly papacy in his Divine Comedy, where Rome often makes brief but significant appearances. In Inferno, he describes sinners coming and going,

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as, in the year of Jubilee, the Romans, confronted by great crowds, contrived a plan that let the people pass across the bridge, for to one side went all who had their eyes upon the Castle, heading toward St. Peter’s, and to the other, those who faced the Mount (18.28–33, Tr. Allen Mandelbaum)

Here Dante turns Boniface’s attempt at crowd control—the pope did in fact place a partition along the Ponte Sant’Angelo to divide foot traffic—into an extended simile, or comparison. Yet his overall setting should not be forgotten: he is describing damned souls in a deep section of Hell known as Malebolge. Thus Dante is hardly complimenting Boniface. In fact, he insults this pope throughout the poem, and even forecasts his damnation when another pope mistakes Dante, the poem’s persona allowed to travel through Hell, for Boniface coming to assume his rightful place! There, in Inferno 19, Dante laments worldly popes, whose “avarice afflicts the world” and who worship “a god of gold and silver” (104, 112). Dante more subtly alludes to Rome later in the poem when confronting the captive giants that surround Hell’s central well. Approaching, Dante seems to see in the distance “high towers,” and he asks his guide, Virgil, which city lies ahead. He is told the towers are actually the giants’ huge forms. Although the poet explicitly connects the image to the round wall of Montereggioni “crowned with towers,” Rome nevertheless hovers behind this reference; the emblem of a crown of towers evokes Cybele, a matron goddess whom Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Augustine associated with Rome. Furthermore, Dante carefully includes several allusions to the Roman empire in this episode, and he also describes a giant’s face as “broad and long / as Rome can claim for its St. Peter’s pine cone” (31.59–60). This comparison refers to the pigna, or giant bronze pine cone which stood in the atrium to St. Peter’s during Dante’s age, and which today resides

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in a courtyard at the Vatican. The most obvious nod to Rome is in fact the very image of towers, although readers today may have trouble appreciating Dante’s association. Overwhelming numbers of towers defined medieval Rome’s skyline, and the remaining sites—only a handful, and often only with their bases standing—cannot do justice to the several hundreds of rising spires, so numerous they made one pilgrim imagine an urban cornfield. Petrarch, who visited Rome after Dante’s debated trip in 1300, marveled at the height of the Torre de’ Conti, near the Forum of Nerva at Via Cavour today. Like so many medieval sites, these towers were military in character— families that controlled them could protect their territories and survey substantial areas of the city. The twelfth- and thirteenthcentury belltowers abutting many churches represent a more charming counterpart, and they have endured the centuries more successfully. Some of the finest can be seen at SS. Giovanne and Paolo (whose belltower sits atop travertine blocks once belonging to the Temple of Claudius); Sant’Eustachio near the Pantheon; San Giorgio in Velabro and Santa Maria in Cosmedin in the Forum Boarium; and San Crisogono, Santa Cecilia, and Santa Maria in Trastevere, in the neighborhood of that name. Dante refers again to Rome, this time more positively, near the very end of his epic. In Paradiso the sight of the Celestial Rose, filled with beatified souls, amazes him. Attempting to describe his travels from the human realm to the divine, from time to eternity, he compares his own awe to those northern Barbarians who were, seeing Rome and her vast works, struck dumb (when, of all mortal things, the Lateran was the most eminent) ... (31.34–36)

The specific attention here to St. John Lateran is understandable: Boniface took special care in presenting this premier site of papal power to multitudes of pilgrims, and Maurice

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Andrieux describes the church in 1300 as “so thoroughly restored that it seemed completely new.” Dante’s attitude toward Rome was clearly a complex one. An imperialist, he strongly believed that Augustus’ empire had been providential—the instrument that made Christ’s earthly ministry a truly universal one—and his political hopes lay in the Holy Roman Empire. He speaks daringly in Purgatorio of being a citizen of an eternal, spiritual Rome, “the Rome in which Christ / is Roman” (32.102–3). Yet, as we have seen, the worldly Roman church, mired in European politics, had no greater critics than this poet. For him, Rome had ideally established dual, separate mechanisms for proper civil and spiritual rule—the empire and the church—which he figures earlier in Purgatorio: For Rome, which made the world good, used to have two suns; and they made visible two paths— the world’s path and the pathway that is God’s. Each has eclipsed the other; now the sword has joined the shepherd’s crook; the two together must of necessity result in evil ... (16.106–11)

Dante’s image of two suns is pointed, for it overturns a common image of the sun and moon used by papal supporters: the emperor, they argued, received his authority from the pope, just as the moon merely reflects the sun’s originating light. Upon Boniface’s death in 1303, the sort of eclipse Dante feared occurred. Philip IV of France successfully secured the papal tiara for a countryman, who became Clement V. In 1308 this pope abandoned Rome altogether and established a papal residence in Avignon, in Southern France. The French monarchy’s ensuing domination and the pope’s absence from Rome, which lasted for sixty-eight years, became known as the Babylonian Captivity of the church.

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PETRARCH THE LAUREATE

The age’s second great Italian writer, Francesco Petrarch, so revolutionized several areas of learning in his Latin humanistic writings, and so powerfully revealed a more interior, modern way of thinking in his lyric poetry, that it seems best to present him in the following chapter as the true harbinger of the Renaissance. His coronation with the poetic laurel on April 8, 1341 merits an exception, however, for one suspects it represented a “surrogate” event for a city bereft of its pope and desperate for high ceremony. Petrarch did not disappoint them. In the great hall of the Senate Palace on the Capitol, he delivered a Latin oration invoking his poetic and prose masters, Virgil and Cicero, and he also recited a sonnet in praise of Rome. Once crowned with the laurel, he proceeded solemnly to St. Peter’s, where he left his wreath upon the apostle’s tomb. Rome on this occasion honored a symbolic, literary figure (and an altogether worthy one) in place of its rightful spiritual leader, now residing unnaturally in France. Cola di Rienzo, a memorable medieval subject with whom to conclude, shared Petrarch’s enthusiasm for ancient Rome, but unlike the poet he briefly realized the Republic’s actual if bizarre restoration. Rienzo attended the poet’s coronation and soon met him personally in Avignon in 1343, when the charismatic younger man joined a delegation to request the new pope, Clement VI, return to Rome. Validated by this involvement, he soon set himself against the city’s warring noble families and, being a sly propagandist, he distributed large posters that valorized older, long forgotten Roman values. Yet he was most persuasive in person, as Petrarch’s recollection of their first meeting makes clear: I seem to have been listening to a god, not to a man. You bemoaned the present conditions—no, the very fall and ruin of the republic—in words of such divine inspiration, and you probed our wounds with the shafts of your eloquence to such depths that whenever I recall the sound and the

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meaning of your words, tears leap to my eyes, and grief again grips my soul. My heart was all inflamed as you spoke ... (Sine Nomine 7)

He inflamed many other hearts in May 1347, when fully armored, he spoke forcefully at the Capitol about a reformed Roman Republic. His revolutionary zeal resounded with the people, who made Rienzo their dictatorial Tribune. This new ruler brought immediate order to the city, and more lastingly the noble families would never again wield the same level of power. Amanda Collins in Greater Than the Emperor attributes Rienzo’s success to a mix of local pragmatism and universalizing oratory: “while operating on a lower level in the real world, he never gave up the rhetoric of the classical global dream.” Unfortunately, Rienzo’s global dream quickly corrupted him, and he gave himself over to the megalomaniacal element in his personality that made him so effective in the first place. Appearing more like a frenzied prophet-tyrant than an austere senator, he shortly had to flee the city. Earthquakes in 1348 caused much destruction throughout Rome and led to renewed lawlessness; this development, and a new pope favorable to Rienzo, made possible his triumphant return in 1354. But his time had passed: later that year a mob, fed up by his presence, stabbed him to death. Rienzo made some of his most stirring speeches from the eastern stairs of the Church of Aracoeli, on the summit of the Capitoline, and today a monument there commemorates his death. These 124 steep marble stairs, apparently built in thanksgiving for the end of the Black Death in 1348, probably owe their existence to the upcoming 1350 Jubilee as much as to the plague. In any case, their severe shape provides a fitting memento for Rienzo, the darkly charismatic brief savior of medieval Rome. THE SIGHTS OF MEDIEVAL ROME

And now, you should properly conclude this chapter with a short walk across the Tiber to Trastevere, a vibrant, independent

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neighborhood that still retains much of its medieval character. Just south of the Vatican and close to the river, Trastevere presented an ideal location for pilgrims and water-dependent citizens alike. Today bottlenecks of tourists along the twisted, narrow streets and shadowy alleys reflect the heavy foot traffic of the earlier age. First, from the Church of Aracoeli proceed south to the Theatre of Marcellus, where a quick right brings you to the Portico of Octavia (the sister of emperor Augustus), in the ruins of which is built Sant’Angelo Pescheria, the church visited by Rienzo before his great speech in 1347. Proceed south along Lungotevere Pierleoni and take in two additional medieval sites, San Nicola in Carcere and the Casa dei Crescenzi, both featuring columns of ancient temples in their exterior walls. Locals sometimes refer to this house as Rienzo’s, whose family acquired it. In the spirit of medieval legend, it’s also the House of Pilate for those who wishfully think Pontius Pilate resided in Rome for a time. Crossing the Ponte Palatino a block away, you now find yourself in Trastevere. If you journey southward, you will eventually encounter San Francesco a Ripa, marking the hospice where St. Francis stayed in 1219. The church contains relics of the great medieval saint, and Bernini’s sculpture Ecstasy of Beata Ludovica Albertoni is a must-see in the Chapel Altieri. On Sundays in nearby Porta Portese a huge flea market occurs, punctuating the generally slapdash nature of the neighborhood. The harsh naturalism of Émile Zola was suited to the “quagmire” that is Trastevere. His character Pierre reflects on its “listless, filthy stagnation”: On the brightest days a dank gloom chilled the sinuous cellar-like lanes, and the smell of rotting vegetables, rank oil, and human animality brought on fits of nausea. Jumbled together in a confusion which artists of romantic turn would admire, the antique, irregular houses had black, gaping entrances diving below ground, outdoor stairways conducting to upper floors, and wooden balconies which only a miracle upheld. There were crumbling fronts, shored up with

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beams; sordid lodgings whose filth and bareness could be seen through shattered windows; and numerous petty shops, all the open-air cook-stalls of a lazy race which never lighted a fire at home ... (Rome, 308–9)

Pierre’s repulsion takes its place in a long critical tradition: one English Renaissance traveler noted that the district’s unwholesome air attracted only artisans and bankrupts, and Augustus Hare in Walks in Rome (1871) worried about the “Trasteverini,” revengeful, murderous residents even by Roman standards. Yet Zola is also, shall we say, heavily gritty. The frequently seen laundry hanging from windows or strewn on lines high across streets were for him “symbolical banners of abominable misery,” but this too, along with the insubordinate ivy hanging from medieval archways, today adds to Trastevere’s charm. If you proceed northward, along the Tiber, you will enter at the bridges Garibaldi and Sisto respectively the piazzas Belli and Trilussa, both named for beloved nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “city poets.” Both were satirists who chose to capture city life in the dialect of the city, rather than in more literary, academic Italian. Today a statue of Belli stands in his piazza, and Trilussa’s recreated study can be viewed at the Museo del Folklore nearby. Finally, if you proceed due west along the Via della Lungaretta, you will arrive at Santa Maria in Trastevere, the centerpiece of the neighborhood and home of treasured thirteenth-century mosaics by Pietro Cavallini. The church’s spacious, picturesque piazza constitutes the social heart of Trastevere, and its octagonal fountain is a fine place to sit and people-watch for half an hour. This pleasant square was recently featured in the closing scene of Neil LeBute’s film Nurse Betty. Visitors should be warned, however, that the area’s quaintness is to some degree a bygone quality, one fabricated now to attract tourists. That is to say, pricey restaurants and boutiques have largely driven out the traditional bohemian, foreign, and working-class elements, which relocated across the city to the area around the train station. Rents, too, have exploded in

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recent years, as old apartments have been renovated for wealthier denizens. The journalist Michael Sheridan recalls his seemingly un-Trasteverian landlord as early as the 1980s: “I once signed the lease of an apartment in the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere on gold-embossed notepaper from the Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, from where the owner, a cultivated octogenarian count, had returned at the conclusion of a painting tour.” Perhaps only Rome is capable of reversing a threadbare proverb—“The more things stay the same, the more they change.”

C HAPTE R | F IV E

Being Geniuses Together: Early and High Renaissance Rome

In his archaeological book Rome Restored (1446), Flavio Biondo praises Pope Eugenius IV for restoring a by-now-familiar monument in the city’s heart: By your intervention, O Pope Eugenius, and at your expense, the Pantheon’s stupendous vault, torn in antiquity by earthquakes and threatened with ruin, was restored.... That splendid church, clearly superior to all others, had had the lofty columns that support it hidden, for many centuries, by the nasty little shops that surrounded it. These have now been completely cleared off, and their bases and capitals, laid bare, reveal the beauty of this wonderful building. (3.65–66)

Biondo’s approval of the particular means of renovation signaled a new spirit of the age. Secretary to the pope, he was also a central figure in a new humanist movement that desired to see the long-buried world of classical Rome recovered and “laid bare,” and in his dismissal of those “nasty little shops” that hid the Pantheon’s columns, we can hear the early, heady days of the Italian Renaissance sweeping away, as if with a single phrase, a 70

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thousand years of medieval Roman accretions. The next two centuries would see the city restored to a grandeur unseen since the imperial age. The papacy achieved new heights of power, and amid historic upheavals there occurred a flowering of genius among scholars, architects, painters, poets, and writers, many of whom you will encounter in this chapter. Renaissance Rome rarely faced a shortage of observant, articulate residents and visitors who could capture in words both the city’s problems and its promises, symbolized best by its buildings and masterpieces. Just years before, Rome had endured one of its lowest points in a long history. The Great Schism, arising when France and Italy produced rival popes, had followed the removal of the papacy to France in the fourteenth century, and for a brief, vertiginous time a third pope was supported by church council. The Council of Constance settled these differences in 1420 and elected Martin V, who preceded Eugenius in Rome and undertook initial, modest improvements to the forlorn city, sacked most recently by the King of Naples in 1413. After abandoning Rome for a decade, Eugenius IV entered the city in 1443 to signal a reunited Church returning, for good, to its true home. He was the first pope to recognize and actively to promote this new age, as well as a new city—he repaired walls and bridges; cleaned streets and removed wooden hovels; prohibited the plundering of marble from the Colosseum and other monuments; and invited the Florentine artist Filarete to construct bronze doors for St. Peter’s. Charles L. Stinger, an authority on Renaissance Rome, attributes the development of its “distinct cultural world” to a number of factors: the reinvigorated papacy, an increasingly “Romanized” Catholic Church, and the broad influences of the Renaissance itself, with its imperial ideals and new interest in Rome’s material, historical existence. The humanist movement became the vehicle of these influences, in the person of Biondo and others supported by Eugenius and his papal successors. These Roman humanists owed much to an earlier lover of Rome and a great poet—Francesco Petrarch.

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For much of Petrarch’s life, the papacy was not in Rome but Avignon, and in fact as a young man he served the prominent Colonna family in the latter city. His passion for Latin literature, growing antiquarian interests, and literary ambitions all contributed to interest in Rome, “which I had since my infancy ardently desired to visit,” he recalls in his Letter to Posterity. He first did so in 1337, and although a friend warned him that the dilapidated city would disappoint him, his visit there “has increased everything,” he wrote. “Rome was greater than I thought, and so are its remains.” Petrarch shortly explored the city’s landmarks with this said friend, Giovanni Colonna, to whom he later addressed a famous letter recreating their tour: “Here was the castle of Evander, there the temple to Carmenta; ... here was the temple of Jupiter ... here Caesar triumphed, here he perished ... here Christ appeared to his fleeing Vicar; here Peter was crucified, there Paul was beheaded ...” Petrarch directed a new historical scrutiny toward Rome’s ruins, and at one point he triumphantly corrected his friend’s belief that the Septizonium (Petrarch’s identification) was the Temple of the Sun. Despite the geographical emphasis in his letter to Colonna (“here ... here ...”), Petrarch’s tour is in fact chronological, reflecting the importance for him of textual testimonies by Virgil, Livy, and other ancient writers. It is important to realize, however, that Petrarch invokes Christian sites as well, and he likely visited the Domine Quo Vadis, that church where Christ traditionally appeared to Peter, his “fleeing Vicar,” with as much curiosity as he did the classical sites along the Via Appia. Petrarch’s appreciation of Rome’s Christian heritage increased as he grew older, as he himself indicated in a touching letter to his fellow writer Boccaccio in 1350, a holy year: Now I am making my fifth trip to Rome; who knows if it be not the last? It should be more blest than the others as the care of one’s soul is nobler than the care of the body, as one’s eternal salvation is more to be desired than mortal glory (Epistolae Familiares 11.1).

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Yet Petrarch’s greatest legacy involved a new apprehension, which his humanist erudition made possible, of Rome’s classical achievements and its ongoing—if temporarily forgotten—glory. “Nowhere is Rome less known than in Rome,” he remarked. The critic Leonard Barkan in Unearthing the Past explains this paradox: “The inhabitants of Rome know nothing of this, he says, presumably because it is the act of historical and metaphorical imagination, and not the few crumbling objects themselves, that creates a vision of Rome.” In the 1370s he presented this vision to the Holy Roman Emperor and the popes in France, when he pleaded with them to return to their proper seat of power. If a “true leader” were restored to Rome, it would again become a “world empire.” Even in its ruined state, the “glory of her name is immortal.” He memorably conveys this sense of latent, ghostly heroism in his poem “Noble Spirit” (“Spirto gentil ...”): The ancient walls which all the world still fears and loves and trembles, every time it thinks of turning back to look at those past times, recalling those tombstones which hold the bodies of men who will not be without great fame until our universe dissolves away, and everything involving this one ruin, through you they hope to mend all of the faults. O great Scipioni, O faithful Brutus, how pleased you must be now if news has reached you down there of how well placed this office is! To think how very glad Fabricius must have been to hear such news; he says: “My Rome you shall once more be lovely.” (29–42; Tr. Mark Musa)

Petrarch’s sense of Rome and its corrective destiny, newly resurfaced in a new age, heavily influenced subsequent generations of humanists, artists, and writers.

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HUMANISM COMES TO ROME

The Byzantine humanist Manuel Chrysoloras, who remained in Rome two years futilely awaiting military help for Constantinople, was instrumental in introducing Italian humanists to Greek texts. In 1411 he composed an influential text of urban description and art criticism, Comparison of Old and New Rome (that is, of Rome and Constantinople). At this time the venerable scholar also wrote a letter that must have initially shocked its recipient: “Can you believe of me that I am wandering about this city of Rome, swiveling my eyes this way and that like some boorish gallant, clambering up palace walls, even up to their windows, on the chance of seeing something of the beauties inside?” He quickly repaired his reputation by solving this “riddle”—he was seeking “beauty not in living bodies but in stones, marbles, and images.” Similarly, two Florentine artists— Brunelleschi and Donatello—apparently studied Rome’s ruins with intensity. Some historians have questioned the reliability of Antonio Manetti, Filippo Brunelleschi’s early biographer, but if the two artists did not in fact visit Rome, an even more interesting question arises—why did Manetti make such an effort to say they did? How did experience in Rome validate his subject? In any case, he tells a good story. Having just suffered disappointment in Florence, Brunelleschi went to Rome where at that time one could see beautiful works in public places. Some of those works are still there, although not many; some have been removed, carried off, and shipped out by various popes and cardinals from Rome and other nations. In studying the sculpture as one with a good eye, intelligent and alert in all things, would do, he observed the method and the symmetry of the ancients’ way of building. He seemed to recognize very clearly a certain arrangement of members and structure just as if God had enlightened him about great matters. Since this appeared very different from the method in use at that time, it impressed him greatly.... The sculptor Donatello was with

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him almost all the time during this stay in Rome. They originally went there in agreement about strictly sculptural matters, and they applied themselves constantly to these. Donatello had no interest in architecture. Filippo told him nothing of his ideas, either because he did not find Donatello apt or because he was not confident of prevailing, seeing more every minute the difficulties confronting him. However, together they made rough drawings of almost all the buildings in Rome and in many places beyond the walls, with measurements of the widths and heights as far as they were able to ascertain by estimation, and also the lengths, etc. In many places they had excavations made in order to see the junctures of the membering of the building and their type— whether square, polygonal, completely round, oval, or whatever. (50–52)

Fictional or not, these activities constitute avant-garde visits to Rome in the early fourteenth-century; most travelers still came as pilgrims to view the Christian relics and holy places. Contemporary English accounts make this clear, from visits to the Santi Apostoli church and St. Bridget’s chapel in 1414 in The Book of Margery Kempe, to John Capgrave’s Solace of Pilgrims, a thorough, dull account of the city during the 1450 Jubilee. During that same year, a curious Florentine merchant named Giovanni Rucellai was of two minds about his time in Rome— he visited churches in the morning and classical landmarks in the afternoon. POGGIO BRACCIOLINI

Unsurprisingly, many writers moved by Petrarch’s example not only visited Rome, but also resided there. Often these humanists served the papacy as courtiers, librarians, or churchmen, and one even became pope himself. An avid decipherer of classical inscriptions and a collector of statues and texts, Poggio Bracciolini in the elegiac Variability of Fortune, written sometime between 1431 and 1448, crystallized in dialogue form the

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sense of loss most humanists felt toward Rome’s fragmentary past and down-at-heels present. He recalls how he and his friend Antonio Lusco paused on the Tarpeian Mount and “reflected on the former greatness of the broken buildings and the vast ruins of the ancient city, and again on the truly prodigious and astounding fall of its great empire and the deplorable inconstancy of fortune.” From the other side of history, Poggio reverses the Aeneid’s prophecy of “golden Rome” by saying “Golden once, now rough with thorns and overgrown with briars.” Poggio also brought a new level of firsthand attention to antiquarian pursuits, and he sometimes corrected Petrarch’s misidentifications. He insisted, for example, that the large pyramid near the Protestant Cemetery was the tomb of Cestius, and not that of Romulus’s brother Remus as legendarily believed. Petrarch, he explains, “followed the common opinion, not considering it very important to search out the inscription, which was covered with bushes.” He quickly adds a respectful postscript: “In reading it, those who came after him have shown less learning but more diligence.” Petrarch also failed to notice Hadrian’s name on the sides of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, instead attributing its construction to Trajan. The earlier writer approached the city through texts, and for later landmarks he had to rely on sometimes questionable medieval sources; thus he associates the Pantheon with an ancient temple of Cybele, and he accepts the legend that Julius Caesar’s ashes rested in an orb atop the obelisk then south of the Vatican. Poggio was more scrupulous and skeptical: he considered different building materials to date city gates more precisely, and he benefited from many rediscovered sources, some of which he himself brought to light. Poggio dedicated his treatise to Nicholas V, the Florentine pope who succeeded Eugenius IV in 1447, and who for two decades was every bit the humanist as his secretaries. NICOLAS V

Nicholas V, like Poggio, passionately collected newfound classical texts and those by early Church Fathers. Bequeathing more

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than a thousand of his own volumes, this pope inaugurated the Vatican Library, part of a greater rebuilding of the Vatican Palace. (He moved the official papal residence to the Vatican from the Lateran palace; since St. John Lateran remained Rome’s official cathedral, this change ensured regular processions through the city, along the Via Papale.) Inside the palace he commissioned Fra Angelico to paint frescos in a private chapel, still worth viewing nearby Raphael’s famous Stanze. Nicholas restored several other churches, which were partially funded by profits from the 1450 Jubilee. Today’s readers may have a clearer sense of crowded conditions in Rome, after the recent death of Pope John Paul II. A writer from the Associated Press describes how multitudes flooded the city for that pope’s funeral: Rome groaned under the weight of visitors. Side streets were clogged in a permanent pedestrian rush hour, mostly by kids with backpacks. Tent camps sprang up to take the spillover from hotels. Hawkers jacked up prices of everything from bottled water to papal trinkets.

In 1450 similar congestion led to tragedy: pilgrims leaving St. Peter’s, where they had hoped to view the relic known as the Veronica, or true image [vero + icon] of Christ’s face, accumulated in the shop-lined Ponte Sant’Angelo and the narrow streets on either side. A panic erupted, and nearly two hundred people were trampled or drowned in the Tiber below. To avoid another disaster, Nicholas cleared the shops from the bridge and broadened entrances to it, creating the Piazza San Celso on the eastern bank. There he commemorated the dead with a pair of chapels, and on the other bank he asserted papal control of the Castel Sant’Angelo by adding a gatehouse, bastions, a papal apartment, and a bronze statue of St. Michael sheathing his sword. This statue referred to Gregory the Great’s vision of the angel that marked the end of the plague, but it also symbolized the pope’s authority to remit the sins of believers. Revealing

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further sensitivity to such symbolism, Nicholas V made a deathbed speech in 1455 urging the continuance of urban projects. Pilgrims, particularly illiterate ones, are “moved by certain extraordinary sights,” and the Church itself was glorified by “great buildings, which are perpetual monuments and eternal testimonies seemingly made by the hand of God.” This justification of papal architectural magnificence spurred construction in the city for the next two centuries. Nicholas himself had ambitions that outlasted his reign but were completed by future popes, including the widening of the three medieval streets between the Vatican and the papal castle, the moving of the Vatican obelisk to the piazza San Pietro, and the demolition of the old, crumbling basilica of St. Peter’s. ALBERTI AND ST. PETER’S

Nicholas consulted a fellow Florentine and true genius of the early Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, to design a new, domed, and far grander St. Peter’s. Alberti’s accomplishment in several fields made him a “Renaissance man” in the way we use it today, and his investigations of Rome were informed by philological knowledge, genuine literary artistry, and the expertise of an experienced engineer. His Panorama of the City of Rome represented a revolution in mathematical cartography; it applied maritime and astronomical charting methods to arrive at a more precise measurement of Rome’s topography and the relationships between its monuments. Alberti also led many visitors, such as Lorenzo de’Medici in 1471, on learned tours among Roman ruins, and as his recent biographer Anthony Grafton claims, “No one did more to call the lost city of the ancients back to life” (256). The aforementioned Flavio Biondo was a fellow explorer of Alberti’s, and his Rome Restored featured the age’s most systematic, erudite study of the classical city. In addition to catalogues of gates, aqueducts, and obelisks, Biondo’s book also proved ideologically potent: papal Rome, he argued, had inherited the dominion of the imperial city, and the Church more completely revealed—and did so now with

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heavenly authority—the inexhaustible “majesty of this glorious city of Rome.” Biondo’s later work Rome Triumphant (1459) emphasized this connection in a more militant register, not least because Europe had recently been shaken by the Turks’ conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Biondo of course saw Nicholas V’s bold building projects as material confirmation of this grand inheritance, but this approval created contradictions. To obtain marble for his projects, the pope did not hesitate to strip ancient monuments. His architects carted away massive amounts of marble from all across the Capitoline, Aventine, and Celian hills. Biondo lamented this destruction, but even he had to come to terms with a central paradox of the Roman Renaissance—new buildings that paid homage to classical architecture nevertheless accelerated the destruction of many of Rome’s classical monuments. PIUS II

Pius II, the renowned humanist who became pope in 1458, reestablished legal protection of ruins and lamented their deprivations in Latin verses. Yet he too contradicted himself when necessary: he pillaged the Portico of Octavia, for example, and marble from the Colosseum and Forum contributed to a new benediction stairway at St. Peter’s. Pius preoccupied himself with plans for a crusade against the Turks and the rebuilding of his hometown, Pienza, rather than undertake extensive urban projects in Rome. However, he did give voice to Roman historical awareness, a recognition of loss, as when he says of Rome’s imperial palaces, “The snakes unwind in the rooms of the queens of antiquity.” He also emphasized Rome’s Christian heritage and its apostolic primacy. Pius supported scholarly research on early church writers and showed new attention to papal liturgy. These priorities help explain the high ceremonies that marked the relocation of St. Andrew’s head to Rome in 1462, one of the most memorable incidents in Pius’s massive, engagingly written Commentaries. Here he describes the formal procession with the relic to St. Peter’s:

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There were present the priests of all the churches of Rome carrying sacred relics; Roman citizens splendidly dressed; the conservators of the camera; the chiefs of the sections and other magistrates. There were also ambassadors of kings and princes and the nobles of the city carrying lighted tapers and marshaled according to their rank. Some of the ambassadors and nobles were stationed about the Pope, holding over the head of the apostle a golden canopy like an umbrella to keep off the sun’s rays. The rest of the clergy brought up the rear. Some say on that day in the procession of the clergy and laity 30,000 lighted candles could be counted as they crossed Hadrian’s bridge two by two, and there were so many priests carrying sacred relics that the head of the procession reached St. Peter’s before the pope started, though the marchers left no space between them and trod close on one another’s heels. When everything was ready and the procession was well started, the Pope came down from his chamber carried on men’s shoulders in his golden chair, as had come to be his custom, since gout had long since deprived him the use of his feet. He dispatched the Bishop of Ostia with two cardinals to bring him the Apostle’s head from the church of Santa Maria, since he could not himself get through because of the great crowds. They received the famous relic at the altar and put it into the Pope’s hands while all the people looked on and invoked God’s mercy. The Pope kissed it and then carrying it before him and blessing the crowds who surged about him he began to progress. (251–52)

After Pius II, a series of popes with urban ambitions significantly altered the appearance of Rome. PAUL II

Paul II, a pleasure-loving Venetian pope with extravagant tastes, ascended the papal chair in 1462, and within two years he moved to the Palazzo San Marco in the center of the city. He

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renovated the palace, deposited there his large collection of paintings, jewels, plates, and tapestries, and also expanded the adjacent church of San Marco. The entire area became associated with Rome’s Venetian community. Paul’s palace was the first in Renaissance Rome to imitate imperial architecture, and today its small museum features an impressive decorative arts collection, as well as medieval and Byzantine artifacts and regular international exhibits. This pope also revived the Roman Carnival and enjoyed the spectacle and levity it occasioned. From his balcony he watched races, or corse, along the Via Lata, which explains why this major north-south road through the city is today called the Corso. (In the early twentieth century James Joyce lived in poverty on Via Frattina, just off the Corso.) Less festively, Paul II in 1468 suppressed a group of eccentric humanists who together formed the Roman Academy. Its leader, Pomponio Leto, was a Neapolitan who hosted home meetings on the Quirinal Hill. Members enacted ancient Roman rituals among the Palatine’s ruins and declared their friendship in erotic, Latin verse. They also explored the city’s catacombs, where they wrote their names in the soft pumice among the tombs. When Leto became known as “Pontifex Maximus,” a title usually reserved for the pope, Paul II became testy and accused the humanist circle of sodomy, republicanism, paganism, and heresy. His wrath was actually centered on another member, Bartolomeo Platina, a recently fired member of the Roman Curia who in his disgruntled state threatened the pope. Paul thundered that “the law is whatever I keep in my heart,” and for several months Platina was tortured, first in the Venetian palace and then the Castel Sant’Angelo. The next pontiff, Sixtus IV, actually resurrected this group as a religious confraternity in 1478, and many of its members rose to high ranks in the Church. Platina, for example, was made prefect of the newly reorganized Vatican Library, an event commemorated in Melozzo da Forlì’s richly colored fresco now in the Vatican’s Pinocoteca Museum. (The four other figures in the fresco are all relatives of the pope—Sixtus IV was the first

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in a line of nepotistic popes who constantly used the Church’s power and riches to exalt their families.) SIXTUS IV

Although a Franciscan theologian, Sixtus IV shared the humanist commitments of Nicholas V, and he resumed many of his predecessor’s ambitious urban projects, particularly at the Vatican. In an epigraph below Melozzo’s fresco, Platina himself praised his forceful patron for many of the accomplishments: “You gave your city temples, streets, squares, fortifications, bridges, and restored the Aqua Virgine as far as the Trevi ...” The scholar James Ackerman speaks of the pope’s “furious activity” prior to the Holy Year in 1475. Sixtus repaired nearly forty churches and established seven additional ones, including San Pietro in Montorio, with its classicizing umbrella vaults, pilasters, and Bramante’s splendid Tempietto (1502) in its cloister, as well as Santa Maria del Popolo at Rome’s northern gate. The first domed church of the Roman Renaissance, it attracts visitors to its Chigi Chapel, designed by Raphael and featuring artwork by Sebastiano del Piombo and Bernini, and to its two Caravaggio paintings in the Cerasi Chapel. This church was a favorite of the Victorian writer and art critic John Ruskin, and the contemporary poet Thom Gunn, who describing the sun as it illuminates one of Caravaggio’s works, writes: I see how shadow in the painting brims With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs, Until the very subject is in doubt. (“In Santa Maria del Popolo,” 5–8)

With a functional eye toward the easing of pilgrim traffic, Sixtus ordered a new road, the Via Sistina, to guide visitors more efficiently to the Ponte Sant’Angelo. He also built the Ponte Sisto, the first Tiber bridge since antiquity, to create for pilgrims a southern route in and out of the Vatican.

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Perhaps his most sweeping actions were behind-the-scenes and administrative; in papal bulls of 1475 and 1480 the pope granted considerable new powers to his “supervisors of the streets,” resulting in increased taxation, easier seizure of private property for the sake of public improvements, and papal architects’ more active role in municipal matters. Sixtus also made it legal for churchmen to pass on property to their heirs, a change that sparked a building boom. In 1486 the pope’s flamboyant nephew—and cardinal, of course—Raffaele Riario sponsored an opulent production of Seneca’s classical tragedy Hippolytus in front of his massive residence (eventually called the Palazzo della Cancelleria), one of the great palaces of this age. With these new powers, the papacy widened and paved important thoroughfares, including the three main arteries leading from the Vatican through the city, the Via Recta (renamed the Via dei Coronari), Via Papale, and Via dei Pellegrini. It also cleared away obtruding arcades and porticos from these streets, after the King of Naples informed the pope they looked “old-fashioned”! Without a doubt this pope’s greatest benefaction was the Sistine Chapel, designed to accommodate liturgical activities. Even before Michelangelo’s masterful series of frescos, the chapel boasted masterpieces by Botticelli and Perugino, and these contributed to a conscious “program” emphasizing papal claims: illustrations of the earliest popes inhabited niches around the chapel, and under the windows two narrative cycles of the lives of Moses and Jesus presented the Church’s validating models. Sixtus’s followers were equally savvy in adapting classical precedents to papal ideology, although particular applications could be quite opposed. For example, the curialist Raffaello Maffei underscored the classical parallel when he praised the pope for turning Rome from brick to stone, just as Augustus had taken a city built of stone and left it marble. Conversely, Robert Fleming, whose long Latin poem Meditations at Tivoli (1478) was the first imaginative work by an Englishman printed in Italy, contrasted Sixtus’s piety and church building with the “mad pleasure” of imperial circuses

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and theatres. Fleming’s poem of praise finds its visual equivalent in the Hospital of Santo Spirito near St. Peter’s. The pope’s renovation of this site revolutionized care for the sick, providing different cloisters for different kinds of patients, and his papal arms can still be seen above the doors to many rooms. The hospital also publicized the life and accomplishments of Sixtus in a series of thirty-seven frescos, twelve of which are dedicated to his urban projects. The final scene features St. Peter leading his faithful servant, crowned in his triple tiara and papal robes, to PARADISVS, or paradise. Sixtus IV’s aggressive building campaigns and innovative urban planning had sought to portray the Church and its home city as an earthly paradise, but shortly it came to resemble something far different. ALEXANDER VI

Another experienced cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia, assumed Peter’s chair as Alexander VI in 1492. Although shaken by the 1494 invasion of the Italian peninsula by the French king Charles VIII, Borgia soon took full advantage of the unsteady political landscape that followed. He made the papacy a more political, worldly institution, and with grand ambitions wished to carve out a dynasty in Italy for his family. From 1498 to 1503 his notorious son Cesare led the papal army with that goal primarily in mind. Enormously wealthy and hailing from a powerful Spanish family, Alexander VI showed a ruthless and canny political bearing that the great political theorist, historian, and playwright Niccolò Machiavelli found praiseworthy: “more than any previous pope, he showed how much a pope could achieve through money and military means,” he writes in The Prince, his famed meditation on modern statecraft: Alexander VI was concerned only with deceiving men, and he always found them gullible. No man ever affirmed anything more forcefully or with stronger oaths but kept his word less. Nevertheless, his deceptions were always effective, because he well understood the naivety of men. (62)

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Machiavelli also praised Borgia’s violent son Cesare, whom he said “possessed a great spirit and had high ambitions.” Indeed, but the calculating, amoral Florentine fails to mention the many crimes Cesare perpetrated in Rome. He murdered several men, including his brother-in-law, assorted dukes, the pope’s chamberlain, and perhaps his own brother. His sister, Lucrezia, also gained a sordid reputation. Decadent banquets, sexual exploits, violent outrages, and dark intrigues became a part of Vatican life, and rumors of poisoning, magic, and incest soon fed the mind of many an anti-papal writer in Protestant countries. In Barnabe Barnes The Devil’s Charter (1607), for example, Lucrezia plots the death of her husband: Revenge thyself upon thy jealous husband That hath betray’d thine honour, wrong’d thy bed. Fear not. With resolution act his death. Let none of Borgia’s race in policies Exceed thee, Lucrece. Now prove Caesar’s [i.e., Cesare’s] sister, So deep in bloody stratagems as he. (1.5.2–7)

Catholics, too, were critical of papal scandals. From Florence the powerful Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola preached against Rome, as did a poet known as Mantuan (Baptista Mantuanus). He regularly served as vicar general of the Carmelite order at San Crisogono in Trastevere, just south of the Vatican, and his Eclogues contain thinly veiled attacks on Rome’s iniquities. In the “pasquinade,” the Romans themselves found an entertaining means of criticism, and the Church’s abuses surely stimulated this form of social commentary. In 1501 a cardinal placed a battered, noseless statue of Homer’s Menelaus on a pedestal before his palace, just to the southeast of Piazza Navona. The statue assumed the name Pasquino (perhaps after a local cobbler), and anonymous satirists began to attach to him poetic attacks, or pasquinades, written in the statue’s voice. Alexander VI’s worldliness certainly did not escape criticism:

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Alexander sells the keys, the altars, and Christ; Since he bought them first, he has a right to sell them!

Ingrid Rowland, director of the American Academy in Rome, reports that in the 1980s a feminist spray painter had performed a graffiti sex-change—“Pasquina”—and today we continue to

Giordano Bruno at Castel Sant’Angelo Castel Sant’Angelo occupies a dubious place in Rome’s literary tradition. It was at the fortress along the Tiber River where the sixteenth century essayist, poet, and philosopher Giordano Bruno was held before he was burned at the stake. Born in 1548 near Naples, Bruno traveled to England where he absorbed western thought and became a proponent for ideas that weren’t popular among leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. For example, he vigorously supported Copernicus’s view that the sun was the center of the universe and the earth merely a planet. Later, he traveled throughout the Continent, visiting Prague, Zurich and Frankfort, among other cities. He continued to write, often criticizing closed-minded critics for not accepting the immense nature of the universe. Back in Italy, he was denounced as a heretic and, while visiting Venice in 1592, Bruno was arrested by the Office of the Inquisition. Bruno was extradited a year later to Rome, where he was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo for seven years. During his trial, Bruno refused to recant his positions and was found guilty. Bruno was ordered put to death and his books burned. When the verdict was read, he told the court, “Perhaps you who bring this sentence against me are in greater fear than I am who receive it.” (Willkins, 288) He was burned at the stake in the Campo di Fiori in 1600.

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live in critical times—during a recent visit I noticed the statue was entirely covered with diverse complaints, many of them now laser-printed. Pasquino has also been known to engage in dialogues with other “talking statues” throughout the city, most frequently with Marforio, a jovial-looking river god now in the Palazzo Nuovo’s courtyard on the Capitoline. Despite Alexander VI’s debauched habits and family, he did manage to put his stamp on Rome. He continued developing the Castel Sant’Angelo, fortifying it further, enlarging its piazza, and, most radically, creating a central street from it to the Vatican, the Via Alexandrina (now the Via della Conciliazione). This wide, straight street required extensive demolition, including the revered pyramid long thought to be the Tomb of Romulus. Alexander razed it, creating not only a grand, open space for processions, but also a desirable street where many au currant palazzos were built, including the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia, property of the English crown in the sixteenth century, and the following century the residence of the celebrity queen, Christina of Sweden. This pope, also carrying out work within the Vatican palace, erected a tower and commissioned Pinturicchio to paint a series of frescoes in the rooms of the Borgia Apartment (1492–95). The pope’s secretary, Annius of Viterbo, probably arranged the program of images, with its emphasis on the Spanish Borgia family’s ancient Egyptian ancestry (thus its noble lineage predated the founding of Rome itself ), its punning implication that Rome was a new Alexandria, and its use of the Egyptian gods Isis, Osiris, and Apis, the latter of which was conveniently a bull, emblem on the Borgia coat of arms. It was all too convenient, in fact; most of Annius’s historical and antiquarian claims proved to be forgeries. Nevertheless, the frescoes, particularly those in the Sala dei Santi, are florid, exotic masterpieces full of stars, pyramids, and rich indigo backgrounds. The papal throne likely sat below St. Catherine Debates the Scholars of Alexandria, which curiously features the Arch of Constantine in its background, and for which Alexander’s daughter, Lucrezia, served as the model for the saint. (Today

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this space houses a collection of modern religious art.) In some ways Rome was becoming a new Alexandria, by 1500 surpassing Florence as Italy’s cultural center. At the time a 25-yearold named Michelangelo had just completed his gloriously serene Pietà, a sculpture found today just off the nave of St. Peter’s. This Florentine artist, along with his patron Julius II, the most memorable and fiery pope of the High Renaissance, soon extended Rome’s achievements, and its excesses, in both arms and letters. JULIUS II

Possessing vigorous energy, Julius II continued to alter Rome in the spirit of his uncle, Sixtus IV. He widened many streets, making the Via delle Botteghe Oscure (Street of Dark Shops) less dark, and he also created the Via Giulia, a north-south thoroughfare connecting the Ponte Sisto to a planned, but never executed, bridge near the Vatican, the Ponte Triumphale. This new street, built by the pope’s brilliant architect Bramante, remains one of Rome’s widest, most elegant streets with its antique shops and hanging vines. During the Renaissance it soon became a fashionable address for many new palaces. Less reputably, it also became known for a high ratio of courtesans. The English traveler William Thomas visited the area in 1547: Rome wanteth [lacks] no jolie dames, specially the street called Julia, which is more than half a mile long, fair builded on both sides, in manner inhabited with none other but courtesans, some worth 10 and some worth 20,000 crowns, more or less, as their reputation is. And many times you shall see a courtesan ride into the country with ten or twelve horses waiting on her. Briefly, by report Rome is not without 40,000 harlots, maintained for the most part by the clergy and their followers. (The History of Italy, 50)

A similarly decadent spirit reigned on a parallel street across the Tiber, the Via della Lungara, which was also widened by the

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pope, and along which the wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi built the first true Renaissance villa. Now known as the Villa Farnesina (after a later owner), the charming residence was built in 1508 by Baldesarre Peruzzi, who later added illusional frescoes that seem to present views of Rome’s skyline across the river, as if the eastern wall were a balcony. Cherubs and sea nymphs capture the spirit of the place, and highlights include Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea and Three Graces, for which Chigi’s courtesan mistress was a model. The latter fresco is located in the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, which faces a formal garden where the banker, truly the Donald Trump of Renaissance Rome, entertained lavishly. It was such hedonism that elicited criticism from northerners, and one such visitor—an German Augustinian who arrived in Rome in 1510 on monastic business— within a decade would shake up all of Europe and change Western Christianity forever. Martin Luther first explored the city with the earnest enthusiasm befitting one of his religious temperament. He said masses at St. Sebastiano, and climbed the Holy Stairs on his knees. His son later reported that he, upon reaching the top of the stairs, found himself asking, “Who knows if it is true?”, a crisis of belief that sent his troubled mind to St. Paul’s reassurances—the just shall live by faith, the justifying cornerstone of Protestantism. The immoral behavior and casual blasphemies encountered in Rome heightened Luther’s spiritual turmoil. He also grew suspicious of the profiteering machinery of the Roman church; in 1517–18 his full-blown attack on papal indulgences would spark the Reformation. “If there is a Hell,” Luther summarized, “then Rome is built on it.” The Roman Church also troubled the great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, but not for the same reasons. Erasmus actually admired the learned, collegial, easy-going life of the Curia, but he found Julius II unbecoming as a spiritual leader. The humanist first witnessed the robust, intimidating pontiff when “Julius the Terrible” led troops in triumph through Bologna in 1506. Julius’s passions did seem more martial than spiritual; he wished to reclaim lost territories for the papal states

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and end the French occupation of the Italian peninsula. To this end he strengthened the papal army, thereby creating a force of Swiss Guards whose colorful uniforms still attract many a photographer in St. Peter’s Square. Was this pope the successor of Jesus Christ, an alarmed Erasmus asked, or of Julius Caesar? In Rome by 1508, he continued to suspect the latter answer. He complained to a friend about a preacher who hailed Julius “as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, brandishing in his right hand the trident and the inevitable lightning ... But what has all this to do with the Julius who is head of the Christian religion, the vice regent of Christ, the successor of Peter and Paul?” Bull fighting in the papal palace courtyard, which Erasmus compared to gladiators’ duals, only added to his impression. Residing in England in 1514, Erasmus took literary revenge with his anonymous satirical dialogue, Julius Exclusus. The dialogue’s title refers to the pope’s imagined exclusion from heaven. Needless to say, the Renaissance warrior pope, more surly than holy, receives his just desserts from the holy apostle. It was Erasmus, however, who was out of step with the Church. This stout, militant pope symbolized powerfully its “imperial mission,” which Charles Stinger succinctly describes: As heir to the civilizing achievements of the Roman Empire—and destined to surpass them in universality— renewed Rome and the restored Roman Church could find only in the classicism of imperial Rome the forms suitable to express these overarching ambitions. (The Renaissance in Rome, 11)

Machiavelli’s assessment of this pope, who sometimes beat his clerics with a stick if they irritated him, provides an interesting contrast to Erasmus’s—“Pope Julius II always acted impetuously, and found the times and circumstances so suited to his ways that he was always successful.” Julius’s ways also defined these times, and Rome in particular, for he also supported a series of art and architectural projects that audaciously

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attempted to express the Church’s “overarching ambitions” in timeless forms, ones that not only embellish Rome but also could be said to be Rome for millions of visitors, viewers, and readers. MASTERWORKS

We will conclude Julius’s reign by surveying these masterworks. All, quite significantly, are located in St. Peter’s or the Vatican (and truly, you should devote no less than a full day to explore them), and all owe their existence to a collection of geniuses— Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The pope in no uncertain terms displayed the boldness of his spirit when he ordered the destruction of old St. Peter’s in 1505. As E.R. Chamberlain succinctly puts it, “the oldest, largest, most sacred building in Christendom was knocked down as though it were a peasant’s hovel.” Designs for a new basilica had circulated for more than a half century, and recently Julius had rejected several proposals as “not grand enough.” The architect Bramante, however, provided a design worthy of the pope’s vision. Much of the Curia was nevertheless scandalized, and Bramante was soon scornfully known as “The Destroyer” (il ruinante). The cornerstone of the new church was laid in 1506, and work would continue for the next 150 years. Even in its various states of incompletion, visitors could tell Bramante had undertaken a singular architectural challenge, and he responded nobly, combining innovative uses of classical, geometrical forms with a sense of grand scale that he borrowed from arguably the two most impressive monuments of classical Rome—the Pantheon and the Temple of Maxentius and Constantine. The great 435-foot-tall dome, designed by Michelangelo and extended by Giacomo della Porta, became an immediate symbol of the Catholic Church Triumphant when it was completed late in the century. Eleanor Clark wittily describes how the dome “has a way of following you around the town, proclaiming Michelangelo and the center of the world.” Although he destroyed the old basilica, Julius was nevertheless an admirer of antiquity, and in fact he amassed a formidable

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classical sculpture collection, which remains on display in the Vatican’s Pio-Clementine Museum and the Octagon Courtyard. Pieces such as the Apollo Belvedere and the terrifying Laocoön have been among the city’s greatest attractions since the Renaissance. The rediscovery of the latter statue on the Esquiline in 1506 seemed to augur a new Julian Golden Age, and Goethe describes its captured action as “a flash of lightning fixed, a wave petrified at the instant when it is approaching the shore.” From here all museum-goers will proceed for thirty minutes, at a minimum, through the Vatican’s many artistic treasures. The sightseeing endurance demanded by the Vatican Palace is well-known. It may not have 11,000 rooms, as Chateaubriand joked it did, but many regularly share the Russian writer Anton Chekov’s experience—“I wilted from exhaustion.” This halfhour walk does not include stops, but you should make plenty of them—the Gallery of Maps, for example, and the Pinacoteca, which features Leonardo da Vinci’s St. Jerome, Bellini’s Pietà, and Raphael’s Transfiguration and Madonna of Foligno. The destination of this day-long tour is, of course, Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Almost every visitor, upon entering the place, experiences a stultifying, immobilizing moment—great-art overload, let’s call it. As you recover, you will notice on the barrel-vaulted ceiling nine scenes from Genesis, framed by both prophets and sibyls and interspersed with muscular nudes in diverse poses. The narrative in general moves chronologically from the altar to the entrance, and can be divided into three topics—Creation, Adam & Eve, and Noah. Taken together, they complete the chapel’s presentation of Christian history by complementing the ages of the law and of grace represented on the wall frescoes. Just behind the smaller, central image is The Creation of Adam, which the art critic Sydney Freedberg calls “the confrontation in a high bare world of the first man and his Maker,” indeed the most iconic confrontation in Western Art. Freedberg sees in God a figure of the classical sculptor, and thus of Michelangelo himself, delivering life by his hand to his lethargic creation. You may notice many

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visitors looking into pocket mirrors or compacts, in order to view the ceiling continuously without straining their necks. This strategy reminds us that the Sistine Chapel was a monument to artistic labor, as well as to art itself. Michelangelo worked on the frescoes from 1508–1512, and his early biographer Ascanio Condivi claims the artist could not read letters for awhile unless he held them out above his head. Michelangelo himself described the job’s physical demands in a poem to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia: I am a Syrian bow strained for the pull— A hard position whence my art may grow. Little, it seems, that’s strong and beautiful Can come from all the pains I undergo. Giovanni, let my dying art defend Your honour, in this place where I am left Helpless, unhappy, even of art bereft. (14–20; Tr. Elizabeth Jennings)

Despite achieving what Condivi calls a “new and wonderful manner of painting,” the painter himself was never entirely comfortable with the project. He was a sculptor first, and he suspected his rivals, including Raphael and Bramante, had convinced the pope to redirect Michelangelo from work on a papal tomb to this project where, he complained, “I waste my time.” Finally, Julius II as a patron (as one might imagine) created many trials for the artist. He withheld payments, delayed approving stages of work, and was consistently gruff and impatient. Once, fed up with Michelangelo’s evasive promises about finishing, the pope struck the artist and threatened to throw him off the scaffolding. These circumstances inform Michelangelo’s plaintive letters—“I struggle more than any man ever has,” he writes—yet he was also gloomy by temperament, and much of his great work in Rome lay ahead of him: The Last Judgment on the wall of the chapel, the redesign of the Capitoline Piazza, and his eccentric Porta Pia at the eastern outskirts of the city.

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Even as Julius II was initiating the Sistine ceiling project, he decided he no longer wished to reside in the apartment of Alexander VI, his predecessor whom he despised. Thus he commissioned Rome’s other great Renaissance artist, Raphael of Urbino, to redecorate four rooms (or stanze) on the floor above. What resulted were further Vatican masterpieces. While Michelangelo worked downstairs, Raphael completed the Room of the Segnatura, after which he turned to an adjacent antechamber, the Room of Heliodorus, from 1512–1514. The most celebrated fresco in the first room is The School of Athens, in which Aristotle and Plato walk and debate within a grand classical edifice, based on a design by Bramante. That architect is slyly represented in the figure of Euclid, bent over his compass, and many other contemporaries appear as philosophers in this busy scene. Among them are Michelangelo, cast (one imagines mischievously!) as a Heracletus, despondent on the stairs, and the artist himself, wearing a black cap and peeking out with satisfaction from a crowd. Literature lovers will wish to pore over Raphael’s Parnassus, featuring a number of famous poets, including Homer, Virgil, and Dante (who also appears in profile in The Dispute in the same room). According to the great Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari, Raphael viewed the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo was away in Florence, and his influence can be seen in the Heliodorus Room’s later work. In The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, one finds a counter-balanced intensity, a new sense of action breaking out. On one side Julius II looks on from his papal litter, and his presence symbolizes the defense of the Church’s patrimony against all profane thieves. Vasari glowingly reported of this composition that “even the cartoons [or preliminary drawings] are regarded as precious.” The pope also appears in The Mass at Bolsena, and less noticeably in The Liberation of St. Peter as well. Julius died in 1513, and so the final fresco in this room, The Meeting of Leo I and Attila, instead features the portrait of his successor, Leo X. Raphael’s designs were used for the final two rooms, whose

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more strident pro-papal programs reflect the growing troubles of the Renaissance Church. However, increasingly his apprentices carried out the actual painting, so busy with new projects was their prosperous supervisor. Pope Leo had the good sense to retain Raphael, commissioning ten designs for tapestries in the Sistine Chapel and appointing him commissioner of antiquities in 1514. In this role he was less a preservationist than a facilitator of city marble for the ongoing construction of St. Peter’s. He also began composing a complete visual record of ancient Roman buildings. In a famous 1519 letter, to which the great Italian writer and courtier Baldessare Castiglione likely contributed, Raphael explained to the pope his combined method of textual investigation and imaginative reconstruction—he strives to understand the ruined structures by correspondence, by studying buildings that “remain standing and can still be seen.” Castiglione, who was currently writing his subtle masterpiece The Book of the Courtier, was less prone to Raphael’s optimism, and he treated Rome’s ruins in a sonnet made famous by its author’s nostalgic, stoic temperament: O lofty hills, O ruins rare and blest, where but the name of Rome is carven deep, what wretched relics in your midst you keep of souls once awesome, singular and best! Theaters, arches by God’s hand impressed, colossal grandeur, glory’s joyous leap, you’re now of ash and dust a little heap, to passing throngs but mockery and jest.... (1–8; Tr. Joseph Tusiani)

When Raphael died early in 1520, Castiglione composed an elegy. In it he said Death snatched his friend because he resented Raphael’s reanimation of Rome’s corpse. LEO X AND CLEMENT VII

Two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, represent the prof-

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ligate climax, the troubling fissures, and the devastating end of the High Renaissance in Rome. Hailing from a powerful Florentine family known for shrewd diplomacy and cultivated artistic tastes, Leo X encountered great enthusiasm among Romans, who hoped he would be the refined “Augustus” after the successful but rough-riding Julius “Caesar” II. Initially a Golden Age did indeed seem at hand: strife with France was resolved, and the early modern city had never before experienced such spectacle, luxury, or merriment. Only in his thirties, this “bull-necked, pop-eyed, red-faced” pope (as one historian describes him) loved to travel in procession through Rome’s streets while riding a white stallion, wearing perfumed, pearlenlaced gloves, and covered by a canopy of embroidered silk. He also enjoyed hunting, practical jokes (the coarser the better), masked balls, and succulent feasts—one Venetian ambassador recalled a meal of sixty-four courses. Leo’s building projects in Rome reflect well his self-absorbed character and limitations of leadership. He built San Giovanni dei Fiorentini as an expression of his own Tuscan dominance of Rome, and the triumphal-arch façade of a new papal Mint (today the Palazzo del Banco di Santo Spirito), designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and completed later by his cousin Clement VII, reflected his flair for civic ostentation. He also constructed the Via Leonina, less to assist pilgrim traffic than to provide a proper approach to a grand family palace at Piazza Navona, which was never built. He also failed to carry out existing plans for a massive hall of justice on the Via Giulia, and improvements at the Roman university stalled because of funding shortages. Inordinate amounts of papal resources supported Leo’s spendthrift lifestyle, and he also used Church money to entice countless artists and intellectuals to the papal court. However, his lack of discrimination often meant cads and posers enjoyed his generosity most amply, and to more worthy candidates he could be capricious and equivocating. Among the most deserving was the disgruntled Ludovico Ariosto, whose epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516) was quickly judged

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the greatest vernacular work of the age. Unfortunately, Ariosto also served the Este family, rulers of Ferrara and bitter enemies of the Medici in Florence. This hostility may explain why this great poet was destined for disappointment in Rome, which he expresses in a few of his Satires: His nephews and his relatives—not few— are first to drink; and then come those who helped him don the fairest mantle of them all.

Thus Ariosto describes the pope’s typical favoritism, and he may refer to the day in 1517 when Leo created a jaw-dropping thirty-one new cardinals, each a further drain on the dwindling papal treasury. After recalling a visit with the pope and questioning his own insatiable greed, Ariosto ends this poem on a note of longing: Upon that time when the world was new and the first crowd was innocent and good, and there was not the shrewdness of today ... (Satire 3; Tr. Joseph Tusiani)

Ariosto also produced a number of comedies for Leo, but to no avail. Many Romans shared his feelings of rejection when Leo was replaced in 1522 by Adrian VI, an austere and parsimonious Flemish pope whose reign fortunately (for them) was brief. However much Clement VII was welcomed by comparison, his pontificate too was a far cry from the merry, inconsequential days when his cousin ruled Rome. CLEMENT VII AND THE SACKING OF ROME

Clement VII was less socially pleasant than Leo, and by nature more pensive. To be fair, however, the pontificate required such brooding, and in 1524 he took control of a Church beset by problems, several of which had grown because of his cousin’s negligence. Leo, for example, had shrugged off Luther’s attacks

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on the “Babylonical” Church, but now the reformer’s surging message could not be ignored; the Protestant Reformation was resonating among believers, and it made Rome seem far less like the capital of a universal spiritual commonwealth. This symbolic diminishment had its practical parallels, as the temporal power of the Church became increasingly vulnerable to stronger French and Imperial forces battling in Italy. Clement, unfortunately, was utterly ill-suited to be the pope the times required, and instead his nervousness and lack of resolution led to inconceivable disaster. His oscillating loyalties antagonized the powerful emperor Charles V, and regrettably he forged a new partnership with France just before it suffered a terrible defeat at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Two years later imperial (largely Spanish) troops, led by the Duke of Bourbon, joined with a German Lutheran army and marched toward Rome. These 20,000 soldiers—unpaid, hungry, and greedy for church treasures—carried out the unthinkable on May 6, 1527: they invaded Rome in an onslaught of killing, torture, and destruction. The soldiers first penetrated the walls near the Vatican, and soon they also overtook Trastevere and crossed the Ponte Sisto into the heart of the city. Considering the crises he faced, Clement may be excused for not undertaking the grand urban projects of his predecessors. In any case, he will forever be associated with one narrow structure—the corridor on top of the fortified wall connecting the Vatican palace to the Castel Sant’Angelo. Nearly captured, the pope fled the Vatican and scurried along this corridor to the fortified castle. Three thousand other refugees joined him within its walls, including Benvenuto Cellini, an impetuous sculptor and writer who in his autobiography described the “unbelievable spectacle” with a self-promotion that is not entirely trustworthy. Even so, his account conveys the breathless horror of the event. “At this moment the whole world was in arms,” he begins. Reaching this gate [of the castle], we found some of the enemy had entered Rome, and they were at our heels. As the

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castellan wished to let the portcullis fall, he had to clear the way somewhat, and so we four got inside.... I took up a post near some big guns, which were under the charge of a bombardier called Giuliano the Florentine. This Giuliano, hanging over the battlements of the castle, saw his poor house being sacked and his wife and children outraged; so lest he should massacre his own kith and kin, he did not discharge his guns, but threw his fuse upon the ground, and wailed aloud, and tore his face. And other bombardiers were doing the same. Therefore I seized one of the fuses, and, with the help of some who were calmer in their minds, pointed some swivels and falconets where I saw a chance, slaughtering therewith a great many of the enemy.... I kept up the fire, for which several cardinals and noblemen blessed me, giving me the greatest encouragement. (The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, ch. 34)

Andre Chastél in The Sack of Rome, 1527 speaks of the “unparalleled humiliation of city, papacy, and italianness,” and the invaders’ outrages were swift. As Luigi Guicciardini soon reported, “If anyone had been walking through the streets of Rome by day or night, he would have heard not sighs and tearful laments, but pitiful cries and screams of hapless prisoners coming from every house and building.” Although precise numbers differ, the death toll was at least several thousand, in a city whose population at the time was around 60,000. The troops desecrated churches, stole relics, and destroyed houses (perhaps as many as 30,000). Soldiers tortured citizens until they revealed where family treasures had been hidden. These and other atrocities—nuns violated, hospital patients slain—became known as the “Spanish fury,” but the German soldiers were no less violent: with yells of “Long live Pope Luther!”, they killed Romans on the high altar of St. Peter’s, exhumed the bodies of past popes, and forced clerics to perform mock masses. Those tapestries designed by Raphael disappeared from the Sistine Chapel, and in the artist’s Stanze

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more zealous soldiers defaced the pope’s image and with lances scratched “Luther” and other graffiti on frescos. Neither force spared their own national churches—the Spanish San Giacomo or the German Santa Maria dell’ Anima. Plague was raging by the summer, and the humiliated pope, now wearing a long, mournful beard, agreed to massive concessions. Vasari recalls how Rome’s artists and writers, their paintings and books destroyed, fled the city after the Sack, and they were not alone. On December 7, the pope, disguised as a servant, abandoned his city and took up residence in Orvieto. At the time the Florentines’ church had become a barracks, and St. Peter’s a stable. The occupiers themselves finally left the city in February 1528. When Clement returned that October, one nobleman reported that four-fifths of Rome was deserted. Pietro Aretino, who like Cellini exemplifies the brasher, harsher literary voice of the late Renaissance, had a complicated relationship to the devastated city. After distributing a series of sonnets (called The Positions) to accompany sexually explicit engravings, he had to flee Rome, but only after a papal rival nearly succeeded in having him killed. His bitterness toward the city can be seen in his play Court Life, where Rome’s traditional title of caput mundi—head of the world—becomes the coda mundi, the world’s backside. (He may have borrowed this inversion from Boccaccio.) Aretino also printed “prognostications” forecasting Rome’s fall (his own prescience must have shocked him), and later in The Discussions, a cynical how-to dialogue between an older and younger prostitute, he does not shy away from graphic descriptions of the Sack of Rome. However, in a canzone he could still lament that “The adored Lady of the Universe” found herself “In the hands of dogs and imperious monsters.” Responding to the painter Titian, who wrote enthusiastically about Rome in 1545, Aretino nostalgically quipped, “you should have seen it twenty years ago.” Aretino’s ambivalent feelings, shared by so many other writers through the ages, were especially apt for him, but so was Titian’s enthusiasm. The painter was seeing a different Rome, to be sure, but one already recovering and thriving again.

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The pope at that time, Paul III, is arguably the figure who truly culminates the Renaissance—as the builder of the massive landmark, the Palazzo Farnese—but he also led the city into a new age: five years before Titian arrived, Paul confirmed Ignatius of Loyola’s Jesuit order and helped to usher in the Counter Reformation. Less than four decades later, Sixtus V would once again radically alter Rome—expanding its habitable areas, changing the character of its streets and monuments, and preparing the way for the genius of Bernini.

C HA P TE R | S I X

The Grand Tourists Arrive in Rome

The poet Philip Sidney was probably the first young English gentleman to participate in what would become known as the “Grand Tour,” the lengthy and leisurely trip through the Continent made by the student who, after years of arduous scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge, would then have the opportunity to continue his education at a somewhat slower pace, taking two or three years to study the art, languages, and literature of the great European cities. In 1572, Queen Elizabeth I gave permission to Sidney to make the tour so that he could learn French, German, and Italian while soaking up the culture of the countries of the Continent, believing that when he returned she could put his skills to use in her diplomatic corps. Accompanied by a tutor and three servants, Sidney visited Paris, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, Vienna, and Venice. Upon his return Sidney was knighted and elevated to an ambassadorship. The term “Grand Tour” was first used by the British author Richard Lessels in his 1670 book Voyage to Italy, written as a guidebook for the young man preparing to embark on the adventure. Another author who provided a guidebook for the trip was Thomas Nugent, whose 1749 book was titled The 102

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Grand Tour: Or, A Journey Through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France. For the young “tourist,” Paris was usually the first stop, where the student would take lessons in dance and fencing, visit the city’s museums and galleries—and, on occasion, its brothels—and, finally, avail himself of his opportunities to hobnob with the French aristocracy. Usually, the doors of Paris’s grand mansions were flung open to the gentleman tourist with the help of letters of introduction provided by wealthy and influential friends and family members back home. After several months in France, the tourist usually headed next for Italy, with extended visits planned for Florence, Naples, Venice, and, of course, Rome. The journey from Paris to the Italian cities was not without its risks. The tourist could travel across the Mediterranean by boat, departing from Marseilles or Nice to one of the coastal Italian cities, but travel by sea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a hazardous venture and shipwrecks were common. A land route featured risks of its own. There were no decent roads through the Alps, which meant the tourist and his traveling companions were forced to abandon the carriage and make the trip on horseback. They carried little money with them, fearing attacks by highwaymen. Instead, the trips were financed by letters of credit from London banks, which the tourists could present after arriving at their destinations. When taking a land route, the traveling party would arrive first at Turin, then head south down the peninsula. The tourists were encouraged by their tutors to take notes about their adventures on the Continent. Some of the tourists performed this act with relish, spending hours each night on their journals while noting even the tiniest of details. One dedicated note-taker was James Boswell, a young barrister at law and, later, an important contributor to the literature of England. In fact, a treasure trove of notes and manuscripts authored by Boswell was discovered hidden in an Irish castle in 1929. The notes would be edited into a number of books, including

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two volumes that detailed Boswell’s three years on the Grand Tour: Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, and Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766. Boswell was such a scrupulously careful note-taker that his propensity for writing down every word uttered by his friend, Dr. Samuel Johnson, would result in one of literature’s great biographies, The Life of Samuel Johnson. That achievement would come twenty-seven years after Boswell, having just completed his study of the law in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Utrecht, Holland, arrived in Germany to commence his Grand Tour. It was 1764 and Boswell was twenty-four years old. From Germany, the tour took him next to Switzerland and then to Italy. After a disagreeable crossing of the Alps—“I have climbed the rudest heights and drunk the Alpine snow” (Brady, 22)—he arrived in Turin on January 7, 1765. Making his way south, Boswell set foot on Roman soil in mid-February. He stayed in the city briefly, then went to Naples but returned to Rome on March 24 for an extended stay of sightseeing, scholarship, and sinning. Indeed, throughout his journal, Boswell displays an unceasing devotion to the search for female companionship. For example, on the night of April 12—evidently after a long and wearying romantic interlude—Boswell wrote that he would do well to take a break from womanizing: “Swear no women for week. Labour hard.” (Brady, 65). When he wasn’t worrying about women sapping his strength, Boswell did get out into the city to record the sights. On March 30, Boswell wrote: We saw the Baths of Diocletian, whose plan was explained to me by my antiquary. In the Carthusian church we saw also a fresco by Pompeo Batoni depicting Simon Magus carried in the air by the demons to show that he could perform miracles as well as Peter. The Saint worships God, and points with his finger to the place where Simon Magus will fall. A group watches this event. The composition of the painting

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is excellent. But Peter appears too uneasy, as if he were afraid that his prayers would not be effective. The colouring is false and unnatural, as if Peter had not only caused Simon to fall but had discoloured the flesh of all those around him. In Santa Maria Maggiore we saw some fine columns of oriental marble. I must not forget to add in passing that we saw a strange fellow sitting in the sun reading Tasso to a group of others in rags like himself. (Brady, 62–63)

According to that entry, Boswell visited Terme di Diocleziano, the remains of the sprawling public baths erected by the Emperor Diocletian between the years 298 and 306 A.D. The pink ruins of the baths are located just off the Piazza della Republica, a major intersection in the city where statues of art nouveau nymphs frolic in fountains, and where Rome’s political agitators traditionally begin their demonstrations. Diocletian’s baths, covering two-and-a-half acres, were able to accommodate 3,000 bathers. Surrounding the baths were a number of ornate bathhouses, including a tepidarium, where a bather could get a hot—or, at least, a lukewarm—bath as well as the Aula Ottagona, an eight-sided building that did doubleduty as a planetarium. About 200 years before Boswell visited the baths, Michelangelo oversaw construction of a convent at the site. The painting that sparked Boswell’s interest—The Fall of Simon Magus—remains on display in the Carthusian church that Boswell visited, Santa Maria degli Angeli. The church, designed by Michelangelo, was built in 1563 on the orders of Pope Pius IV, and dedicated to the Christian slaves who died building the Baths of Diocletian. The stunning painting was rendered in 1755 by Batoni, who originally hoped that it would hang in Saint Peter’s Basilica, but Vatican authorities rejected it and, instead, the painting found its way into the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. So distraught was Batoni by the Vatican’s decision that he gave up rendering religious scenes and turned to making his living painting portraits. In any event,

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The Fall of Simon Magus depicts the ill fate that fell upon the Samaritan magician Simon. (Because of his skill at magic, Simon was called “Magus.”) It is said that Simon angered the Apostles Peter and John when he offered them money to gain greater magical power. Peter warned Simon to drop his worship of the black arts, but Simon refused and instead went to Rome searching for the secrets of holy magic. Evidently, Simon failed in his quest and went home to Samaria, where he attempted to prove his magic by having himself buried alive for three days, at which time he planned to rise from his grave. Instead, the stunt proved fatal. Batoni painted a much different ending for the hapless magician. In Batoni’s version, Simon proves his magic by ascending above the Roman Forum before the eyes of the Emperor Nero and the population of Rome. He accomplishes this feat with the assistance of demons, who hoist him aloft by their hands. But the prayers of Peter and Paul cause the demons to release Simon, who falls to his death. The other church cited by Boswell in his journal entry, Santa Marie Maggiore, is located several blocks from the baths in a square adjacent to the Piazza dell Esquilino. Santa Marie Maggiore was most likely built in the fifth century A.D. The church acquired an impressive baroque façade in 1750, which is after Boswell toured the place. It is likely that the columns Boswell described in the church are located in the Capella Sistina—the Sistene Chapel, but not the Sistene Chapel whose ceiling was decorated by Michelangelo. The Capella Sistina found at Santa Maria Maggiore was commissioned by Pope Sixtus V in the sixteenth century. To erect the chapel’s marble columns, Sixtus ransacked ancient buildings for the materials and employed virtually every sculptor in the city to work on the project. EDWARD GIBBON’S SLEEPLESS NIGHT

Usually, the young tourist required his father’s permission, and his father’s funds, to make the Grand Tour. As many prospective tourists would learn, fathers could be downright irascible when

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it came to opening their purses for the trip, a fact that was made clear to young Edward Gibbon. Also, political events beyond control of the young gentleman often delayed the tour. In Gibbon’s case, his visit to the Continent was delayed by an act of religious rebellion, which caused his father to banish him to a mountaintop in Switzerland, and then by the Seven Years War with France, which made it impossible for an Englishman to travel to Paris. Still, when Gibbon finally made his way to Rome, at the age of twenty-five, he would be struck with an idea that would change his life as well as history’s view of the ancient Roman Empire. Even as a young boy, sickly and pudgy, Gibbon found himself fascinated with stories of heroic gladiators, conquering Roman armies, and the great leaders who built the Roman Empire. One day, while accompanying his father on a visit to a friend’s house in Wiltshire, England, young Gibbon found himself wandering through the home’s sizable library when he came across a copy of History of the Latin Roman Empire by Laurence Eachard. “I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube, when the summons of the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast,” he recalled. (De Beer, 11) Gibbon was educated at Oxford, entering the great university on April 3, 1752, at the age of fifteen. Hardly a dedicated scholar, Gibbon found his classes dull and often played truant, yet he constantly found himself drawn to Roman history and Latin studies. Gibbon’s admiration for the Romans did not end in the classroom. As a student, he found himself questioning the direction of the British church and drawn instead to the rituals of the Roman Catholic faith—he agreed with the notions of celibacy for priests, the monastic life of devotion to the church, the veneration of saints and the use of holy water in the services. And so, having located a priest with the help of a Catholic bookseller, Gibbon inquired about conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. “In our first interview he soon discovered that persuasion was needless,” Gibbon recalled. “After

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sounding the motives and merits of my conversion, he consented to admit me into the pale of the Church: and at his feet on the eighth of June, 1753, I solemnly, though privately, abjured the errors of heresy.” (Gibbon, 86) Gibbon’s conversion to the Roman Catholic faith angered his father: “His good sense was astonished at my strange departure from the religion of my country,” he recalled. (Gibbon, 87). It also got him booted out of Oxford. Still only sixteen years old, Gibbon was sent by his father to Lausanne, a university high in the mountains of Switzerland, where Gibbon shivered in the wintertime while falling under the influence of Calvinist educators who, Gibbon’s father hoped, would convince the boy to give up Catholicism. At Lausanne, Gibbon blossomed as a student. He continued his Latin studies, but found himself thirsting for other knowledge as well. He studied the Greeks, and also mastered mathematics, political studies, and became fluent in French. And, as his father had hoped, the Calvinists did succeed in convincing Gibbon to return to the Protestant church. “The various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream, and after a full conviction, on Christmas Day, 1754, I received the sacrament in the church at Lausanne,” Gibbon wrote. “It was here that I suspended my religious enquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants.” (Gibbon, 96) He remained at Lausanne for five years and would have remained longer, devoting himself to his studies, but his father decided his son had had enough college and ordered him to withdraw. With nothing else to do, Gibbon reluctantly joined the military, becoming an officer in the militia of South Hampshire, England. At the time, Britain was engaged in the Seven Years War with France, but Gibbon never got near a battlefield, spending the next two-and-a-half years marching his men along muddy British roads. His chief contribution to the militia was his deftness in completing the battalion’s paperwork. Finally, on December 23, 1762, as a treaty with France was being negoti-

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ated Gibbon—with his father’s permission and letter of credit in his pocket—left for the Continent to begin his Grand Tour. He spent time in France, then visited his old school in Lausanne and then, in 1764, Gibbon arrived in Italy. On October 15, 1764, while touring Rome, Edward Gibbon found himself overwhelmed with an idea: he would write the definitive history chronicling the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He explains that day in his autobiography, Memoirs of My Life: The historian of the Decline and Fall must not regret his time or expense, since it was the view of Italy and Rome which determined the choice of the subject. In my Journal the place and the moment of conception are recorded; the fifteenth of October 1764, in the close of the evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the Capitol. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire: and, though my reading and reflections began to point towards the object, some years elapsed and several avocations intervened before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work. (Gibbon, 143)

Gibbon’s visit that day brought him to the Capitoline, the hill of Rome along the Via del Teatro where the ancient Romans established their government. It is the location of the former Temple of Jupiter, built to worship the father of the gods, by the Roman Lucius Furius Purpureo. The temple featured a statue of Caesar, whose head was said to move from west to east. The “Church of the Zoccolanti” that Gibbon speaks of is the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, which occupies the site of the former Temple of Juno, built nearby the Temple of Jupiter. On one night in 390 B.C., a flock of geese kept at the Temple of Juno started cackling so loudly that their keepers were awakened to discover an invading force of Gauls attempting to scale the hill. “The Romans never forget their patriotism,” the British

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writer H.V. Morton notes in his 1957 travelogue of the city, A Traveller in Rome. “Once a year, a goose gorgeously arrayed in purple and gold was carried around the Forum in a splendid litter. This delightful spectacle was unfortunately marred by the usual touch of Roman cruelty, for a dog crucified on a cross of elderwood was also carried round, a reminder of the dogs which failed to bark the night that the Gauls tried to scale the hill.” (Morton, 63) Adjacent to the Capitoline is the Palatine, the hill where the city is said to have been founded by the twins, Romulus and Remus, in the eighth century B.C. At the foot of the Palatine, between the arches of Septimius Severus and Titus, the Roman king Tarquinius Priscus built the Forum, the Foro Romano, in the seventh century B.C. At one time a swampy area of the city that was used as a burial ground, Tarquinius had the swamp drained, clearing the way for what he hoped would become the cultural, intellectual, commercial, and political center of Rome. It was between the arches that victorious Roman armies would return, parading before Rome’s citizens while showing off their prisoners and holding aloft their spoils of war. Says Morton: “It is pleasant, as one looks down at the Forum, to think of the plump little figure of Edward Gibbon treading its stones ‘with a lofty step,’ during his brief visit to Rome in 1764, when he first conceived the idea of writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. ‘After a sleepless night,’ he wrote, ‘I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot, where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell (how strange that Gibbon of all men should make this error!), was at present to my eye.’” (Morton, 60) Alas, there is little that remains of the Forum today although archaeological work goes on. As for Gibbon, it would be twelve years before the first volume of The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published. Altogether, Gibbon’s work spans thousands of pages and is published in six volumes, the last of which was completed in 1788, just six years before his death.

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JOHN MILTON AND THE WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

Following his graduation from Cambridge, the English poet John Milton spent five years caring for his ailing parents before taking his Grand Tour. But in 1638, Milton’s mother died, and the poet found himself “desirous ... of seeing foreign parts, especially Italy, and with my father’s consent I set forth, accompanied by a single attendant.” (Orgel, 321) Milton spent two years on his tour, twice visiting Rome. Born in 1608, Milton devoted himself, even as a young boy, to the study of literature. He recalls, “My father destined me in early childhood for the study of literature, for which I had so keen an appetite that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight.” Still, when he entered Cambridge, his ambition was to obtain an education in theology and, following graduation, enter the ministry of the Church of England. He spent seven years at Cambridge forming his own ideas about the organization of religion, many of which were at odds with the hierarchy of the Anglican Church. He also wrote poetry at Cambridge, finding a literary voice that would eventually produce some of the greatest poetry written in the English language. Finally giving up the idea of a career as a clergyman, Milton returned home to his father’s country estate to care for his ailing parents, where he immersed himself in his beloved books and continued writing verse. A year before leaving on his tour, Milton published the poem Lycidas, written as a tribute to a friend who died in a shipwreck after entering the priesthood. Literary scholars have interpreted several lines of the poem to include a sharp attack on the Catholic church: The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said. But that two-handed engine at the door,

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Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. (Orgel, 42)

Scholars have concluded that the “grim wolf ” is the Catholic church, a reference to Matthew 7:15, which contains the admonishment to “beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” A year later, his attack on the Roman Catholic Church was very much on his mind as he made his way down the Italian peninsula. Indeed, on his second visit to the Eternal City, Milton harbored reservations about making the trip, believing his life was in danger. In his essay, Second Defence of the English People, Milton writes: As I was on the point of returning to Rome, I was warned by merchants that they had learned through letters of plots laid against me by the English Jesuits, should I return to Rome, because of the freedom with which I had spoken about religion. For I had determined within myself that in those parts I would not indeed begin a conversation about religion, but if questioned about my faith would hide nothing, whatever the consequences. And so, I none the less returned to Rome. What I was, if any man inquired, I concealed from no one. For almost two more months, in the very stronghold of the Pope, if anyone attacked the orthodox religion, I openly, as before, defended it. Thus, by the will of God, I returned again in safety to Florence, revisiting friends who were as anxious to see me as if it were my native land to which I had returned. (Orgel, 322) Evidently, by the fall Milton made his peace with the Catholics because on October 30, 1638, the poet dined at the English College, the Venerabile Collegio Inglese, a seminary for student priests from England. It is likely they had much to talk about.

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Milton did survive the tour, returning home to become an advocate for parliamentary government and human rights. His poetry centered on even grander themes; his epic, Paradise Lost,

The Venerable English College By the time John Milton visited the venerable English College, the Venerabile Collegio Inglese, in 1638 the seminary on the Via di Monserrato already had a notorious reputation in England. At the college, young priests were trained in the Roman Catholic rites, then sent to Britain to spread the faith to their countrymen. Alas, the practice did not sit well with the Anglican authorities back home. Between 1581 and 1678, forty-four Collegio Inglese graduates were rounded up by English authorities. The young priests were tortured, tried, and sent to the gallows. The college was founded in 1576 by British Cardinal William Allen, who took over a hospice that tended to the needs of poor and infirm British Catholics making their pilgrimages to Rome. Since 1818, the seminary has been known as the “Venerable English College” because of the forty-four priests who were martyred as well as 130 priests who suffered imprisonment and exile; forty-one of the priests have been canonized or beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. According to H.V. Morton, author of the 1957 guide to the city, A Traveller in Rome, the school has an appreciation for the theater, dating back to its earliest days. Morton wrote that the diarist John Evelyn visited in 1644, where he dined “and afterwards saw an Italian comedy acted by the alumni before the Cardinals; again, the following year he dined at the College and this time saw an English play. How interesting it is that the College should have retained its histrionic traditions; for I heard that the alumni were at that moment rehearsing HMS Pinafore.” (Morton, 310–11)

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relates Adam’s fall from grace, placing it in the context of a cosmic drama that examines the birth of the struggle between good and evil. A lesser work, Paradise Regained, tells of human salvation through Christ, and includes several lines that salute the Eternal City: All nations now to Rome obedience pay, To Rome’s great emperor, whose wide domain In ample territory, wealth and power, Civility of manners, arts and arms, And long renown thou justly mayst prefer (Orgel, 656)

Milton went blind in his later years and suffered a brief term of imprisonment during the Restoration, but kept writing and amused himself with music and good conversation with his peers. He died in 1674. TOBIAS SMOLLETT ENTERS FROM THE NORTH

Not every Englishman who traveled through the Continent did so with the intent of sowing his wild oats. The Scottish author Tobias Smollett crossed the English Channel on his way to the Continent in June 1763 at the age of forty-two. He was accompanied by his wife, Nancy. Indeed, the Smolletts were hardly in a festive mood. Just before leaving for their tour, the Smolletts suffered the death of their fifteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Smollett also suffered from asthma, a condition aggravated by London’s foggy climate. They hoped the sunny weather ahead in southern France and along the Italian peninsula would cheer them up and, according to Smollett, “prove favourable to the weak state of my lungs.” (Smollett, 15) Born in 1721, Smollett grew up with the ambition to be a soldier but his grandfather, who was supporting him, had already bought a commission in the military for Smollett’s older brother and did not want to incur the expense again. So at the age of fifteen Tobias was sent off to college in Glasgow,

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where he studied the healing arts. Smollett left college and headed for London a qualified surgeon, but by then his interest had been drawn to the literary world. His first attempt at writing produced the play The Regicide, a tragedy dramatizing the death of James I. It was, by most accounts, a laughable attempt at literature. Undeterred, Smollett kept writing, even though he was proving utterly incapable of supporting himself with the written word. Destitute and near starvation, Smollett was finally forced to accept an appointment as a ship’s surgeon, which caused a delay in his development as a writer for nearly four years as his vessel, under the command of Admiral Vernon, headed for the West Indies and the siege of Cartegena. Smollett returned to London in 1744, where he established a practice of surgery. He had also married well, meeting the beautiful heiress Nancy Lascelles during his time in the West Indies—they married in 1747. His professional and personal life now secure, Smollett returned to writing and, in 1748, produced his masterpiece: The Adventures of Roderick Random, a boisterous comedy about a sailor that portrayed the British tar as a hard-drinking, fun-loving fellow, always ready for a good fight and a good joke. Other literary successes would follow. By the time the Smolletts departed on their tour, Tobias was a well-respected, albeit curmudgeonly, man of letters. In the months to follow, he took careful notes while on the tour and in 1766, shortly after his return, Smollett published Travels Through Italy and France, his guide to the two most traveled nations on the tour. The Smolletts arrived in Rome sometime between February 25 and 28, 1765. They approached the city from the north, traveling along the Via Flaminia. Arriving at the Tiber River, they crossed over the Ponte Molle: You may guess what I felt at first sight of the city of Rome, which, notwithstanding all the calamities it has undergone, still maintains an august and imperial appearance. It stands

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on the farther side of the Tyber, which we crossed at the Ponte Molle, formerly called the Pons Milvius, about two miles from the gate by which we entered. This bridge was built by Aemilius Censor, whose name it originally bore. It was the road by which so many heroes returned with conquest to their country; by which so many kings were led captive to Rome; and by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms and states approached the seat of empire, to deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the protection of the Roman people. (Smollett, 220)

Fourteen-hundred years before Smollett crossed the bridge, it was the scene of a monumental battle between feuding Roman leaders, Constantine the Great and Maxentius. The battle was sparked by a disagreement between the two men over control of the western half of the Roman Empire. Constantine was the son of the western emperor Constantius Chlorus, but succession to the throne was not necessarily inherited. When Constantius died on July 25, 306 A.D., the emperor’s troops proclaimed Constantine the new ruler, but Maxentius, the son of Constantius’ predecessor Maximian, also claimed the title. Two years later, a conference to resolve the issue resulted in selection of Maxentius as emperor, although Constantine retained rule of the provinces of Britain and Gaul. This solution did not sit well with either man, and over the next few years both rulers schemed to win control of the entire empire. Finally, in the summer of 313, Constantine raised an army and headed for Rome, approaching—as Smollett did— from the north on the Via Flaminia. He arrived at the Tiber River some ten miles from the city, intending to cross the Milvian Bridge for the final march on Rome. (By the time Smollett arrived, the bridge had been replaced, and was known as Ponte Molle.) Arriving at the bridge, though, Constantine realized his men were outnumbered by a margin of four-to-one. It appeared likely that Maxentius would hold the crucial bridge and keep

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Constantine out of Rome, maintaining his rule of the empire. Still, the two armies prepared for battle. Late in the afternoon of October 27, the eve of the battle, Constantine looked toward the setting sun and had a vision: He saw a cross emblazoned on the sun, and heard, spoken in Greek, the words: “Under this sign, you will conquer.” The next day, the two armies clashed, and Constantine emerged the victor. Maxentius’ army retreated, but Constantine’s men showed them no mercy. Many men were slaughtered on the bridge. Maxentius met his death on the north bank of the Tiber. Constantine entered Rome and claimed the emperorship. And since it was the sign of the cross that had led him to victory, Constantine, who had been a pagan, declared an end to the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, clearing the way for Christianity to explode as the dominant religion of Europe. “Nothing of the antient bridge remains but the piles,” Smollett said. (Smollett, 221) Smollett crossed the Tiber—he called it “foul, deep, and rapid”—and noted that “the bed of this river has been considerably raised by the rubbish of old Rome, and this is the reason given for its being so apt to overflow its banks.” (Smollett, 221) Following the Via Flaminia, Smollett arrived at the city, entering at the Porta del Popolo, “an elegant piece of architecture, adorned with marble columns and statues ... Within-side you find yourself in a noble piazza, from whence three of the principal streets of Rome are detached. It is adorned with the famous Egyptian obelisk, brought hither from the Circus Maximus, and set by the architect Dominico Fontana in the pontificate of Sixtus V. Here is likewise a beautiful fountain designed by the same artist; and at the beginning of the two principal streets, are two very elegant churches fronting each other. Such an august entrance cannot fail to impress a stranger with a sublime idea of this venerable city.” (Smollett, 222–23) The three roads that converge at the northern gate, the Porto del Popolo, are the Via Flaminia as well as the Via del Babuino and the Via del Corso, although a number of smaller streets also

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converge at the scene, which is now a plaza, and is known as the Piazza del Popolo. Smollett apparently missed the show, but it was not unusual to find condemned criminals on public display in the gate, often tortured for the entertainment of the citizenry. The obelisk Smollett described was moved to the Porta del Popolo in 1589 from its previous home at the Cicrus Maximus. The two churches—the Santa Maria dei Miracoli and the Santa Maria di Monte Santo, were erected in the 1660s by the architect Carlo Rainaldi. In 1655, Queen Christina of Sweden, who abdicated her throne after converting to Catholicism, arrived in the Eternal City on the Via Flaminia. She stopped at the gate to find it featuring a plaque engraved in her honor by the baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, with the words: “Felice Fausto Ingressui,” meaning “a happy and blessed arrival.”

C HA P TE R | S EV E N

Romantic Poets in Rome

The Eternal City played an important role in the lives of the three great poets of the Romantic age: Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Indeed, Lord Byron reserved a prominent place for Rome in one of his most famous works, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, while Shelley drew on his knowledge of the city’s history and its people while authoring his play, The Cenci. Certainly, Shelley’s dark story of a murderous Italian family does not rank among the poet’s most important works—few contemporary theatrical groups attempt to tackle the tragedy—nevertheless, the somber mood of the play can probably be attributed to the fact that Shelley wrote the tragedy shortly after the death of his young son. As for John Keats, the poet lived in Rome for just a few months before his death—hoping that the warm Mediterranean breezes would cure his tuberculosis. He is believed to have done little or no writing while living in a home at the foot of the Spanish Steps, the Scalinata di Trinita dei Monti. Sickly, melancholy, bitter over his treatment by the British literary critics and separated from Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved, Keats died in 1821 at the age of twenty-five. It is truly sad that while living 119

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in Rome Keats was probably too ill to write; surely, he would have been inspired by the boat-shaped La Baraccia fountain just outside his door as well as the sweeping vista of steps leading up to the Spanish embassy to the Vatican, erected in 1725 by the wealthy French diplomat Etienne Gueffier, who felt that the muddy slope on the west side of the Trinita dei Monti church was in need of a more agreeable mode of egress. Certainly, authors who saw the steps long after Keats died were impressed with the view and inspired to express their thoughts in words. Wrote H.V. Morton: As I looked down the long sweep of steps I could see the flower sellers at the bottom putting up their umbrellas, then walking over to the strangest of fountains, La Baraccia, the work of Bernini’s father, to refresh their carnations and maidenhair fern. I suppose the Spanish steps have given as much pleasure as any of Rome’s outdoor monuments. There can be few strangers who have not sat there on some sunny day, gathering strength for the ascent, and they remain in the memory, with that vivid splash of floral colour at their feet, as if they were one of Rome’s finest palaces. (Morton, 22)

Morton wondered what Keats would have thought of the steps. He wrote, “I cannot look at them without remembering that they were the last earthly sight upon which the eyes of the dying Keats rested as he glanced from the windows of the siennabrown house at the foot of the Steps.” (Morton, 22–23). Keats is buried in the cypress tree-covered Protestant Cemetery, the Cimitero Protestante, near the Gate of St. Paul just inside the city’s ancient wall. The cemetery is also called the English Cemetery. Just beyond the grounds of the cemetery is an Egyptian-style pyramid, about 118 feet tall, that is said to house the tomb of an ancient Roman magistrate named Cestius. Severn proved to be a devoted friend to the poet, nursing Keats through the final months of his life. Just before he died, Keats showed bitterness toward his critics when he asked that his grave-

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stone be inscribed with the words: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” Severn intended to carry out the poet’s last wish, but following Keats’s death a friend, Charles Brown, interceded, and instead had the gravestone inscribed with these words: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal, of a young English poet Who, on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone—Here lies One Whose Name was writ on Water, Feb. 24th, 1821.” (http://poetsgraves.co.uk) Above the inscription is a carving of a lyre with half its strings missing. The image was designed by Severn. SHELLEY AND THE CENCI

Percy Bysshe Shelley provided an equally heartfelt eulogy to Keats. His poem, “Adonais,” is a tribute to Keats and a defense of the dead poet’s work. In his preface to the poem, Shelley wrote: “John Keats died at Rome of a consumption ... and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space, among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” (Shelley, 484) In the poem, Shelly described Keats’s gravesite: Go thou to Rome,—at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds, and fragrant corpses dress The bones of Desolation’s nakedness Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread; (Shelley, 497)

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Alas, Shelley would join Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in just a year’s time. He was killed at sea, drowned during a storm on July 8, 1822, while sailing along the Italian coast from Livorno to Le Spezia to meet his friend, the poet Leigh Hunt. Shelley’s body washed ashore ten days later at Viareggio, where Hunt and Lord Byron burned the body on the beach. The poet’s heart was retrieved from the funeral pyre by a family friend, the British writer Edward John Trelawny, and given to Shelley’s widow, the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Under her husband’s guidance six years earlier, Mary Shelley wrote the horror classic Frankenstein. Mary pressed her husband’s heart between the pages of a copy of “Adonais;” years later, she took her husband’s heart with her into her own grave in Bournemouth on the southern coast of England. Shelley’s ashes were taken to the Protestant Cemetery where they were interred not far from Keats’s grave. Unlike Keats, Shelley had lived for some time in Italy before his death, drawing inspiration from the country and the city of Rome for several of his works. Born in 1792 and educated at Eton and Oxford—until he was expelled for authoring a pamphlet defending atheism—Shelley first married in 1811, taking as a wife the teenage daughter of a London coffeehouse keeper. Soon, Shelley found himself influenced by the anarchist writer William Godwin. By 1814, Shelley had grown weary of his first wife; he obtained a divorce and married Godwin’s daughter Mary, who was sixteen when she eloped with the poet. The Shelleys headed for the Continent, spending time in France and Switzerland—where, on the shores of Lake Geneva Mary wrote Frankenstein—and, finally, Rome, where they arrived in 1818. By now, the Shelleys were traveling with Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron as well as a number of other odd and eccentric characters. For Shelley, it would prove to be a most productive time. During this period, Shelley wrote some of his most important verse, including “Ode to the West Wind” and “Ozymandias.” But in 1819, the Shelleys’ young son William died. Grief-stricken, Percy and Mary left Rome, taking a home

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in Livorno where Mary could be consoled by her friend Maria Gisborne. Percy Shelley showed his grief through his work, writing the dark tragedy The Cenci. It is the story of a prominent and wealthy Roman family whose history dates back to the tenth century. One of the Cenci became Pope John X; four other members of the family were elevated to the rank of cardinal. In the late sixteenth century, though, the family was headed by Francesco Cenci, a man so evil that Pope Clement VIII banished him from Rome. It is likely that Francesco escaped much more severe punishment by providing sufficient bribe money to keep himself out of prison. In any event, under Clement’s orders Francesco moved his family to Monte Petrella near the village of Rieti south of Rome. Now, well hidden in the mountainous countryside, Francesco subjected his hapless family to the totality of his wrath, beating his wife Lucretia as well as his sons, Giacomo and Bernardo, and raping his daughter Beatrice. By 1598, the Cenci could endure no more and decided to murder Francesco. The crime was carried out by Giacomo Cenci, who with the help of a servant tossed the old man’s body over the wall of the family villa, hoping to convince the authorities that Francesco’s death was an accident. Investigators soon got to the bottom of the story and arrested the family members. Hoping to save himself, Giacomo accused the others of committing the murder. Clement VIII—seeing the opportunity to add the Cenci family fortune to the Vatican coffers—showed the conspirators no mercy, ordering the executions of all family members except Bernardo, who was considered too young to be put to death. His punishment was life imprisonment. He was also ordered to witness the executions of his stepmother, brother and sister. Indeed, even though Beatrice was regarded as an innocent victim of a cruel father, she was executed as well. She was held in the prison at Castel Sant’Angelo, which was built by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 A.D. The castle—which is also featured prominently in Puccini’s opera

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Tosca as the place where the heroine Tosca plunges to her death from the battlements—is just east of Vatican City, along the banks of the Tiber River. Wrote H.V. Morton, “She was executed on a September morning on a scaffold at the end of the bridge facing Sant’Angelo. As the beautiful head of Beatrice bowed to the headman’s axe, romance and poetry claimed her forever, and it is as La bella Cenci that she has continued to live in the memory of Rome and the world.” (Morton, 398–99) Shelley was taken with the story of Beatrice and engrossed by her beauty, having seen a portrait of the girl painted by the artist Guido Reni while she was imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo. Today, Reni’s portrait of the doomed girl hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, a national art gallery established in the palace of the Corsini family on the Palazzo Corsini along the Via della Lungara west of the Tiber River. In his preface to the play, Shelley wrote: There is a fixed and pale composure upon her features: she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lusterless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and sufferer are as the mask and the

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mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world. (Shelley, 302)

The Cenci family’s story did not end with the executions of Beatrice and the others. Beatrice was buried beneath the altar at the church of San Pietro in Montorio on the Via Garibaldi just below the Palazzo Corsini. The family’s home and lands in Rome were confiscated. The family home, featuring a medieval arch, is still standing on the Piazza Cenci, along the Via Garibaldi near the eastern banks of the Tiber. It is in private ownership. Shelley called the Cenci home “a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture,” adding that “one of the gates of the Palace formed of immense stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.” (Shelley, 302–03) CITY OF BYRON’S SOUL

During much of the time the Shelleys lived in Switzerland and then Italy they were accompanied by Percy’s longtime friend, Lord Byron. Born George Gordon in 1788, he assumed the title of sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale at the age of ten. Alas, there was hardly a family fortune to accompany so noble a rank. His father, a man with an insatiable appetite for rakish behavior, died when Byron was three. His mother entrusted young George to the care of gloomy servants and tutors who raised him amid the stifling atmosphere of Calvanism. To escape, the boy adopted an appetite of his own for debauchery. Byron also turned to poetry and literature, creating what would come to be known as the Byronic hero: the strong yet often troubled individual making his way through the world on his own. He left England in 1816 on the heels of a scandal and would never return. Byron joined the Shelleys at Lake Geneva, then accompanied them to Italy. Although he spent most of his time in Pisa and Venice, where he maintained an open relationship with the married Teresa Guiccioli, the Eternal City would leave a deep impression on Byron—despite the fact that he is believed

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to have spent a mere twenty-three days in Rome. Sitting at a marble table, Byron sipped English tea at the Caffe Greco on the Via Condotti. Mostly, his days in Rome were spent on horseback, seeing the sights as any tourist would, soaking up the culture and history. His brief tour of Rome was enough to inspire him to write extensively about the city in the fourth canto of Childe Harold, which he completed in 1818. Calling his protagonist “the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind,” (Byron, 203) the poem follows its hero on travels through Europe as he wrestles with guilt over sins of the past. In the fourth canto, the brooding and remorseful traveler arrives in Keats-Shelley Memorial House The home John Keats shared with the artist Joseph Severn is located at Piazza di Spagna 26 in the square that takes its name from the nearby Spanish Embassy. Formerly known as the Casina Rossa, or Little Red House, the building was acquired in 1906 by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, a group based in England and dedicated to preserving the home as a memorial to Keats and his fellow Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died in a shipwreck in 1822 near Viareggio. The Keats house has been converted into a library that includes some 10,000 volumes of Romantic literature. Inside, a lock of the poet’s hair has been preserved. So has his death mask, the wax rendering of the dead poet’s face. Visitors will also find an urn holding pieces of Shelley’s charred skeleton; after Shelley’s body washed up on shore it was burned by his friends, Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt. The house contains an extensive collection of paintings, objects, and manuscripts celebrating the lives of Keats, Shelley, and Byron as well as a manuscript and poem by Oscar Wilde, and first editions and letters by William Wordsworth and Robert Browning, among others.

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Rome. As he gazes on the ruins of the Roman Empire, Harold finds strength believing that his troubled spirit may stand as a “ruin amidst ruins.” (Byron, 224) Though the passage is dour, to be sure, during his brief stay in Rome, Byron was hardly the personification of his protagonist Harold. Evidently, during his visit he stepped down from the saddle long enough to pose for a bust by the sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen. During the sitting, Byron insisted on wearing a melancholy expression. Thorwaldsen protested, knowing Byron was attempting to adopt the personality of Harold. When the bust was finished, Byron was surprised to find that

During World War II it was feared the Germans would burn or otherwise desecrate the library as well as the other contents of the home, so curators made efforts to protect the collection by masking the home’s appearance—they removed the exterior plaques that designated the house as a museum of British literature, thus helping the house blend into the architecture of the neighborhood. The library remained on the shelves, but some of the most priceless items were stored in unmarked crates and hidden in a church in the nearby town of Cassino. Contents of the crates included the last drawing of Keats by Severn, first editions of Keats’s volumes Endymion and Lamia, locks of Keats’s and Shelley’s hair, and letters of Shelley, Byron, Leigh Hunt, Edward John Trelawny, Mary Shelley, and the Brownings. Following the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, the German Army established a defense at Cassino. The church was searched by German troops, but the crates containing the items from the Keats house escaped their attention; a church worker hid them among his own possessions. Following the liberation of Rome, the crates were returned to their home at the Piazza di Spagna.

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Thorwaldsen had rendered his image wearing something of a gay expression. Byron fumed, complaining that the bust didn’t look a bit like him but Thorwaldsen knew better. Wrote Morton, “The reader thinks of some sensitive soul weeping in the Forum and choking back a sob on the Via Appia, while all the time Byron was leading a healthy, manly life in the saddle, hastily and inaccurately observing the scene, but nevertheless soaking up out of the air, as it were, the essence of Rome.” (Morton, 61) Later, Byron was devastated by Shelley’s death. With no reason to remain in Italy, the poet left the country—although it was during this period that Byron wrote his most acclaimed work, Don Juan. Soon, though, the poet was drawn to the plight of Greek independence. Byron joined an army of insurgents taking up arms against the Turks. Arriving in the Greek city of Missolonghi, Byron helped recruit and finance a regiment. “I have a presentiment I shall die in Greece,” he wrote. (Byron, vii) That prediction would prove accurate. On April 18, 1824, at the age of thirty-six, Lord Byron died of fever. He is buried in Mycenae, Greece. GOETHE AND THE CORSO

The English Romantics weren’t the only writers of the era to find inspiration in the Eternal City as well as other cities in Italy. Charles Dickens wrote Pictures of Italy after touring the country in 1844 and 1845. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning made their home in Florence from 1846 to 1861, where Elizabeth died. George Eliot lived in Florence as well while Algernon Swinburne visited Siena in 1864. The American poet James Russell Lowell spent several months in 1851 and 1852 in Rome, writing Verses on Italy and Leaves from a Journal in Italy and Elsewhere. Herman Melville visited Italy. Nathaniel Hawthorne spent more than a year in Rome, where he started work on The Marble Faun. The German poet and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—known mostly for his masterpiece Faust—visited

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Rome well before all those authors, arriving in 1786. He spent two years traveling throughout the country, producing a book of poems titled Roman Elegies that celebrated his experiences in Rome—both cultural and amorous. Later, in his 1816 book Travels in Italy, he again told about his visit to Rome. During his time in Rome, Goethe shared a room with his friend, the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Goethe arrived in Rome on October 29, 1786, moving into room 5 at Via del Corso 18, which was owned by a coachman who took in boarders. Goethe has said that his time spent in Italy was the happiest period of his life—the fulfillment of a life-long dream. Indeed, upon arriving in Rome, he wrote these words: “Now, at last, I have arrived in the First City of the world!” (www.casadigoethe.it) His excitement was probably due in no small part to the neighborhood he chose: the Via del Corso had always been one of Rome’s liveliest thoroughfares; during ancient times, it was known simply as Via Lata—the Wide Street. In the fifteenth century, Pope Paul II decided to put a stop to the debauchery that marked the pre-Lenten Roman Carnivals staged in the nearby Testaccio district. He moved the carnival to the Wide Street, location of his Palazza Venezia, where he could keep a closer eye on the revelers. As for the street, the pope had it paved and renamed il Corso, which means “the avenue.” By the time Goethe unpacked his bags on the Via del Corso, the annual Roman Carnival had achieved something of a reputation for riotous behavior. Here is how Goethe described the street in his book, Travels in Italy: The Roman Carnival collects in the Corso. This street limits and determines the public celebration of these days. Anywhere else it would be a different sort of festival, and we have therefore first of all to describe the Corso. Like several long streets of Italian towns, it derives its name from the horse-races which conclude the entertainment of each Carnival evening, and with which too, in other

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places, other festivals, such as that of the patron saint or the consecration of a church, are ended. The street runs in a straight line from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Venezia; about three thousand five hundred paces long, and enclosed by high, mostly splendid buildings. Its breadth is not proportionate to its length, nor to the height of its edifices. The pavements for foot passengers take up on both sides from six to eight feet. The space in the middle for carriages is at most places from twelve to fourteen feet wide, and therefore, as will be readily calculated, allows but three vehicles at the most to drive abreast. The obelisk on the Piazza del Popolo is, during the Carnival, the extreme limit of this street at the lower end, the Venetian Palace at the upper. (Goethe, 519)

Goethe also found that the Corso is “one of the few streets in Rome which are kept clean the whole year.”(Goethe, 521) He witnessed balconies and windows decorated with tapestries, commenting: “The tenants of smaller houses and all children are in the street, which now ceases to be a street, and resembles a large festive salon, a vast adorned gallery.” (Goethe, 522–23) As for the revelers, Goethe reported that they dressed in colorful costumes and masks. “Here comes a Punchinello,” he wrote, “running with a large horn attached to bright cords dangling about his haunches. By a slight motion, while entertaining himself with the women, he contrives to assume the impudent shape of the old god of the gardens in holy Rome, and his insolence excites more mirth than indignation.” (Goethe, 523) At night, Goethe attended plays and operas just off the Corso at the Teatro di Roma Argentina—the Argentina Theater, which was built in 1732, as well as other theaters that have since fallen victim to one calamity or another. The great Tordenone theater, he explains, burned down but was quickly rebuilt, only to collapse. Sadly, Goethe observes, the Tordenone “no longer entertains the people with its blood-and-thunder tragedies and other wondrous representations.” (Goethe, 539)

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Goethe witnessed the horse races that concluded each day of the carnival; the masked balls attended by the gentry, commenting that when danced in Rome, “the minuet, in particular, is looked upon as a work of art” (Goethe, 540), and the raucous night-time candlelit ceremony and feast on the eve of Ash Wednesday that ended the carnival. Wrote Goethe, “Seeing that life as a whole, like the Roman Carnival, stretches far beyond our ken, and is full of troubles and vexations, we would desire that every one should with us be reminded by this careless crowd of maskers of the importance of every momentary, and often apparently trivial enjoyment of life.” (Goethe, 544) STENDHAL’S ROMAN JOURNAL

The French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle is the author of a wellrespected account of his travels through Rome. Beyle, who wrote under the name Stendhal, served as a diplomat in Napoleon’s government, but Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 spelled an end to Stendhal’s career in the diplomatic corps. Following Napoleon’s defeat, Stendhal settled in Milan where he remained until 1821 before returning to Paris. During his period in Italy he wrote history books and biographies, which were hardly regarded as literary achievements. His acclaim would come later with publication of his novels The Red and the Black, which told the story of a young soldier torn between his duty to the monarchy and the call for liberty, and The Charterhouse of Parma, a fictional retelling of how Alessandro Farnese of Rome rose to the papacy with the help of a devious aunt. Stendhal’s major work on Rome, though, was A Roman Journal, essentially a tour guide of the Eternal City chronicling the writer’s experiences in Rome from 1827 to 1829. It is more than just a guidebook for the nineteenth century tourist. At the time, Stendhal was down on his luck in Paris when a cousin suggested the project. Stendhal immediately saw the book as an opportunity to provide a lively eyewitness account of Europe’s most intriguing city that would delve into the history of Rome

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as well as his impressions of the people, the architecture and the culture. Years later, the University of California literature professor Haakon Chevalier, who translated A Roman Journal into English, wrote that readers at first accepted the book “as a diary of a cultivated man traveling in a pleasant company ... bent on getting the most out of a one-to-two-years’ visit to Rome.” (Stendhal, 13). The book, Chevalier wrote, turned out to be much more. “It was a circumstantial eyewitness account of endless visits, walks, conversations, encounters, receptions at embassies and palaces, full of anecdotes and adventures of all sorts, broken by a series of longish stories that foreshadow the themes of later novels. It was alert, informative, diverting; readers were convinced and delighted.” (Stendhal, 13) Stendhal took his readers around the city, providing vivid descriptions of the sights, smells and sounds of nineteenth century Rome. Typical was his description of the Colosseum. He started by giving a brief history of the Colosseum—built by the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus with the labor of 12,000 Jewish prisoners of war, completed in 80 A.D. “The world has seen nothing so magnificent as this monument,” Stendhal wrote, “its total height is 157 feet, and its outer circumference 1,641 feet. The arena where the gladiators fought is 285 feet in length by 182 in width. On the occasion of the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, the Roman people had the pleasure of seeing 5,000 lions, tigers and other animals put to death, as well as nearly 3,000 gladiators. The games lasted one hundred days.” (Stendhal, 33) Stendhal observed, for the record, that the bottommost seats in the arena were protected from the sandy floor by a very high wall, erected so that the lions and tigers could not leap at the spectators. He noted that the spectators at the contemporary bullrings he saw in Spain are similarly protected, and speculated that the Spanish got the idea for the design from Vespasian’s architects. Stendhal also took his readers up the Colosseum’s steps so he could share the view with them. He wrote, “One climbs the passageways of the upper stories by stairs that are in a fair state

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of repair ... On reaching the highest story of the ruins, still on the north side, you view, across from where you are standing, behind tall trees and almost at the same height, San Pietro in Vincoli, a church famous for the tomb of Julius II and Michelangelo’s Moses.” (Stendhal, 31) A Roman Journal moved on to describe the artwork that Stendhal saw as well as what he knew about the Roman masters—after examining Raphael’s skull, Stendhal made the observation that the painter was “very short in stature.” (Stendhal, 47). He delved into the history of the walls surrounding the city, noting for his readers that the walls stretch a mere sixteen miles, and that their construction commenced in 402 A.D. on the orders of the Emperor Honorius. He complained about bagpipe music that woke him at 4 o’clock in the morning, played on the streets below his lodgings by peasant musicians in a pre-Christmas ritual. “Nothing is so infuriating as to be awakened in the middle of the night by the lugubrious sound of the bagpipes of these people,” he huffed. (Stendhal, 105). He lamented discovering the rundown condition of the Forum, which was stripped of its treasures and desecrated during an invasion of Gauls in the eleventh century. By the time Stendhal arrived, the Romans were using the Forum as a cattle market. Still, Stendhal liked most of what he saw and never tired of his tour. “We feel a kind of passion for the renowned city,” he said, “no detail is too severe or too minute for us. We are thirsty for everything that belongs to the object that we are examining.” (Stendhal, 249) FLAMES OF NATIONALISM

While writers from England, France, and Germany were finding inspiration in the Eternal City, the era’s Italian writers were drawing their influence from events occurring elsewhere in Europe. For years, the cities and states of the Italian peninsula had been dominated by foreign conquerors. In 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy. The French easily overran the Italian defenders and in 1797, the Treaty of Campo Formio partitioned

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the country among the French and Austrians. By 1810, Rome was part of the French Empire although in 1815, the Congress of Vienna placed it under papal authority. Throughout Italy, the flames of nationalism burned within the country’s literary community. The writers and poets of the era called for a unification of the country under a single monarch. During this period, the city of Milan was regarded as the literary capital of the Italian peninsula; still, many Italian poets and writers spent time in Rome and drew inspiration from the Eternal City. The poet Vincenzo Monti lived in Rome from 1778 to 1797. Monti’s 1793 poem “La Bassvilliana,” tells the story of a French official named Hugo Bassville who arrived in Rome to promote revolution in the style that had just unseated the French monarchy. He was met by hostility on the Roman streets and killed by a mob. Monti’s poem denounced the revolution, depicting Bassville’s soul visiting the scenes of France’s Reign of Terror, describing in detail the murders of priests and execution of Louis XVI. Later, Monti’s poems and plays called for a unified, self-governed Italy. “The garden of nature,” he wrote, “is not for barbarians.” (Wilkins, 377) Another poet of the era was Giacomo Leopardi, who was born in Recanati, a town in central Italy near the Adriatic coast. He ached to leave Recanati and, at the age of twenty-four, finally made his way to Rome. He arrived in the fall of 1822 and spent just a few months in the city, fighting loneliness while finding himself hardly impressed with the scholarship of the Roman literary community. In the spring of 1823, he returned to Recanati. Later, he traveled extensively through Pisa, Florence, Naples, and Bologna. Leopardi is regarded as one of Italy’s greatest lyric poets. While much of his work centers on such classical poetic themes as the search for truth, love, and beauty, Leopardi was fervently nationalistic and longed for a united Italy. He wrote, “Oh my fatherland, I see the walls and the arches and the columns and the images and the lonely towers of our ancestors, but I see not

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their glory, I see not the laurel and the steel that our ancient fathers bore.” (Wilkins, 400) The most nationalistic Italian writer of the mid-1800s was Giuseppe Mazzini, a literary critic, translator, and essayist born in Genoa in 1805. He was also an agitator, calling for a unified Italy with Rome as its capital city. In 1830, Mazzini helped found the Young Italy organization, established while the essayist was living in exile in France. Young Italy’s goal was unification of the nation under a single monarch. It would be eighteen years before Mazzini set foot again in Italy; during his time in exile he supported himself by writing literary criticism. The 1848 uprising in Austria that drove Prince Metternich from power spilled over into Italy, where a popular insurgency in Milan ousted Austrian troops from the city. Revolution spread into other cities on the peninsula, but there were setbacks. For the nationalists, a unified Italy remained out of reach. Still, Mazzini returned to the peninsula and participated in an uprising that drove Pope Pius IX from Rome. For three months, Rome was a republic—with Mazzini serving as one of three governors—but French troops invaded the city and, despite gallant resistance led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, returned the pope to power. Unification would eventually come to the Italian peninsula. Indeed, the fires of Italian nationalism were kept aflame by Mazzini’s powerful words. He once wrote that his role is to ... tell our young people of the greatness of our fathers ... to instill in their minds the principle that only great virtues make great peoples; to educate them to constancy in the face of obstacles, to hope in time of grief ... to raise on high the banner of the liberation and the brotherhood of the peoples, and to infuse in Italy the desire to assume the leadership in that cause—all this is the sacred obligation of every Writer. (Wilkins, 427–28)

C HA P TE R | E I G HT

The Americans Arrive

The unification of Italy demanded by Giuseppe Mazzini and other writers was nearly a reality when Mark Twain arrived in Rome in 1867. By then, most of the country had been unified but Rome was still under the authority of the pope, whose rule was protected by French troops. The forces of the Risorgimento were led by the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. Twain hoped to meet Garibaldi, even pointing out in The Innocents Abroad, the author’s journal of his trip through the Continent, that his tour party was promised, “if practical, a call will be made ... to visit the home of Garibaldi.” (Twain, 19) Later, in The Innocents Abroad, Twain announced that the tour ship arrived off the coast of Livorno, the home of Garibaldi, but Twain elected to pass up the trip to shore. “We are surfeited with Italian cities for the present, and much prefer to walk the familiar quarter-deck and view this one from a distance,” he wrote. (Twain, 198) Evidently, the tourists who went ashore did get to meet the Italian patriot, but found themselves under suspicion of the police who believed the Americans intended to aid the patriotic cause. “A visit paid in a friendly way to General Garibaldi 136

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yesterday (by cordial invitation,) by some of our passengers, has gone far to confirm the dread suspicions the government harbors toward us,” Twain wrote. “It is thought the friendly visit was only the cloak of a bloody conspiracy. These people draw near and watch us when we bathe in the sea from the ship’s side. Do they think we are communing with a reserve force of rascals at the bottom?” (Twain, 199) And so, the greatest American writer of his generation missed his opportunity to meet Italy’s greatest patriot. Soon, Garibaldi would head south accompanied by 5,000 men. Garibaldi hoped to liberate Rome at the Battle of Mentana, but his forces were defeated by French troops. Another three years would pass before Rome became part of a unified Italy. In 1870, Napoleon III was forced to withdraw troops from Rome because they were needed for the Franco-Prussian War; on September 20, Italian fighters entered the Eternal City and, the following July, Rome was declared capital of a unified Italy. By the time Mark Twain made his trip to the Continent, he had not yet written the books that would define him as a satirist, humorist, and spinner of homespun wisdom. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper were all in his future. Still, at this point in his career his humorous stories had developed somewhat of a following among readers, due mostly to his story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, the Missourian had worked as a journeyman printer, steamboat pilot, silver miner, and journalist. He had a deep respect for human rights and, in his later work, would find himself questioning the oppression of minorities, even though he had briefly fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. There is no doubt, then, that even though Twain passed up the opportunity to meet with Garibaldi, he was with the revolutionary in spirit. In The Innocents Abroad, he constantly berated the Roman Catholic Church for what he perceived as its greed. He wrote:

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Where is the wisdom in permitting hundreds upon hundreds of millions of francs to be locked up in the useless trumpery of churches all over Italy, and the people ground to death with taxation to uphold a perishing Government? As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. (Twain, 202–03)

And so, it is with those thoughts in mind that Mark Twain paid a visit to the Vatican, setting foot in the center of papal authority and grandeur, the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. His first thought was to compare the seat of Roman Catholic authority with the U.S. Capitol, a building he knew to house a very different type of authority—one elected by the people. He reported St. Peter’s is about the same length as the Capitol in Washington, but somewhat wider. The dome of the church is also higher than the dome of the Capitol, he estimated, by as much as a hundred feet or more. Still, Twain was not impressed, huffing in his journal, “St. Peter’s did not look nearly so large as the capitol, and certainly not a twentieth as beautiful, from the outside.” (Twain, 213) Actually, Twain’s estimates were pretty well on the mark: The Capitol is fifty-six feet longer than St. Peter’s, but the church is 109 feet wider. The dome of the basilica is some 160 feet higher than the Capitol dome. Once inside, Twain admitted to feeling very tiny while standing in the immense building. He wrote, “To stand in the door of St. Peter’s and look at men down toward its further extremity, two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them;

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surrounded by the prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the open air. I ‘averaged’ a man as he passed me and watched him as he drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond—watched him dwindle to an insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him.” (Twain, 214–15) Twain looked up and saw workers removing flowers and other ornaments from the walls that had been decorated for a ceremony. The men were working too high up to use ladders; instead, they dangled from the balustrades and pilasters by ropes. “I had not supposed, before, that a man could look so much like a spider,” he observed. (Twain, 215) There has been a basilica on Rome’s most sacred site since the fourth century A.D.; work on the current St. Peter’s commenced in 1506, first under the guidance of Raphael. By 1547, the church was still under construction, having been redesigned by Michelangelo, who planned the massive dome and, of course, decorated the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was employed in this task by Pope Julius II; he spent some four years on his back atop scaffolding, paint and plaster constantly dripping in his eyes, complaining all the time about the low and infrequent pay. Twain paid great respect to Michelangelo, but can’t help but complain about his tour guide’s propensity for showing off the great artist’s work seemingly everywhere the Americans visited. Said Twain, “In Genoa, he designed every thing; in Milan, he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone to look at, and they showed us the stone.” (Twain, 227). Finally, Twain disclosed wryly, “I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.” (Twain, 228)

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Michelangelo finished the chapel ceiling in 1512 but died in 1564, twenty-six years before St. Peter’s dome was completed. Just outside the church is St. Peter’s Square—the Piazza di San Pietro—an enormous elliptical plaza built between 1656 and 1667. It measures 1,115 feet by 787 feet. The plaza features a red-granite Egyptian obelisk, fountains by Maderno and Bernini, and a 284-column, 88-pillar colonnade upon which rest the statues of 140 saints. The baldacchino that Twain described is the massive brass canopy that encompasses the high altar of St. Peter’s. Designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the baldachhino is bathed in light that shines through the dome windows above. It stands over the site of St. Peter’s tomb. To the right of the main altar is the brass statue of St. Peter, whose toes are kissed by Catholic pilgrims. Behind the altar stands the Throne of St. Peter; designed by Bernini, the throne is said to contain remnants of a wood and ivory chair owned by Peter. Climbing the stairs to the top of the dome, Twain continued to find himself awed by the dimensions of the church. At the top, he was overwhelmed by the view: From the dome of St. Peter’s one can see every notable object in Rome, from the Castle of St. Angelo to the Coliseum. He can discern the seven hills upon which Rome is built. He can see the Tiber ... About his feet is spread the remnant of a city that once had a population of four million souls; and among its massed edifices stand the ruins of temples, columns, and triumphal arches that knew the Caesars, and the noonday of Roman splendor ... (Twain, 215–16)

And yet, he found himself gazing at the Colosseum, and wondering whether there was much change between the days of the ancient Romans who fed Christians to the lions, and the days of the Holy Inquisition, when unbelievers were tortured and put to death in horrific ways:

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The beasts tore the victims limb from limb and made poor mangled corpses of them in the twinkling of an eye. But when the Christians came into power, when the holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the error of their ways by no such means. No, she put them in this pleasant Inquisition and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him—first by twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their flesh with pincers—red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by roasting them in public. (Twain, 216–17)

Later, after leaving St. Peter’s, he visited the Mamertine Prison, a dungeon where St. Peter was imprisoned. He was awed by the experience, but refused to believe that St. Peter made an impression in the dungeon wall by pressing his face against it, or that the saint’s feet made impressions in the stone floor. Looking over the evidence, Twain concluded that the face and feet were out of proportion. “The discrepancy confirmed our unbelief,” he insisted. (Twain, 217) The Vatican includes much more than just St. Peter’s. Twain went on to visit the museums, where he admired the paintings and statues. He toured the catacombs and found them fascinating. And despite the fact that he continually made no effort to hide his contempt for the Roman Catholic Church, Twain finally—albeit somewhat irascibly—extended a note of thanks to Pope Pius IX for letting him see it all: I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pictures, also—even of monks looking up in sacred ecstasy, and monks looking down in meditation, and monks skirmishing for something to eat—and therefore I’ll drop ill nature to thank the papal government for so jealously guarding and so

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industriously gathering up these things; and for permitting me, a stranger and not an entirely friendly one, to roam at will and unmolested among them, charging me nothing, and only requiring that I shall behave myself simply as well as I ought to behave in any other man’s house. I thank the Holy Father right heartily, and I wish him long life and plenty of happiness. (Twain, 240–41)

HENRY JAMES AND THE SPIRIT OF ROME

Mark Twain may have been the grumpiest American to have visited Rome, but he wasn’t the first. The American artist Benjamin West studied in Rome in 1760 before returning to the colonies. An American named Moses Ezekiel lived in Rome, where he befriended Franz Liszt, who enjoyed practicing on Ezekiel’s piano. The American sculptor William Westmore Story made Rome his home, and Henry James made frequent and—in contrast to Mark Twain’s experience—usually pleasurable visits to the Eternal City. Indeed, James harbored a much different attitude toward Rome, Catholicism, St. Peter’s, and virtually all other aspects of Roman life. Simply stated, Henry James loved Rome. He loved walking the city’s neighborhoods, observing its people, taking coach rides in the countryside and exploring the Eternal City’s many hidden features. He also loved writing about the people and their neighborhoods, albeit sometimes with gritty realism. He took careful notes of all his adventures, and published them over the years in a series of essays. Later, he would blend his memories of Rome into his novels. James visited Rome as well as other cities of Italy many times between 1869 and 1907 and unabashedly trumpeted their glories. He once wrote, “It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy—your education— nowhere ... I went reeling and moaning through the streets in a fever of enjoyment ... the effect is somewhat indescribable.” (Shetterly, 1) James was born in New York City in 1843 and educated in

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London, Paris, and Geneva. He was born an American, but would leave his native shores at the age of thirty-two, taking up permanent residence in England. A year before his death in 1916, James became a British citizen. He wrote extensively about Europe and how European culture affected Americans living abroad. His novels Daisy Miller and Roderick Hudson were based in part on James’s experiences in Italy. Here is how James described the working-class Trastevere district in Roderick Hudson: He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the sinister charm of it. As you pass from the dusty swarming purlieus of the ghetto you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse and yet your footsteps bring figures of startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but not a part of Rome seemed more oppressively historic, more weighted with ponderous past, more blighted with the melancholy of things that had their day. (Shetterly, 215–16)

That’s a gritty description of a Rome neighborhood, to be sure, but rest assured, Henry James had nothing but admiration and devotion to the Eternal City. One of his favorite places was the Palazza Barberini, which served as a gallery for the national art collection. The massive baroque palace at the Via delle Quattro Fontane and Via Barberini was built between 1627 and 1633—which was, given the era, an extraordinarily short period of construction. The palace was erected under the orders of Maffeo Barberini, who had been elected Pope Urban VIII in 1623. It was designed in part by Gian Lorenzo Bernini but other artists of the day, including Carlo Maderno and Carlo Borromini, also had their hands in the design. The papal throne room is decorated with the painting by the artist, Pietro da Cortona, Triumph of Divine

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Providence, one of the largest paintings in the world. Other paintings in the gallery include Filippo Lippi’s Madonna, El Greco’s Nativity and Baptism of Christ, Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and Sodoma’s Rape of the Sabine Women. The Barberini Palace has a very definite connection to the literary world through William Westmore Story, who maintained an apartment on the second floor of the palace. Story’s friends, the Brownings, were frequent guests. On one occasion, Story gave a party for children attended by the Brownings as well as Hans Christian Andersen. Robert Browning read The Pied Piper to the children while Andersen read The Ugly Duckling. The English novelist and humorist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, was also entertained at Barberini by Story. In a 1903 essay, “The Spirit of Rome,” Henry James recalled wandering through the palace gallery one day when he saw the British poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold, whose work he admired immensely. He wrote: I remember that in days, or rather on evenings, that now seem to me exquisitely dim, I met Matthew Arnold, for the first time, at the Palazzo Barberini, and became conscious then and there—more so at least than I had before—of the interesting truth I attempt to utter. He had been, in prose and verse, the idol of my previous years, and nothing could have seemed in advance less doubtful than that to encounter him face to face, and under an influence so noble, would have made one fairly stagger with a sense of privilege ... It was, on the Roman evening, as if, for all the world, we were equally great and happy, or still more, perhaps, equally nothing and nobody; we were related only to the enclosing fact of Rome, before which every one, it was easy to feel, bore himself with the same good manners. (Kaplan, 211)

And that is how Henry James chose to remember Rome— with the “sense of privilege” that he could stroll through Rome’s

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galleries and encounter the world’s greatest artists and poets or ordinary citizens with whom he could share the “enclosing fact” that all they had in common was Rome, and that was all they

Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters The drama Six Characters in Search of an Author was written by Luigi Pirandello, who was born in Sicily but, following his education in Rome and Bonn, established his residence in the Eternal City where he found fame as Italy’s greatest writer of the early twentieth century. In 1934, Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pirandello was a novelist and a playwright. One of his bestknown novels is The Late Mattia Pascal, about a hapless custodian who, while running from his troubles wins a small fortune at a casino, then reads in the newspaper about his death. Taking this mistake as a blessing, Mattia rents a room in Rome under an assumed name and falls in love with his landlord’s daughter, but finds it impossible to marry the girl because he has no papers to back up his identity. So he again runs from his troubles, faking his own death by making it appear that he jumped from a bridge into the Tiber River. Then, after a period of two years, Mattia returns to his old job as a custodian. Six Characters in Search of an Author tells the story of six members of a family who march into a theater and demand that the manager make them characters in a drama so that they may explain the crucial events of their lives. The play asks a lot of its audience—two of the characters are already dead when they enter the theater—which may explain why Roman audiences didn’t know what to make of Six Characters when it premiered at the Teatro Valle in 1921. Some members of the audience applauded politely while others greeted the final curtain with hoots of protest. Still, the play has endured and has found many venues for performances.

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really needed to have in common. Wrote James: “These sequences, these presciences certainly exist by the Thames and Seine and Hudson, but quite, as they become familiar, without making us thrill at their touch. Their touch (since we discriminate) is coarse; it was only the Roman touch that was fine— which is the simple moral of my remarks.” (Kaplan, 213) EDITH WHARTON TOURS THE COUNTRYSIDE

Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley settle in for a late afternoon lunch at a restaurant in Rome. These “two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age” (Wharton, 9) enjoy a panoramic view of the Palatine, the Forum, and the Colosseum. Mrs. Ansley knits and frets about missing a bridge game at the embassy; Mrs. Slade would rather stay and enjoy her lunch. She offers this insight: “I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travelers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street. They don’t know it—but how much they’re missing!” (Wharton, 15)

As the reader soon learns in Edith Wharton’s short story, “Roman Fever,” Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley harbor deep and long-lasting animosities and jealousies toward each other. Still, as the story heads toward its shocking climax, Wharton’s prose delivers a brief travelogue to Rome, providing details that her friend Henry James was likely to appreciate: Suddenly, the air was full of that deep clangour of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver. (Wharton, 15)

Later, James said Wharton is “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.” (Wright, 11)

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The American author Edith Wharton traveled extensively in Rome, using the Eternal City as a backdrop for many of her stories. In addition, Wharton authored many essays about her travels, publishing her accounts in Scribner’s Magazine. Booklength volumes of her Roman travel journals include Italian Villas and Their Gardens, published in 1904, and Italian Backgrounds, published in 1905. She also published essays and books about France and Morocco. Italian Villas and Their Gardens explored the country’s lush greenery, much of it cultivated by groundskeepers in the employ of Italy’s richest and most powerful landowners. For example, the book takes the readers just outside of Rome to the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. The villa was built in 1550 for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, a son of the notorious Lucrezia Borgia. Inside the villa, visitors will find frescoes and paintings by Correggio, Da Volterra and Perin Del Vaga, but it is the garden surrounding the lavish home that caught Edith Wharton’s interest: One looks down on the towering cypresses and ilexes of the lower gardens. The grounds are not large, but the impression produced is full of tragic grandeur. The villa towers above so high and bare, the descent from terrace to terrace is long and steep, there are such depths of mystery in the infinite green distances and in the cypress-shaded pools of the lower garden, that one has a sense of awe rather than of pleasure in descending from one level to another of darkly rustling green. But it is the omnipresent rush of water which gives the Estes gardens their particular character. From the Anio, drawn up the hillside at incalculable cost and labour, a thousand rills gush downward, terrace by terrace, channeling the stone rails of the balusters, leaping from step to step, dripping into mossy conchs, fishing in spray from horns of seagods and the jaws of mythical monsters, or forcing themselves in irrepressible overflow down the ivy-matted banks. (Wright, 67)

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Italian Villas and Their Gardens takes its readers next to Mondragone, a sixteenth-century palace in the hills above Frascati built for Cardinal Scipone Borghese, where Wharton found the garden dominated by sculpted “Borgehese eagles and dragons” (Wright, 70), and then to the nearby Villa Aldobrandini, built in 1598, and visited fifty years later by the English writer John Evelyn, whose Diaries were a major influence on Wharton. Quoting Evelyn, Wharton’s book reports that the diarist found behind the villa a high hill or mountain all overclad with tall wood, and so formed by nature as if it had been cut out by art, from the summit of which falls a cascade ... precipitating into a large theatre of water. Under this is an artificial grot wherein are curious rocks, hydraulic organs, and all sorts of singing birds, moving and chirping by force of water, with several other pageants and surprising inventions. In the centre of these rooms rises a copper ball that continually dances about three feet above the pavement, by virtue of a wind conveyed secretly to the hole beneath it; with many other devices for wetting unwary spectators. (Wright, 71)

The book ventures further into the Italian countryside, leading Wharton’s readers far from Rome. Still, it was the Eternal City that she appreciated the most. Indeed, “Roman Fever” was one of Edith Wharton’s final works of fiction, published shortly before her death in 1937. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S UNHAPPY NIGHT IN ROME

One of Henry James’s admirers was Zelda Fitzgerald, who read Roderick Hudson in the fall of 1925 while living in the French Riviera town of St. Raphael with her husband, the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Intrigued by James’s description of the city, Zelda and Scott decided to spend that winter in Rome. Alas, it would not be a happy winter for the Fitzgeralds. Scott Fitzgerald had just finished The Great Gatsby and felt emotionally

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drained from the work; what’s more, he was making one of his many attempts to stop drinking. Writing to a friend from Rome, Scott Fitzgerald said, “Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.” (Mizener, 179) Certainly, the Fitzgeralds didn’t spend all their time trapped in a drafty hotel in the Quirinal district. A movie company was in town filming Ben-Hur, and the Fitzgeralds spent most days on the set, where they made good friends with the film’s star, Carmel Myers. Still, they found Rome disagreeable; the warm and sunny winter they expected had, for most of the winter, eluded the peninsula. In addition, Scott Fitzgerald found doing business with the Italian people troublesome; it seemed that all the waiters and taxi drivers had to be bribed to provide any sort of service. One night, they were kicked out of a hotel room to make way for a Roman aristocrat. But that was a mild incident compared to what would happen next. “I’ve lain awake whole nights practicing murders,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote later. “After I—after a thing that happened to me in Rome I used to imagine whole auditoriums filled with the flower of Italy, and me with a machine gun concealed on stage. All ready. Curtain up. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.” (Mizener, 180) It seems that on one night of their stay, Fitzgerald had been drinking and found himself in an argument with a group of taxi drivers who were demanding an exorbitant fare to take him back to his hotel. The argument came to blows with Fitzgerald landing a solid punch on one of the fellows. The problem was, though, that the chap who absorbed the novelist’s punch happened to be a plainclothes police officer who stepped forward to resolve the matter. That resulted in Fitzgerald being hauled off to jail, rather roughly, where he was beaten again. Zelda and a friend came to the writer’s rescue, bailing him out by paying some very significant bribes to all parties involved. Indeed, Scott never forgot the incident but he was not one to

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let it go to waste, either. Recognizing in himself his own failing—he had deteriorated to the point where he was now willing to fight taxi drivers—Fitzgerald wrote about the incident in his novel Tender is the Night to show how the main character, Dick Diver, was self-destructing in a similar way. Here is the scene in the police station in which Diver absorbs the full fury of the policeman: He was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down, stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor. When Doctor Diver lay quite still a pale of water was sloshed over him. One of his eyes opened dimly as he was being dragged along by the wrists through a bloody haze and he made out the human and ghastly faces of one of the taxidrivers. “Go to the Excelsior hotel,” he cried faintly. “Tell Miss Warren. Two hundred lire! Miss Warren. Due centi lire! Oh, you dirty—you God— Still he was dragged along through the bloody haze, choking and sobbing, over vague irregular surfaces into some small place where he was dropped like a stone on the floor. The men went out, a door clanged, he was alone.” (Fitzgerald, 252–253)

Henry James never found himself in such trouble, and Mark Twain, grumpy though he was, nevertheless promised to behave himself in Rome, leaving one to assume that Scott Fitzgerald’s

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bad experience in Rome was of his own making. The Fitzgeralds never returned to the Eternal City. And during the next few years, authors from America and the other western democracies would find themselves unwelcome in Rome as well, as the clouds of fascism gathered over the city and war became inevitable.

C HAPTE R | N I N E

City of Romance, City of Mystery

R ome was liberated by the Allies on June 4, 1944, after enduring some two decades of Fascist and Nazi rule. A year later, Benito Mussolini was dead. Killed by partisans while trying to escape to Switzerland, Il Duce’s body was strung up by its heels from a lamppost in Milan. Italy suffered in World War II, losing some 150,000 of its soldiers to death on the battlefields. Rome recovered quickly. The city threw open its arms to Western writers, and they responded by flocking to what was now the capital of the Italian republic. By the late 1940s, Rome had become something of a literary capital as writers sought to rediscover the mystique of the Eternal City. “The city has its own language in time, its own vocabulary for the eye, for which nothing else was any preparation,” wrote Eleanor Clark, the wife of novelist Robert Penn Warren. “Those who stay in Rome, where nothing is single or simple and the aesthetic experience is always subordinate to something else, unless they are too handicapped to start with begin to change.” (Clark, 7) The Vassar-educated Clark, a novelist in her own right—her literary credentials included The Bitter Box—provided a travelogue 152

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to readers in her book Rome and a Villa. Clark took her readers throughout the city, touching on the familiar—the fountains, churches and ruins—but the unfamiliar as well. Along the Via Aurelia Antica, for example, Clark felt compelled to describe a public lavatory: The urinal here is the handsome kind with two compartments and the screens coming pretty well around, not one of the cheaper little open niches of the less important streets, where in any case just as much use is made of the corners provided by the irregularities of the buildings. (Clark, 35–36)

Few of the writers visiting Rome were known to go into that much detail; nevertheless, everyone seemed to be coming to Rome in the late 1940s and, evidently, they took their inspiration where they could find it. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AT THE BORGHESE GARDENS

Tennessee Williams arrived in late 1948, fresh from the premier of A Streetcar Named Desire. “That was the city of his dreams,” wrote the playwright’s brother, Dakin Williams. (Dakin Williams, 153) The playwright rented an apartment on the Via Aurora near the Via Veneto, close to the Villa Borghese and its extensive gardens. He gave lavish parties at his apartment, attended by his circle of friends, including the actress Anna Magnani, and his companion, a former sailor named Frank Merlo. Sometimes, Tennessee and Frank would drop in on Anna Magnani in her penthouse apartment. “Tennessee and Frank would have drinks on her terrace overlooking Rome and then she would drive them, along with her current male plaything, to some fabulous place for dinner, which would last for hours,” wrote Dakin Williams. “Then, with a bag of leftover food from the restaurant, they would drive around feeding the stray cats of Rome. After that, they would take her big black Alsatian for a run in the Borghese, stop

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for a nightcap on the Via Veneto, and finally Tennessee and Frank would watch her go up in the elevator with her young man.” (Dakin Williams, 172) Tennessee Williams was totally enthralled by Magnani, writing The Rose Tattoo with the Italian actress in mind. She turned down the starring role of Serafina Delle Rose in the stage version, fearing her Italian accent was too heavy for American theatergoers to bear, but would star in the 1955 film version of the drama opposite Burt Lancaster, winning the Academy Award for best performance by an actress. As for the Borghese Gardens, Tennessee and Anna found them on Monte Pincio in the northern part of the city. The gardens are located on the estate of the Borghese family, and they make up Rome’s largest public park. The gardens grew out of land occupied by the family’s vineyard and were developed in the early 1600s by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a nephew of Pope Paul V. In the center of the park is the Galleria Borghese, which Scipione commissioned to house his art collection. After unification, land speculators made generous offers to the Borghese family for the gardens, but the government stepped in and, after a long court battle, claimed ownership of the gardens, finally winning control of the sprawling lands in 1901. Since then, the property has been a public park, enjoyed by Rome’s citizens and visitors, Tennessee Williams and Anna Magnani among them. “The Borghese Gardens have a pleasant, regular life of their own, whose chief characters are children, dogs, and lovers,” wrote H.V. Morton. “Every time I went there I would see the same man with an Alsatian dog and a red rubber ball, the same nuns in charge of tiny girls in pink print dresses, walking two by two, and sometimes even the same lovers, seated on the grass or eating ices under the stone pines. On Saturday afternoons there was a popular Punch and Judy show near the lake, and how amusing it was to study the circle of small upturned faces. On Sundays young men would take their girls out in rowing-boats on the lake and scull in the direction of the Temple of Aesculapius.” (Morton, 77)

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A young writer named Gore Vidal was frequently invited to Tennessee Williams’s parties. Vidal would become one of the playwright’s closest friends, nicknaming Williams the “Glorious Bird,” a reference to Williams’s play, Sweet Bird of Youth. Although not yet a household name, Vidal had by 1948 published a bestseller, The City and the Pillar, which was one of the first books to examine homosexuality. In 1948, Vidal had been living in Rome for just a few weeks when he found himself invited to a party at the playwright’s home. Wrote Vidal, “That season we were, all of us, symbolically out of jail. Free of poverty and hack work, Tennessee had metamorphosed into the Glorious Bird while I had left behind me ... a lifetime of servitude. So it was, at the beginning of that golden dream, we met.” (Vidal, 152) Although Tennessee Williams was having the time of his life, it wasn’t a very productive period for the playwright. Indeed, his chief accomplishment during his time in Rome was completion of the short novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which told the story of an aging stage actress who, when suddenly finding herself a wealthy widow, travels to Rome in search of one last taste of youth. Williams elected to begin his story at the Spanish Steps: At five o’clock in the afternoon, which was late in March, the stainless blue of the sky over Rome had begun to pale and the blue transparency of the narrow streets had gathered a faint opacity of vapor. Domes of ancient churches, swelling above the angular roofs like the breasts of recumbent giant women, still bathed in gold light, and so did the very height of that immense cascade of stone stairs that descended from the Trinita di Monte to the Piazza di Spagna. (Tennessee Williams, 3) SWINGING, SEXY, AND SOMEWHAT SCREWY

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was adapted for the screen in 1961. It was one of several films made on location in Rome by

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Hollywood studios. Other films in the genre included Roman Holiday in 1953 and Three Coins in the Fountain in 1954. These films depicted Rome as a mystical place of romance where beautiful Americans on holiday could leave their troubles behind and, with mandolin music playing off-camera, find true happiness while gazing into their lovers’ eyes as the camera panned back to show the magnificence of Roman architecture. By the 1960s, the movies would present a much different view of Rome to Americans: The films of Federico Fellini, Carlo Ponti, and other avant-garde directors portrayed Rome as a swinging, sexy, and somewhat screwy metropolis where the stories didn’t always make sense but the stars—Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, among others—were nonetheless pleasing to the eye. The seminal movie of the era was Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita, which starred the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni in the role of Marcello Rubini, a young playboy journalist enjoying a life of parties and sex. The movie includes the unforgettable scene of the incandescently beautiful actress Anita Ekberg taking a knee-deep stroll through the Fontana di Trevi while wearing an evening gown. The film is also responsible for providing the word “paparazzi” to the language of popular culture. In the film, Rubini’s friend Paparazzo works as a celebrityhunting photographer. In Italian, paparazzo means “sparrow.” Fellini named the photographer Paparazzo because he thought photographers fluttering around celebrities looked like hungry birds. By the time Anita Ekberg took her dip in the Fontana di Trevi, the fountain was already well known to American readers and movie-goers, thanks to the film Three Coins in the Fountain as well as the book on which it was based, Coins in the Fountain written by the novelist John Secondari. The story of three American women searching for romance in the Eternal City is centered at the Fontana di Trevi, certainly one of Rome’s most famous landmarks. It is said that any visitor who tosses a coin into the fountain will return to Rome. Trevi Fountain is a stunning achievement. Commissioned in 1762 by Pope Clement

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XII, the fountain features snarling figures of sea horses and brash sea gods blowing on conch shells. As for the coins tossed in by the tourists, they are donated to the Red Cross. In the story, the character John Frederick Shadwell, dying of cancer, makes his way to the fountain: It was hard getting out of the car, but he made it with Battista’s help. Then he stood weaving and looking at the blurred image of the great fountain spouting water while his left hand groped in his pocket where he kept a store of quarters. He took one out and looked at it, then at the fountain. He drew his arm back and the coin sailed through the air while he followed the trajectory until it disappeared into the spuming water ... He heard Italian voices saying something about the “Americano.” But he didn’t particularly care; he had thrown his coin in the magic fountain and he would return. (Secondari, 122–23)

Alas, the book has been long out of print and the film version plays only occasionally on cable nostalgia networks, but the song from the film, Three Coins in the Fountain, won the Academy Award and has become a staple of easy listening radio. INSIDE THE VATICAN

Following World War II a number of writers wondered what was going on behind the closed doors of the Vatican. Henry Morton Robinson was among the first writers to explore a fictional account of the Holy See in his 1950 novel The Cardinal, which told the story of the rise through the church hierarchy of young Irish-American priest Stephen Fermoyle. A much more ambitious look inside St. Peter’s Basilica was undertaken by Irving Stone in his 1961 book The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo. The story is a fictional account of Michelangelo’s task to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Stone made up the dialogue, placing his words in the mouths of the troubled artist, the abrasive Pope Julius II, and the other

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characters, but he spent six years researching the life of Michelangelo and the Vatican before writing the story. Indeed, the appendix of the book includes a ten-page bibliography. While The Cardinal touched briefly on Vatican life and The Agony and the Ecstasy concerned itself with activities 500 years in the past, the author Morris L. West provided his readers with a contemporary look inside the Vatican with his 1963 book, The Shoes of the Fisherman. In the book, West provided a much different view of St. Peter’s Basilica than Mark Twain offered nearly a century before. Twain’s book was, of course, a travelogue, but it was spiced with his wry and caustic comments about the church and its architecture as well as its hierarchy. The Australian author West contributed a novel of suspense and intrigue that, nevertheless, gave his readers an inside view of turf within the Vatican where Twain never had the opportunity to tread. The book tells the story of the election of a new pope, a Ukrainian archbishop named Kiril Lakota. Early in the story, West explains the procedure: Early the next morning, all the Cardinals assembled in the Sistine Chapel for the first ballot. For each there was a throne and over the throne a silken canopy. The thrones were arranged along the walls of the Chapel, and before each was set a small table which bore the Cardinal’s coat of arms and his name inscribed in Latin. The Chapel altar was covered with a tapestry upon which was embroidered a figuration of the Holy Ghost descending upon the first Apostles. Before the altar was set a large table on which there stood a gold Chalice and a small golden platter. Near the table was a simple potbellied stove whose flue projected through a small window that looked out on the Square of St. Peter. When the voting took place, each Cardinal would write the name of his candidate upon a ballot paper, lay it first on the golden platter, and then put it into the Chalice, to signify that he had completed a sacred act. After the votes were counted, they would be burned in the stove, and smoke

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would issue through the flue into the Square of St. Peter. To elect a Pope, there must be a majority of two thirds. (West, 32–33)

West’s novel proved to be remarkably prescient, because in the year the book was released the Roman Catholic Church would suffer the death of Pope John XXIII, which required the College of Cardinals to go through the papal selection process, resulting in the election of Pope Paul VI. What’s more, West’s choice of a Ukrainian as pope was not as outlandish as it sounded. When West wrote the book, there hadn’t been a nonItalian elected pope in more than four centuries, but in 1978, following the death of Pope John Paul I, the cardinals elected the Polish Cardinal Karol Joseph Wojtyla as pontiff. Born in Melbourne in 1916, West joined an order of the Christian Brothers but left after twelve years to pursue a career as a writer. He wrote more than thirty books before his death in 1999, many of which have been based in Rome, including The Devil’s Advocate (1959), The Salamander (1973), Proteus (1979), The Clowns of God (1981), Lazarus (1990), Eminence (1998), and The Last Confession, which was published in 2003. In The Shoes of the Fisherman, West doesn’t keep Pope Kiril confined to the Vatican. On his first night as pope, just hours after his coronation, Kiril dresses in the cassock of a common priest and slips onto the streets of Rome: He ... plunged into the network of lanes and alleys between the Street of the Holy Spirit and the Via Zanardelli, and within five minutes the city had engulfed him. The buildings rose on either hand, gray, pitted, and weather-stained. A pale lamp glimmered at the shrine of the dusty Madonna. An alley cat, scrabbling in a heap of refuse, turned and spat at him. A pregnant woman leaned in a doorway under the coat of arms of some forgotten prince. A youth on a clattering Vespa shouted as he passed. A pair of prostitutes, gossiping under a street lamp, giggled when they saw him, and one of

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them made the sign against the evil eye. It was a trivial incident, but it made an impression on him. They had told him of this old Roman custom, but this was the first time he had seen it. (West, 83)

Tracing Kiril’s path through the city, the pontiff left the Vatican heading east. He walked down the Borgo Angelico arriving at Castel Sant’Angelo. Kiril crossed the Tiber at the Ponte Sant’Angelo, then made his way through the Pantheon and Navona district to the Via Zanardelli, where he found the Piazza Navona and the Fonatana dei Fumi. This is one of Rome’s most eclectic sections, populated by chic professionals as well as busy tradesmen and merchants. The neighborhood is filled with baroque architecture, Bernini fountains, sidewalk cafés, and street merchants, ranging from tourist-sketching artists to ice cream vendors. Outside the Palazzo Braschi, along the Via di San Pantaleo, stands a worn, armless statue of Pasquino, an ancient Roman tailor who won fame as the city’s jokester. Kiril finds energy and warmth in the city. When he stops at a café for a coffee and newspaper, he discovers that he has gone out with no money in his pocket. Embarrassed, he explains to the café owner that he can’t pay. An elderly city dweller steps in to pay, and Kiril responds to his kindness by telling the man that he is the pope—which the fellow doesn’t believe—and then offering the man a blessing. As he leaves the café, Kiril tells the patrons, “Tell your friends that you have seen me and that I didn’t have enough money for coffee.” (West, 86). Kiril then leaves the café, “oddly triumphant from his first encounter with his people.” (West, 86) SPIES AND DETECTIVES

A city offering the intrigue and mystery of Rome would not escape the eyes of authors of thrillers and adventure stories. The British spy novelist Ian Fleming brought his character James Bond to Rome in a 1960 short story titled “Risico,” which was included in the book For Your Eyes Only. Over the years, James

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Bond’s fans would follow the super spy across some of Europe’s most picturesque capitals, but Fleming was no fan of Rome. As a journalist, he had written some travel articles about Rome, making the same complaints about money-grubbing taxi drivers and waiters that F. Scott Fitzgerald had made decades before. “Italy,” Fleming once fumed, “is a race of Philistines ... the ordinary Italian, while loathing and despising all tourists, milks him with the minimum of grace and the maximum of money.” (www.mi6.co.uk) Still, Fleming brought Bond to Rome, where the British Secret Service agent met his contact, Kristatos, at the bar of the Excelsior Hotel on the Via Vittorio Veneto. Later, at the Ambassadori Hotel, Bond encountered the beautiful Lisl Baum, who told him, “I bathe at the Bagni Alberoni, where the English poet Byron used to ride his horse.” (www.mi6.co.uk) Other mystery writers would soon discover Rome as well. Nick Carter visited Rome in the 1973 novel Our Agent in Rome is Missing. Popular mystery author Herbert Lieberman centered his 1996 book The Girl with the Botticelli Eyes in Rome. British suspense novelist Daphne du Maurier set her 1965 mystery The Flight of the Falcon in the Eternal City. Like The Shoes of the Fisherman, Andrew Greeley’s 1996 novel White Smoke begins as the cardinals gather at the Vatican to elect a new pope; in Greeley’s version, though, murder, politics, and an international banking scandal soon dominate the story. And Patricia Highsmith chose Rome as the backdrop for a large portion of her 1960 psychological thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was adopted into a film in 1999 starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. Set in the 1950s, the story follows Manhattan lavatory attendant Tom Ripley as he borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party. At the party, Tom fools wealthy Herbert Greenleaf into believing that he knows Herbert’s wayward son Dickie. Herbert pays Tom to find Dickie in Europe and convince him to come home. Arriving in Italy, Tom finds himself caught up in the jet-set lifestyle, and plans to murder Dickie so that he can assume his identity. Early in the story, after Tom and Dickie enjoy drinks at a sidewalk café on

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the Via Veneto, the reader begins to realize what Tom has in mind: They caught a carrozza and drove around the city, past fountain after fountain, through the Forum and around the Colosseum. The moon had come out. Tom was still a little sleepy, but the sleepiness, underlaid with excitement at being in Rome for the first time, put him into a receptive, mellow mood. They sat slumped in the carrozza, each with a sandaled foot propped on a knee, and it seemed to Tom that he was looking in a mirror when he looked at Dickie’s leg and his propped foot beside him. They were the same height, and very much the same weight, Dickie perhaps a little heavier, and they wore the same size bathrobe, socks, and probably shirts. (Highsmith, 66–67)

Two enormously successful thrillers that touch on Rome are Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, published in 2000, and The Da Vinci Code, 2003. The Da Vinci Code, with more than 17 million copies in print, is based mostly in Paris but does take the reader to Rome for a portion of the story, which suggests that symbols hidden in Leonardo Di Vinci’s artwork provide clues to the location of the Holy Grail and a bloodline that can be traced back to Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Scores of critics have tried to punch holes in Brown’s theories, all of which has generated a flood of publicity and added to the book’s popularity. Indeed, in Paris, tourists are guided from scene to scene where they can follow Brown’s characters, tweed-wearing Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu, as they untangle the clues. Three years before Langdon tackled the clues in The Da Vinci Code, Brown had him follow a similar scenario in Rome in the book Angels and Demons. Langdon arrives in Rome as— once again—the cardinals are gathering to elect a new pope. In the book, a secret organization known as the Illuminati plans to blow up St. Peter’s and has hidden a bomb in the catacombs

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beneath the Vatican. Langdon and his ally, the curvy Italian physicist Vittoria Vetra, must race across Rome, searching for clues amid ancient symbols, to figure out the mystery and save the Vatican before the bomb explodes. As in the case of The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s fans have taken tours of Rome specifically designed to point out the places where Langdon and Vetra uncover clues in Angels and Demons. One of the most recent mysteries set in Rome is T.C. Van

The American Academy in Rome Whenever Gore Vidal worked on a book in Rome, he would often make use of the library at the American Academy in Rome. In his memoir, Palimpsest, Vidal said the academy’s library was particularly useful while he worked on Julian, his 1964 novel about ancient Rome. Vidal recalled that while working on the book he developed a duodenal ulcer. “A year’s diet and regular workouts at a gymnasium got me into fine physical shape,” he wrote. “Also, each day, I would walk across the Tiber and climb up the Janiculum Hill to the American Academy, whose classical library had everything I needed for Julian.” (Vidal, 407) The academy, located on the Via Angelo Masina, is one of several international schools established in Rome to support the studies of the humanities and the arts. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Denmark, Romania, Sweden, and Egypt have also established Roman academies for their citizens. Each year, thirty winners of the Rome Prize win scholarships to study at the American Academy. Prizes are awarded to winners working in architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation and conservation, literature, musical composition, and visual arts as well as studies in ancient, medieval, renaissance, early modern, and modern Italian studies.

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Adler’s sensuous 1999 thriller, St. Agatha’s Breast, which chronicles murder, theft, and suspicion at the fictional San Redempto monastery. The author—who writes under a pseudonym— painted a much different picture of the Villa Borghese than Tennessee Williams and Anna Magnani probably knew when they walked their dogs and fed the stray cats. Van Adler’s characters find drag queens and hustlers occupying the gardens. Still, Van Adler displays a genuine appreciation for the city’s charms. When one of the book’s characters, Father Brocard Curtis, heads to the library of the French embassy at the Palazzo Farnese along the Via Del Monserrato, Van Adler provides this lively description of the neighborhood: He turned his back on the tidy Vatican and crossed the Tiber to the chaotic historic district. The movement all around him was exhilarating: bands of tourists following the lifted umbrellas of their guides, the roar of the motorini arrogantly weaving their way through traffic, the smell of slow-roasting chestnuts and fast-moving women. A riotous, giddy backdrop to the terribly serious task at hand. He made his way over the bridge of the angels to the Via del’Orso, than took a shortcut he remembered from years before, past the uncontrollably exuberant little church of the Magdalene. Bejeweled and gilded, it was just as he remembered it, a celebration of the Magdalene before the fall, the courtesan who one day, but not now thank you, would give it all up for Jesus. So very much like Rome. (Van Adler, 43)

Over the years authors have found much to celebrate about Rome—the mystery and romance, the history and architecture, the ruins of the ancients and grandeur of the church or, even, the gardens in the city and its suburbs. In 1948, the Irish author Sean O’Faolain made his way to Rome to write his travelogue and, like John Frederick Shadwell in Coins in the Fountain, found himself drawn to the Trevi Fountain. He wrote, “Yesterday I performed, at my cabby’s suggestion, the ritual of

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throwing a coin into the basin of the great Fontana Trevi, because if one does so, he said, ‘On aura la nostalgie de revenir.’ It already seems unnecessary to have purchased the inevitable.” (O’Faolain, 135)

P L AC E S O F I NTE R E ST

VATICAN AND PRATI West of the Tiber, Vatican City is an autonomous state under the authority of the pope. Occupying half a squarekilometer of Rome real estate and with just 400 residents, Vatican City is the smallest state in the world. It has its own railroad stop, TV and radio stations and newspaper. It sends an observer to the United Nations, issues its own postage stamps, and is protected by Swiss guards. The surrounding neighborhood is the Prati, a bourgeois residential area dating back to the late nineteenth century. BASILICA OF ST. PETER

Piazza San Pietro • Tel: 06 6988 1662 www.vatican.va

Mark Twain thought the U.S. Capitol was twenty times more beautiful, but Stendhal was overwhelmed by the basilica’s “wealth of solemn splendor.” Morris L. West also appreciated the basilica’s grandeur. A basilica has existed on Rome’s holiest site since the fourth century; the current church was consecrated on November 18, 1862, by Pope Urban VIII. In addition to the basilica—which includes the famous Sistine Chapel—the Vatican also features the dome, which includes a 320-step climb to the top, as well as museums, the gardens, and St. Peter’s Square, where the pope addresses pilgrims at noon Sunday from the balcony of his study in the Apostolic Palace. Open daily. CASTEL SANT’ANGELO

Lungotevere Castello 50 • Tel: 06 681 9111

Built between 117–138 A.D. as a mausoleum by the Emperor 166

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Hadrian, Castel Sant’Angelo has served as a fortress, prison, and residence for popes. Castel Sant’Angelo is where Beatrice Cenci, the heroine of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci, was imprisoned and executed, and where the heroine of Puccini’s opera Tosca plunged to her death from the battlements.

TRIDENTE Location of the Piazza del Popolo, which Tobias Smollett rode past on his way into Rome, and the Via del Corso, where the Roman Carnival caught the attention of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Tridente marks the starting point for three of Rome’s most important avenues: the Via del Corso, Via Ripetta, and Via del Babuino. It is also the district where the poet John Keats gazed out his window at the Spanish Steps as he was dying. KEATS-SHELLEY MEMORIAL HOUSE

Piazza Di Spagna 26 • Tel: 06 678 4235 www.keats-shelley-house.org

Located at the foot of the Spanish Steps, the house is maintained by the Bristish-based Keats-Shelley Memorial Association as a museum of the Romantic era of literature. A lock of John Keats’s hair and remnants of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s charred skeleton are kept in the house, as well as a library of some 10,000 volumes of literature. PIAZZA DI SPAGNA AND SPANISH STEPS

Via dei Condotti, Via Due Macelli, Via del Babuino

The plaza takes it name from the Spanish embassy to the Vatican, where an imposing set of steps was constructed up the hill toward the Trinita dei Monti church. At the foot of the steps, visitors will find a boat-shaped fountain known as the La Baraccia. The fountain was built below ground level because of the low water pressure in the neighborhood. 167

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PIAZZA DEL POPOLO

Via Flaminia, Via del Corso, Via del Babuino

Located at the northern gate of the city, most travelers were greeted first by the plaza at Porta del Popolo as they entered the city. In 1655, when Queen Christina of Sweden arrived, she found the words “Felice Fausto Ingressui” engraved in the plaza gate, proclaiming “a happy and blessed arrival.” The obelisk at the center of the plaza was moved there from the Circus Maximus in 1589 by Pope Sixtus V. Adjacent to the plaza is the church Santa Maria del Popolo. MAUSOLEO DI AUGUSTO

Piazza Augusto Imperatore, Via Rieptta

The Mausoleum of Augustus once held the ashes of Augustus as well as the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nerva, but at some point the royal ashes were removed and lost to history. The mausoleum was built in the year 28 B.C. By the Middle Ages, the brick building was used as a fortress. Benito Mussolini had it restored, hoping that his own body would be laid there among some of Rome’s most illustrious rulers. British writer H.V. Morton called it “one of those miserable ruins which refuses to disintegrate.” (Morton, 304) ANTICO CAFFE GRECO

Via Condotti 86 • Tel: 06 679 1700

Lord Byron enjoyed sipping English tea at the café. Other literary figures who visited the café included Percy Bysshe Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Stendhal. The composer Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor, as were Casanova and Baudelaire.

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CASA DI GOETHE

Via del Corso 18 • Tel: 06 3265 0412 www.casadigoethe.it

The home occupied by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe while on his visit to Rome is now a museum. The Casa di Goethe features programs and seminars on art and literature, many centering on Goethe’s life and work.

VENETO AND BORGHESE Located in the north part of the city, the district includes the estate of the Borghese family, whose gardens make up Rome’s largest public park. The gardens grew out of the family’s vineyard, and were developed in the early 1600s by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a nephew of Pope Paul V. In the late 1940s, Tennessee Williams and the actress Anna Magnani strolled through the gardens at night, walking her dog and feeding stray cats. GALLERIA BORGHESE

Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5 •Tel: 06 32 810 www.galleriaborghese.it

Designed in 1613 to house Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s art collection, the gallery is found inside the Borghese Gardens and features an entranceway decorated with floor mosaics of gladiators in combat. Inside the gallery, visitors will find Canova’s portrait of Napoleon’s sister Pauline, the wife of Prince Camillo Borghese, rendered as a topless Venus. The prince was not amused, and ordered Canova never to see the portrait again. When Camillo confronted his wife and asked her how she could pose naked, she told him the studio was heated. The gallery also includes several statues by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

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GALLERIA NAZIONALE D’ARTE MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA

Viale delle Belle Arti 13 • Tel: 06 322 981 www.gnam.arti.benicultural.it/gnamco.htm Not all art on display in Italy is 500 years old. The gallery is Italy’s museum of modern art, displaying Italian art rendered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The museum also includes work by foreign artists, including Klimt, Kandinsky, Cezanne and Henry Moore. L’IMMACOLATA CONCEZIONE

Via Vittorio Veneto 27 • Tel: 06 487 1185

The Capuchin church displays some interesting art work—St. Michael by Guido Reni and St. Paul’s Sight Being Restored, by Petro da Cortona—but the church is known mostly as the location of a subterranean crypt where the skeletons of monks have been displayed in geometric patterns. Some of the bones have been fashioned into chandeliers and hourglasses. MUSEO NAZIONALE DI VILLA GIULIA

Piazzale di Villa Giulia 9 • Tel: 06 322 6571

Pope Julius III commissioned construction of the villa in the sixteenth century. It featured extensive gardens with fountains designed by Michelangelo. In 1889, the villa was converted into a museum that houses Italy’s collection of Etruscan art, including urns and jewelry that were fashioned hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. One of the most interesting pieces in the collection is the terracotta Sarcofago degli Sposi, a tomb created in the sixth century B.C. for a husband and wife; the lid includes a carving of the couple. The gardens include fountains, mosaics, and statues.

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CAFÉ DONEY

Via Veneto 145 • Tel: 06 4708 2805

Back in 1960s, the café was a favorite of Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, and others in Fellini’s circle. Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner were known to eat there as well in the 1950s.

PANTHEON AND NAVONNA One of Rome’s oldest neighborhoods, the Pantheon once hosted chariot races. In 1963, Morris L. West’s fictional Pope Kiril walked among the streets of the Navonna dressed as a common priest to meet the Romans whose lives he would now influence. The Navonna is one of the city’s most eclectic neighborhoods, where wealthy Romans share the streets with tradesmen and street vendors. TEATRO VALLE

Via Teatro Valle 23 A • Tel: 06 686 9049 www.teatrovalle.it

Regular performances and the occasional concerts are packed, particularly during the autumn season. Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author was first performed at the Teatro Valle on May 9, 1921. MUSEO DI ROMA

Palazzo Braschi Via di San Pantaleo 10 • Tel: 06 6710 8346 www.museodiroma.comune.roma.it

Once the headquarters of the Italian Fascist Party, the Braschi Palace now serves as the Museum of Rome. Built in the 1700s, the building houses the city’s collection of art and artifacts, including paintings, photographs, busts of the pontiffs, and costumes. Out-

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side, visitors will find a worn and armless statue of Pasquino, an ancient Roman known for telling the best jokes in the third century B.C. PANTHEON

Piazza della Rotonda • Tel: 06 6830 0230

One of the best preserved of Rome’s antiquities, the Pantheon was built by Emperor Hadrian between 119 and 128 A.D. as a temple to twelve Roman deities. The dome of the Pantheon includes the oculus, a thirty-foot opening that provides light for the temple as a symbolic link between the Pantheon and the heavens. The Pantheon contains the tombs of the artist Raphael and King Victor Emanuele II, the first ruler of a united Italy.

TREVI AND QUIRINALE Highest of Rome’s original seven hills, the Quirinale is the location of Italy’s presidential palace. The palace overlooks a section of the city whose picturesque streets and architecture date back to medieval times. At the center of the Trevi district, visitors will find the Trevi Fountain, the most famous of Rome’s many fountains. FONTANA DI TREVI

Piazza di Trevi Via Arcione, Via delle Muratte and Via Lucchese

Antia Ekberg went for a stroll in the fountain in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and Dorothy Maquire, Jean Peters and Maggie McNamara tossed their coins in and wished for love in Three Coins in the Fountain. Even without the help of the movies, the Trevi Fountain is a stunning achievement. Commissioned in 1762 by Pope Clement XII, the fountain features snarling figures of sea horses and brash sea gods blowing on conch shells. As for the coins tossed in by the tourists, they are donated to the Red Cross. 172

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PALAZZO BARBERINI—GALLERIA NAZIONALE D’ARTE ANTICA

Via delle Quattro Fontane 13/Via Barberini 18 • Tel: 06 481 4591

The baroque palace of Pope Urban VIII houses some of Italy’s most valuable state-owned works of art. The papal throne room is decorated with the painting by the artist, Pietro da Cortona, Triumph of Divine Providence, one of the largest paintings in the world. Other paintings in the gallery include Filippo Lipp’s Madonna, El Greco’s Nativity and Baptism of Christ, Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and Sodoma’s Rape of the Sabine Women. The American author Henry James recalled meeting British poet Matthew Arnold while visiting the gallery. GALLERIA COLONNA

Via della Pilotta 17 • Tel: 06 678 4350 www.galleriacolonna.it

Descendants of the Colonna family still live in the palace that houses the gallery, but the six-room exhibition hall is open to the public. The ceiling of the Great Hall is decorated with a massive fresco painted to honor Marcantonio Colonna, a naval hero who led the pope’s fleet to victory against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. The gallery includes Annibale Caracci’s Bean Eater and Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid. PALAZZO DEL QURINALE

Piazaa del Quirinale Via del Quirinale • Tel: 06 46 991 www.quirinale.it

Built in 1574 as the summer palace for the popes, the chapel, the Cappella Paolina, is a replica of the Sistene Chapel in the Vatican, but without Michelangelo’s ceiling. Concerts are staged in the chapel on Sunday mornings. The palace includes a very long wing that runs along the Via del Quirinale.

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TRASTEVERE AND JANICULUM Henry James described the Trastevere in his novel Roderick Hudson, which was read by Zelda Fitzgerald, who was inspired by what she read to visit Rome with her husband, the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds went on to have a miserable time in Rome. As for the neighborhood, it can be hardscrabble but there are also an abundant number of jazz clubs and bohemian artists occupying the flats in its warren of tiny streets and alleys. Just above the Trastevere is the Janiculum, one of Rome’s seven hills. PALAZZO CORSINI—GALLERIA NAZIONALE D’ARTE ANTICA

Via della Lungara 10 • Tel: 06 6880 2323 www.galleriaborghese.it

After Queen Christina of Sweden passed through the Porta del Popolo she established her home at what became known as the Palazzo Corsini, filling it with an extensive library as well as a collection of fine art. She also staged elaborate parties attended by Rome’s most distinguished citizens. The palace was later taken over the Corsini family, and eventually became home to some of Italy’s state-owned fine art. One of the pieces in the collection is Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, which inspired Shelley to write a play dramatizing the life of the doomed girl. SAN PIETRO IN MONTORIO

Piazza San Pietro in Montorio 2, Via Garibaldi • Tel: 06 581 3940

The church was built on the Janiculum, where St. Peter is believed to have been crucified. The church was built in the ninth century and redesigned by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1628. He added a staircase and chapel. The church contains the Guido Reni painting Crucifixion of St. Peter. Beatrice Cenci is buried beneath the church’s altar.

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AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME

Via Angelo Masina 5 • Tel: 06 584 6459 www.aarome.org

Gore Vidal and other authors writing about Rome have been found working in the academy’s library. The academy is composed of ten buildings on eleven acres atop the Janiculum; the main building was designed by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. Lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and seminars at the academy are open to the public. GHETTO AND CAMPO DE FIORI

Narrow cobble streets that served as headquarters of hat-makers, coat-makers, umbrella-makers and other tradesmen dominate the Campo di Fiori and the Ghetto, occupied by Rome’s Jews, who have maintained a presence in Rome for some 2,000 years. VENERABILE COLLEGIO INGLESE

Via di Monserrato 45 • Tel: 06 6868 546 www.englishcollegerome.org

When John Milton dined at the English College in Rome, its graduates were already being arrested in England where they were tried, tortured and executed. The school was founded in 1576 to train young British priests in the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but when they returned home to spread the faith they were persecuted by Anglican authorities. The school became known as the Venerable English College because of the forty-four priests who were martyred as well as 130 priests who suffered imprisonment and exile. PALAZZO FARNESE

Piazza Farnese, Via Del Monserrato • Tel: 06 6889 2818

Built in 1514 for Cardinal Allesandro Farnese, the palace’s original designer, Antonio de Sangallo the Younger, died before it was completed, so Michelangelo took over the project in 1546. Since the 175

PLACES OF INTEREST

1870s, the palace has been the location of the French embassy and is generally not open to the public, but tours in French can be arranged. T.C. Adler’s mystery St. Agatha’s Breast was partially set in the library of the palace.

MONTI AND ESQUILINO The Esquiline hill once housed the villa of first-century ruler Maecenas, who often summoned poets Horace, Ovid, and Propertius to recite their works. The Monti also has literary roots; the poet Juvenal made his home there, and constantly complained about his noisy neighbors. TERME DI DIOCLEZIANO

Via Enrico De Nicola 79 • Tel: 06 3996 770 www.archeorm.arti.beniculturali.it/sar2000/dicleziano

James Boswell was overwhelmed by the design and engineering the ancient Romans were able to employ to erect the Baths of Diocletian, which the Emperor Diocletian commissioned between the years 298 and 306 A.D. The baths covered two-and-a-half acres, and could accommodate 3,000 bathers. Some of the baths even featured hot water. Today, just pink ruins remain, although some of the surrounding bathhouses have been restored. SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI

Via Cernala 9 • Tel: 06 4880 812

The church built on the grounds of the Baths of Diocletian is dedicated to the Christian slaves who died during its construction. The church was designed by Michelangelo, who died before its completion. In the church, James Boswell saw the painting The Fall of Simon Magus.

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PLACES OF INTEREST

SANTA MARIE MAGGIORE

Piazza Santa Marie Maggiore Via Carlo Alberto, Via Merulana • Tel: 06 483 195, 06 483 058 www.prtour.it

James Boswell admired the marble columns in the church, which features a baroque façade. The columns are contained in the Sistene Chapel—the Capella Sistina—which shares a name with the famous chapel at St. Peter’s, but does not feature Michelangelo’s ceiling decorations. The marble admired by the British writer was obtained in the sixteenth century by Pope Sixtus V, who ransacked ancient buildings for the materials.

CAPITOLINE AND PALATINE The two hills of Rome contain some of the most ancient ruins of the city; the Palatine is where Romulus and Remus are said to have founded Rome; the Capitoline is where the Romans established the political, cultural, and commercial center of the ancient world. MUSEI CAPITOLINI

Piazza del Campidoglio 1 • Tel: 06 6710 2071 www.museicapitolini.org

Housed in the twin palaces of the Palazzo del Campidoglio and Palazzo dei Conservatori, the Capitoline Museums are among the oldest museums in the world. The collection was started in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV and opened to the public in 1734 by Pope Clement XII. The collection includes a second-century gilded bronze statue of Hercules, a third-century bronze bust of Caesar’s assassin, Brutus, and an eighteenth-century bronze portrait of Michelangelo believed to have been fashioned from his death mask.

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SANTA MARIA IN ARACOELI

Piazza del Campidoglio 4 • Tel: 06 679 8155

Standing at the site of the ancient Temple Juno, the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli is located at the top of an impressive flight of 120 marble stairs. It was in the church, on October 15, 1764, that Edward Gibbon dedicated his life to writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Established on the site in the thirteenth century, the church includes a gilded ceiling commemorating the Christian victory over the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In the chapel of San Pasquale Baylon, work was completed in 2003 on the restoration of a fresco painted in the thirteenth century by Pietro Cavallini. IL COLOSSEO

Piazza del Colosseo • Tel: 06 700 5469, 06 3996 7700

The Colosseum is arguably Rome’s most famous landmark. Built in 72 A.D. by the emperor Vespasian, the Colosseum hosted battles between gladiators plus other sports of the day, such as the mauling of Christians and slaves by lions. As many as 50,000 Romans could take in the action, and admission was free. In Henry James’s Daisy Miller, his doomed heroine raved about seeing the Colosseum by moonlight. A restoration project on the ruins was completed in 2001; visitors can walk out over a platform and look down on the shafts where the animals were kept. From the top rows, visitors can see a panoramic view of the city, as Stendhal did when he visited. ARCO DI COSTANTINO

Piazza del Colosseo

Henry James wrote of the romanticism of walking home at moonlight, beneath the Arch of Constantine. Standing beside the Colosseum, the arch was erected in 315 A.D., built to commemorate the Battle of Milvian Bridge, in which the outnumbered Constantine defeated Maxentieus. Tobias Smollett wrote of riding over the bridge as he entered Rome. 178

PLACES OF INTEREST

CARCERE MAMERTINO

Clivio Argentario 1 • Tel: 06 679 2902

The Mamertine Prison was an underground dungeon located near the Roman Forum at the bottom of steps that led up the Capitoline. After starving to death, the prisoners were thrown into the city’s sewer system. A plaque in the dungeon says the prison held Saints Peter and Paul, and that Peter pressed his forehead against a stone wall, leaving an impression. Mark Twain visited the dungeon, finding that story hard to believe; still, he found himself awestruck by the experience. Peter is also said to have caused a well to rise up from the dungeon floor, which he used to baptize the prison guards. FORO ROMANO

Entrances from the largo Romolo e Remo, Via dei Fori Imperiali, Piazza del Colosseo and Via Foro Romano • Tel: 06 699 0110

Even when Edward Gibbon toured the scene in 1764, little but a handful of columns remained of the Roman Forum, but visitors can see the layout of the floors and imagine for themselves how the forum bustled with senators, soldiers, and spies during the era when Rome ruled the world. The forum begins at the Arch of Septimius Severus, which was built in 203 A.D. and is still intact. Just beyond the arch are the remains of the imperial rosta, where Roman leaders spoke to the citizens. The rosta is where William Shakespeare had Mark Antony make his famous speech about burying but not praising Caesar. There are also some remains of the Temple of Divus Julius, where Caesar’s body was cremated.

AVENTINE AND TESTACCIO The literary roots of the Aventino and Testaccio are longstanding; Cicero rented rooms in the Aventine while in the Testaccio, Romantic poets Keats and Shelley found their final resting places.

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PLACES OF INTEREST

CIMITERO ACATTOLICO

Via Caio Cestio 6 • Tel: 06 574 1900

The body of John Keats and the ashes of Percy Bysshe Shelley are buried under the cypress trees in the Protestant Cemetery, sometimes known as the English Cemetery. Keats wrote his own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” It was meant as an attack on British literary critics, but after his death friends interceded and a more fitting message was inscribed on his gravestone. Also buried in the cemetery are Keats’s friend, the artist Joseph Severn, as well as Goethe’s son Julius, and Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party. MONTE TESTACCIO

Via Zabaglia 24

One of Rome’s most curious sites, the “Hill of the Shards” is a pile of broken and crumbling earthenware jars covered by a layer of soil and plants. It is likely that Romans tossed their broken pottery onto the pile between A.D. 14 and 255.

CELIO AND SAN GIOVANNI Located in the south of Rome, the Celio is one of the seven hills of the Eternal City while San Gionvanni is largely a residential area of apartment buildings. SAN GREGARIO MAGNO

Piazza di San Gregario 1 • Tel: 06 700 8227

The baroque church was built in 1633 on the site where St. Augustine departed Rome in the sixth century for Britain with the mission of converting the heathens to Christianity. The church also contains the tomb of Sir Edward Carne, the Tudor diplomat who attempted to persuade the pope to annul the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragaon so the king could marry Anne Boleyn. 180

PLACES OF INTEREST

SCALA SANTA

Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano 8 • Tel: 06 772 6641

Know as the Holy Stairs, Jesus is said to have ascended the stone steps to Pontius Pilate’s house before his crucifixion. The steps were brought to Rome from Jerusalem by St. Helena in the fourth century. Throughout history, thousands of pilgrims have walked up the steps.

181

WO R KS C ITE D

Adington, Richard. Translator. The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. New York: Dell Publishing, 1972. Brady, Frank, and Frederick A. Pottle. Editors. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955. Clark, Eleanor. Rome and a Villa. New York: Atheneum, 1961. De Beer, Gavin. Gibbon and His World. New York: Viking Press, 1968. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. Gibbon, Edward. Memoirs of My Life. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984. Kaplan, Fred. Editor. Traveling in Italy with Henry James. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994. Lord Byron. The Works of Lord Byron. Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994. Mann, Thomas. Editor. The Permanent Goethe. New York: Dial Press, 1948. Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965. Morton, H.V. A Traveller in Rome. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002. O’Faolain, Sean. A Summer in Italy. New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1950. Orgel, Stephen, and Jonathan Goldberg. Editors. John Milton. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991. Secondari, John H. Coins in the Fountain. Garden City, New York: Permabooks, 1953.

182

WORKS CITED

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Shetterly, Anya. Romewalks. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994. Smollett, Tobias. Travels Through France and Italy. London: John Lehman Ltd., 1949. Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. New York: Library of America, 1984. Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1995. Wharton, Edith. Roman Fever and Other Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. A History of Italian Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Williams, Dakan, and Shepherd Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Williams, Tennessee. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. New York: New Directions Bibelot, 1993. Wright, Sarah Bird. Editor. Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

183

F U RTH E R R EAD I N G

Black, Jeremy. Italy and the Grand Tour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile. Editors. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Brown, Dan. Angels and Demons. New York: Pocket Books, 2000. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Cahill, Susan. Editor. The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers. New York: Ballantine, 2005. Cary, M. and H.H. Scullard. A History of Rome: Down to the Reign of Constantine. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1976. Chaney, Edward. The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and “The Voyage of Italy” in the Seventeenth Century. Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 1985. Cornell, Tim. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (C. 1000–264 B.C.). New York: Routledge, 1995. Donadoni, Eugenio. A History of Italian Literature. New York: New York University Press,1969. Edwards, Catharine. Editor. Lives of the Caesars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Le Glay, Marcel, et al. A History of Rome. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Modern Library, 2005. Grant, Michael. History of Rome. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978. Graves, Robert. Translator. The Twelve Caesars. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. 184

FURTHER READING

Hainsworth, Peter, and David Robey. Editors. The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hanley, Anne. Editor. Time Out: Rome. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Henry James. Daisy Miller. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1986. Henry James. Roderick Hudson. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1935. Jarrett, Derek. “Guilt-Edged Insecurity: The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell.” The New York Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 7, April 26, 1990. Livy, Titus. Livy: The Early History of Rome. (translated by Aubrey De Selincourt). New York: Penguin, 2002. Marcus, Millicent. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Nugent, Thomas. The Grand Tour: Or, a Journey Through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France. London: Ganesha Publishing, 2004. Rendina, Claudio. The Vatican: History and Treasures. (translated by Daniela Peressini). Italy: Magnus Edizioni, 1997. Robinson, Henry Morton. The Cardinal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961. Varriano, John. A Literary Companion to Rome. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Weaver, William. Editor. Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Italia, 1999. Welcher, Jeanne K. John Evelyn. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

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FURTHER READING

WEBSITES American Academy in Rome

www.aarome.org Goethe on the Corso

www.casadigoethe.it Literary Rome

www.stanford.edu/~evans/literary%20rome/index/Index.htm Rome Tourist Board, Azienda di Promozione Turistica di Roma

www.romaturismo.com UNRV History – Roman Empire

www.unrv.com

186

I N D EX

Abitato, 8 “Adonais,” (Shelley), 20–21, 121 Adventures of Roderick Random, The, (Smollett), 115 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The, (Twain), 137 Aeneid, (Virgil), 15–16, 29, 76 Africanus, Scipio, 18–19 Agony and Ecstasy, The: A Novel of Michelangelo, (Stone), 157–158 Alberti, Leon Battista, 78–79 Alcuin, 1, 50, 53 Alexander VI, 84–88 Allen, William, (Cardinal), 113 American Academy in Rome, 163 Andersen, Hans Christian, 144 Andrieux, Maurice, 55, 63–64 Angels and Demons, (Brown), 162–163 Anthony, Mark, 23 Antony and Cleopatra, (Shakespeare), 23 Apollo Belvedere, (statue), 92 Apollo and Daphne, (Bernini), 6 Apology, (Tertullian), 49 Apostles’ relics, 1 Aqua Virgo, 56 Architecture, On, (Vitruvius), 13 Area Sacra, 22 Aretino, Pietro, 100 Ariosto, Ludovico, 96–97 Arnold, Matthew, 144 As the Romans Do, (Epstein), 44 Augustus, (Emperor), 2, 19, 24, 28, 83 Barberini Palace, 144

Barkan, Leonard, 73 Barnes, Barnabe, 85 Baths of Caracalla, 38 Baths of Diocletian, 5–6 Batoni, 105, 106 Bede, 41, 50 Bellini, 92 Bernini, G.L., 2, 6, 8, 67, 82, 101, 118, 140, 143 Bicycle Thief, The, (film), De Sica, 4 Biondo, Flavio, 70, 79 Birth of Aphrodite, (painting), 6 Bitter Box, The, (Clark), 152–153 Boccaccio, F.G., 60 Book of the Courtier, (Castiglione), 95 Book of Margery Kempe, The, (Kempe), 75 Borghese Gardens, 153, 154 Borromini, Carlo, 143 Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, (Boswell), 103–104 Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765-1766, (Boswell), 103–104 Boswell, James, 103–105 Bowen, Elizabeth, 44 Bracciolini, Poggio, 75–76 Bramante, 91, 94 Brentano, Robert, 57–59 Brodsky, Joseph, 26 Brown, Dan, 162 Browning, Elizabeth, 128, 144 Browning, Robert, 128, 144 Bruno, Giordano, 86 Brutus, Junius, 18 187

INDEX

Byron, Lord, 6, 41, 119, 122, 125–128 Caesar, 19, 22–23, 37, 76 Camillus, 19 Campus Martius, 15 Capgrave, John, 75 Capitoline, 26 Caravaggio, 2, 26, 82 Cardinal, The, (Robinson), 157, 158 Carta telefonica, 4 Carter, Nick, 161 Castel Sant’Angelo, 86, 87, 98 Castiglione, Baldessare, 95 Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The, (Twain), 137 Cellini, B., 98–99 Cenci, (play), Shelley, 119, 123 Charterhouse of Parma, The, (Stendhal), 131 Chastel, Andre, 99 Chevalier, Haakon, 132 “Child Harold’s Pilgrimage,” (Byron), 6–7, 119, 126–127 Christendom, 1 Christian Rome, 33–34 Christian symbols, 40 Christ Passion, 39 Chrysoloras, Manuel, 74 Cicero, 13, 16, 18, 24 Circus Maximus, 28–29, 44, 118 City of God, (St. Augustine), 41–42 City and the Pillar, The, (Vidal), 155 Civilization and Its Discontents, (Freud), 36 Clark, Eleanor, 27, 28, 91, 152–153 Claudius, I, (Graves), 37 Clement VII, 97–101 Clivio Rocca Savella, 45 Cloaca Maxima, 18 Clowns of God, The, (West), 159 Coins in a Fountain, (Secondari), 156, 164 Collins, Amanda, 66

Colosseum, 4, 5, 34, 36–37, 44 Comedy of Errors, A, (Shakespeare), 23 Commentaries, (Pius II), 79–80 Companion Guide, (Masson), 42–43 Condivi, Ascanio, 93 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A, (Twain), 137 Constantine, (Emperor), 39, 40–41, 116–117 Constantinople, (New Rome), 40–41, 79 Conversion of Saint Paul, (Painting), Caravaggio, 2 Corinth, 20 Coriolanus, (Shakespeare), 19, 23 Cortona, Pietro da, 143–144 Counter-Reformation, 2, 101 Court Life, (Aretino), 100 Crucifixion of Saint Peter, (Painting), Caravaggio, 2 Cymbeline, (Shakespeare), 23 Daisy Miller, (James), 5, 6, 143 Dante, 9, 61, 62 Da Vinci Code, The, (Brown), 162, 163 Decameron, (Boccaccio), 60 Decay, 54–59 Decline and fall of the Empire, 38 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The, (Gibbon), 48, 110 De Sica, Vittorio, 4 Devil’s Advocate, The, (West), 159 Devil’s Charter, The, (Barnes), 85 Diaries, (Evelyn), 148 Dickens, Charles, 40, 128 Diocletian, (Emperor), 39, 40 Diocletian’s Baths, 104–105 Discussions, The, (Aretino), 100 Divine Comedy, (Dante), 61 Doctor Faustus, (Marlowe), 24–25 Don Juan, (Byron), 128 “Dum simulacra,” (Lavardin), 54

188

INDEX

Eachard, Laurance, 107 Ecstasy, of Beata Ludovica Albertoni, (sculpture), 67 Edwards, Catharine, 29, 37 Egyptian obelisk, 2 Ekberg, Anita, 7, 156 El Greco, 144 Eliot, George, 26–27, 128 Eminence, (West), 159 English College, 113 Ennius, 21 Epoque cafes, 8 Epstein, Alan, 44–45 Etruscans, 19 Eugenius IV, (Pope), 70 Evelyn, John, 148 Ezekiel, Moses, 142 Fall of Simon Magus, The, (painting), Batoni, 105–106 Faust, (Goethe), 128–129 Fellini, F., 7, 156 Fire, (64), 36 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 148–151, 161 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 148, 149 Fiumicino Airport, 2–3 Flags, 4 Fleming, Ian, 160, 161 Fleming, Robert, 83, 84 Flight of the Falcon, The, (Maurier), 161 Flood of 1557, 3 Fontana, 8 Forests, 15 Forum Romanum for Mr. Soane’s Museum, (painting), 48 For Your Eyes Only, (Fleming), 160 Founding of the city, On the, (Livy), 15, 17–18 Frankenstein, (M. Shelley), 122 Freedberg, Sydney, 92 Frescoes, 92, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 36 Frugoni, Chiara, 33

Fuseli, Henry, 26 Garibaldi, G., 136, 137 Geneva Bible, 32 Geography, (Strabo), 20 Gibbon, Edward, 38, 48, 106–110 Girl with the Botticelli Eyes, The, (Lieberman), 161 Gladiator, (movie), 38 Godwin, William, 122 Goethe, J.W., 2, 6, 128–131 Golden Age, 32 Golden House, 35, 38 Gothic Wars, 50–51 Gracchi brothers, 19 Grandazzi, Alexandre, 14, 15 Grand Tour, 102–103 Grand Tour, The, (Nugent), 102–103, 106 Graves, Robert, 37 Great Gatsby, The, (Fitzgerald), 148–149 Greater Than the Emperor, (Collins), 66 Greece, 19 Greek New Testament, 33–34 Greeley, Andrew, 161 Gregorovius, F., 51, 52 Gregory I, (Pope), 49 Gunn, Thom, 82 Hadrian, (Emperor), 47 Hamlet, (Shakespeare), 23 Hardy, Thomas, 28 Hare, Augustus, 68 Hawthorne, N., 27, 47, 128 Hazlitt, William, 22 Hebrew Bible, 33–34 Hetherington, Paul, 51, 52 Highsmith, Patricia, 161 Hills, 24–30, 32, 33, 55 Hippolytus, (Seneca), 83 History of Italy, (Thomas), 46–47 189

INDEX

History of the Latin Roman Empire, (Eachard), 107 Hobbes, Thomas, 28 Holy stairs, 34 Horace, 10 Hostaria dell’Orso, 9 Hunt, Leigh, 122 Il Gesu, 8 Imerpial Age, 27–28 Inferno, (Dante), 61–62, 63 Innocents Abroad, (Twain), 136 Innocent X, (painting), Velazquez, 8 Italian Backgrounds, (Wharton), 147 Italian Hours, (James), 5 Italian Villas and Their Gardens, (Wharton), 147, 148 James Bond, (movies), 160–161 James, Henry, 5, 6, 142–146, 148, 150–151 Jerusalem, 33 Jews of Renaissance Rome, 8 Johnson, Samuel, Dr., 104 Julian, (Vidal), 163 Julian Forum, 24 Julius Caesar, (Shakespeare), 23 Julius Exclusus, (Erasmus), 90 Julius II, 88–91, 94, 133 Keats, John, 20, 119–121 Keats-Shelley Memorial House, 126–127 Kempe, Margery, 75 King Solomon’s Temple, 33 King Tarquinius Superbus, 25–26 “La Bassvilliana,” (Monti), 134 La Dolce Vita, (film), Fellini, 7, 156 Lancaster, Burt, 154 Laocoon, (statue), 92 Last Apocalypse, The: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D., (Reston), 58 Last Confession, The, (West), 159

Last Judgment, The, (Michelangelo), 93 Late Mattia Pascal, The, (Pirandello), 145 Latin Law, (lex latina), 19 Latium, 15 Lavardin, Hildebert de, 53–54 Lazarus, (West), 159 Leaves from a Journal in Italy and Elsewhere, (Lowell), 128 Leavitt, David, 33 Leopardi, Giacomo, 134–135 Leo I, (Pope), 38 Leo, IV, (Pope), 52 Leo X, 95–97 Lessels, Richard, 102 Letter to Posterity, (Petrarch), 72 Letters from Pontus, (Ovid), 30 Lieberman, Herbert, 161 Life of Samuel Johnson, The, (Boswell), 104 Lippi, Filippo, 144 Lives of the Caesars, The, (Suetonius), 37 Livy, 15, 17–18, 25–26 Lowell, James R., 128 Lycidas, (Milton), 111–112 Macbeth, (Shakespeare), 23 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 84, 85, 90 Maderno, Carlo, 143 Madonna, (painting), Lippi, 144 Madonna of Foligno, (Raphael), 92 Magnani, Anna, 153, 154, 164 Manfred, (Byron), 6 Marble Faun, The, (Hawthorne), 27, 128 Marcellinus, Ammianus, 25 Marlowe, Christopher, 24 Marvels of Rome, (guidebook), 49 Masson, Georgina, 42–43 Mastroianni, Marcello, 7, 156 Maurier, Daphne du, 161 Maxentius, 116–117 190

INDEX

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 135, 136 Medieval Rome, 46–69 Medieval Rome, (Hetherington), 51 “Meditations at Tivoli,” (Fleming), 83, 84 Melville, Herman, 128 Memoirs of My Life, (Gibbon), 109 Metropolitana, (subway system), 4 Michelangelo, 10, 26, 32, 38, 91, 92, 93, 105, 139, 140 Middle Ages, 1, 21, 32, 34, 40, 43 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, (Shakespeare), 23 Milton, John, 111–114 Montaigne, 9 Monte Testaccio, 21 Monti, Vincenzo, 134 Monumental city, 1 Morton, H. V., 7–8, 26, 109–110, 113, 120, 124, 128, 154 Moses, (sculpture), Michelangelo, 38, 133 Motorists, 2 Mouth of Truth, 21 Munday, Anthony, 34 Murray, William, 59 Mussolini, Benito, 4, 22, 152 Nationalism, 133–135 National Roman Museum, 6 Nativity and Baptism of Christ, (painting), Greco, 144 Nero, (Emperor), 35, 36, 37–38, 39 New Yorker, 59 Nicholas V, (Pope), 76–78 Nightingale, Florence, 27 “Noble Spirit,” (Petrarch), 73 Normans, 53 Nugent, Thomas, 102–103 “Ode to the West Wind,” (Shelley), 122 O’Faolain, Sean, 164–165 Oppian Hill, 38

“Orlando Furioso,” (Ariosto), 96–97 Ostia, 3 Ostiense Station, 3 Our Agent in Rome is Missing, (Carter), 161 Ovid, 23, 29–30 “Ozymandias,” (Shelley), 122 Paganism, 2 Palatine Hill, 27 Palazzo di Montecitorio and houses Parliament, 8 Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, 8 Palazzo Nuovo, 26, 27 Palazzo Venezia, 4 Palestine, 33 Palimpsest, (Vidal), 163 Pamarancio, 40 Panorama of the City of Rome, (Alberti), 78 Pantheon, 8 Papal Altar, 10 Papal architecture, 78 Paradise Lost, (Milton), 113–114 Paradise Regained, (Milton), 114 Paradiso, Dante, 63 Parallel Lives, (Plutarch), 23 Parco, Savello, 44 Parnassus, (Raphael), 94 “Par tibi,” (Lavardin), 53–54 Paul II, 80–82 Paul III, 101 Petrarch, Francesco, 65–66, 71, 72, 75 his legacy, 73 Piazza della Republica, 5–6 Piazza del Popolo, 2, 117–118 Piazza of the Knights of Malta, 44 Piazza Navona, 9 Piazza San Marco, 4, 5–6 Pictures from Italy, (Dickens), 40, 128 Pied Piper, The, (Browning), 144 Pieta, (Bellini), 92 Pieta, (Michelangelo), 10

191

INDEX

Pilgrims, 1–2, 77, 78, 82 Piramide Metro Station, 4 Pirandello, Luigi, 145 Piranesi, G.B., 44 Pius II, (Pope), 3, 79–80 Plautus, 23 Pliny, 2–3 Plutarch, 23 Pomoerium, 16 Ponte Cestio, 15 Ponte Fabricio, 15 Ponte San’Angelo, 10 Ponti, Carlo, 156 Porta del Popolo, 1–2, 118 Porta San Paolo, 20 Positions, The, (Aretino), 100 Prince, The, (Machiavelli), 84 Prince and the Pauper, The, (Twain), 137 Protestant Reformation, 98 Proteus, (West), 159 Puccini, 9, 123–124 Purgatorio, 64 Pyramide Metro Station, 20 Rabelais, 9 “Rape of Lucrece, The,” (Shakespeare), 17 Rape of the Sabine Women, (Sodoma), 144 Raphael, 89, 91, 92, 99–100, 133 his works, 94–95 Red and the Black, The, (Stendhal), 131 Regicide, The, (play), Smollett, 115 Remus, 13, 20, 42 Reni, Guido, 124 Republic, (Cicero), 13–14, 16 Republican Era, 18–20, 21, 25 Reston, James Jr., 58 Rienzo, 66 Robinson, Henry M., 157 Roderick Hudson, (James), 143, 148 Roman College, 8

Roman Elegies, (Goethe), 129 Roman Fever, (Wharton), 146, 148 Roman Holiday, (film), 21–22, 156 Roman Journal, A, (Stendhal), 131–133 Roma Quadrata, 16 Roman Republic, 3 Romans, 18 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, (Williams), 155–156 Rome Restored, (Biondo), 70 Rome Triumphant, (Biondo), 79 Rome and a Villa, (Clark), 27, 152–153 Romulus, 13, 15–17, 20, 42 Rose Tattoo, The, (Williams), 154 Rotterdam, Erasmus, 89, 90 Rowland, Ingrid, 86–87 Ruskin, John, 82 Sabines, 18 Sack of Rome, The, (Chastel), 99 Saint Ignatius Loyola, 8 Salamander, The, (West), 159 Salt fields, 15 San Croce, 31 San Lorenzo, 31, 43 San Pietro, 38 Sant’Andrea della Valle, 9 Santa Maria degli Angeli, (church), 6, 21 Santa Maria Maggiore, (church), 31 Santa Maria del Popolo, 2 Santa Sabina, 44 Scribner’s Magazine, 147 Secondari, John, 156 Second Defense of the English People, (Milton), 112 Second Punic War, 18–19 Senatus Popolusque Romanus, S.P.Q.R., 60–61 Seneca, 23, 83 Seven Hills, 31, 32, 33 Seven Kings, 17, 31 192

INDEX

Seven Principal Churches, 31, 31 Severn, Joseph, 120–121 Shakespeare, 17, 19, 21, 23 Shelley, Mary, 122 Shelley, P. B., 20, 21, 119, 121 his death, 122 Shoes of the Fisherman, The, (West), 158, 159–160, 161 Sidney, Philip, 102 Sistine Chapel, 92, 93, 94, 139 Six Characters, (Pirandello), 145 Sixtus IV, (Pope), 81–84 Sixtus V, (Pope), 2, 101 Smollett, Tobias, 9, 114–118 Sodoma, 144 Solace of Pilgrims, (Capgrave), 75 Sparticus, 19 St. Agatha’s Breast, (Van Adler), 163–164 Stark, Freya, 2 Station of the Cross, 39 St. Augustine, 41–42 Stazione Termini, 6 St. Damasus, 43 Stendhal, 11, 131–133 Stinger, Charles L., 55, 71, 90 St. Jerome, (da Vinci), 92 St. John the Baptist, (painting), 26 St. John Lateran, 31, 57, 63–64, 77 Stock exchange, 8–9 Stone, Irving, 157 Story, W. W., 142, 144 St. Paul, 1–2, 52 St. Peter, 1–2, 52 St. Peter’s Church, 10–12, 31, 33, 52, 58, 79–80, 91, 138, 140–142 Strabo, 20 Streetcar Named Desire, A, (Williams), 153 Suetonius, Gaius, 36–37 Sweet Bird of Youth, (play), Williams, 155 Swinburne, A., 128

Tacitus, 16, 39 Talented Mr. Ripley, The, (Highsmith), 161–162 Tarpeian Rock, 26 Tempest, The, (Shakespeare), 21 Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, 46 Temple of Castor, 19 Temple of Jupiter, 25, 109 Temple of Pollux, 19 Temple of Saturn, 19 Temple of Venus and Rome, 36–37 Tempus edax, 22 Tender is the Night, (Fitzgerald), 150 Terra Aeterna, 4 Tertullian, 49 Thackeray, William M., 144 The City, (Urbs), 34 Third Punic War, 18–19 Thomas, William, 46, 88 Thorwaldsen, Bertel, 127–128 Three Coins in a Fountain, (film), 156, 157 Three Gates, (painting), Raphael, 89 Tiber Island, 14 Tiber River, 3, 14, 21, 45 Titian, 144 Titus Andronicus, (Shakespeare), 23 Tosca, (Puccini), 9, 123–124 Transfiguration, (Raphael), 92 Trastevere, 66–67 Traveller in Rome, A, (Morton), 7–8, 26, 109–110, 113 Travels in Italy, (Goethe), 129–130 Travels Through France and Italy, (Smollett), 9, 115 Treaty of Campo Formio, 133–134 Trevi Fountain, 7, 156–157 Triumph of Divine Providence, (painting), Cortona, 143–144 Triumph of Galatea, (painting), Raphael, 89 Turner, J.M.W., 48 Twain, Mark, 136–142, 150–151 Twelve Caesars, The, (Graves), 37

193

INDEX

Tyrrhenian Coast, 3 Ugly Duckling, The, (Andersen), 144 Unearthing the Past, (Barkan), 73 Urban VIII, 143 Van Adler, T.C., 163–164 Vanity Fair, (Thackeray), 144 Variability of Fortune, (Bracciolini), 75 Vasari, Giorgio, 32 Vatican, 18, 32, 91–92, 98, 138–142 Velazquez, 8 Venus and Adonis, (painting), Titian, 144 Verses on Italy, (Lowell), 128 Vespa, 2 Vespasian, (Emperor), 7, 36 Via Appia, 20 Via Corso, 8 Via Dei Fori Imperiali, 4

Via Flaminia, 1–2 Via Nazionale, 5–6 Via Salaria, 15 Vidal, Gore, 155, 163 Vinci, Leonardo da, 3, 92 Virgil, 15, 29, 59 Vitruvius, 13 Voyage to Italy, (Lessels), 102 Walks in Rome, (Hare), 68 Warren, Robert Penn, 152 Wars of the Republic, 18–20 West, Benjamin, 142 West, Morris L., 158–159 Wharton, Edith, 146–148 White Smoke, (Greeley), 161 Williams, Dakin, 153 Williams, Tennessee, 153–156, 164 World War II, 152, 157 Writing Rome, (Edwards), 29

194

P I CTU R E C R E D ITS

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195

C O NTR I B UTO R S

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), and Where Shall Wisdom be Found? (2004). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International Prize.

has held Franke, Harvey, and Whiting fellowships at Yale University, where he recently completed his Ph.D. in English. His dissertation explores images of Reanaissance Rome in early modern English literature and culture. Previoulsy a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has published work in many scholarly and creative journals, including Agni, Boston Review, Genre, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, Prose Studies, and Poetry International.

BRETT FOSTER

196

CONTRIBUTORS

HAL MARCOVITZ is a journalist who lives in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, with his wife Gail and daughters Ashley and Michelle. He is the author of more than sixty books, including the novel, Painting the White House.

197

ROME

A

■ The Tiber River winds down the center of the town, intersecting

the complex construction of large boulevards, hidden squares and narrow side alleys. Known as “The Eternal City,” historians date Rome’s first settlers as far back as 625 B.C. Construction of the modern city of Rome began in the third century by Emperor Aurelian and today is a center of historical landmarks and tourist attractions.

B

ROME

■ Marcus Tullius Cicero

was one of Rome’s greatest orators, humorists, philosophers, and poets. Cicero felt the greatest duty was to serve the public of Rome and spent his life acting as consul and fighting political corruption. Refusing to join the First Triumvirate, a political alliance, Cicero was sent into exile. After an unsuccessful battle against Antony, Cicero was sentenced to death.

■ Seen with his muses Clio and Melpomene, Virgil is Rome’s star

poet. Although he spent most of his years writing pastoral poetry, at the pressure of Augustus Caesar, Virgil dedicated himself to writing an epic about the glory of Rome. Virgil requested this poem be destroyed but his wishes were ignored, and The Aeneid was published.

ROME

C

■ Epic poet Ovid, seen in this portrait, became an inspiration to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. His work Metamorphosis is perhaps the most extensive collection of myths passed through the ages. Born in 43 B.C., Publius Ovidius Naso wrote for pleasure rather than recognition or enlightenment and is considered either the last of the Golden Age poets or the founder of the Silver Age.

D

ROME

■ Built in 72 A.D. by Emperor Vespasiano, Rome’s famous

Colosseum stands over 160 feet high, and once had the capacity to hold 50,000 spectators. Originally named The Amphitheatrum Flavium, the Colosseum gained its current title from its location next to the colossal statue of Nero. Slaves, prisoners, and volunteers participated in gladiator fights, mock naval battles, and wild animal hunts. By 404 A.D., humans no longer took part in gladiator sports but the massacre of animals was widely popular. Stones and timber were later removed to construct other buildings.

ROME

E

■ Designed by Bernini, Maderno, and Michelangelo, St. Peter’s Square is watched over by 140 statues resting atop St. Peter’s Basilica and colonnade. Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine, ordered a church built on Vatican Hill, where St. Peter was reportedly buried in 64 A.D. Improved and expanded, St. Peter’s Basilica is currently the largest church in the world. It is a religious and architectural achievement, patroled by Swiss guards as St. Peter’s Basilica lies within the Vatican state.

F

ROME

■ At the base of the

Spanish Steps in Rome, the Keats-Shelley House is part of the Piazza di Spagna. The house has a library dedicated to British Romantic poets and boasts an extensive collection of art, first editions, manuscripts, and essays. Named after Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, the house remains decorated the same as it stood in 1821, the year Keats died there.

■ Adorned with red velvet chairs and marble tables, the Antico Caffé Greco is one of Rome’s three oldest cafés, founded by the Greek Nicola della Maddalena in 1760. In Rome where cafés are found on almost every block, the café gained a reputation for good coffee served in small cups. With patrons such as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, and Casanova, the café maintains a classical décor.

ROME

G

■ John Keats’ grave lies in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

Keats requested that “Here lies One Whose Name is writ in Water” be inscribed on his stone, a bitter retort to critics. Close friends Joseph Severn and Charles Brown wrote instead: “This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone.”

H

ROME

■ Spanning four decades,

Italian writer Italo Calvino’s career is noted for his imaginative fable-like fiction. Calvino was a political activist during World War II and joined the Italian Resistance. His first works were inspired by his interest in the war, during which he was a journalist. In the 1950s, Calvino turned to fantasy and allegory and quickly rose to acclaim.

■ Dario Fo, satire playwright, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. He began writing monologues after World War II but was censured in 1953 by government and church authorities. Despite public appeal, the censure made it difficult to write and perform new plays. Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, starred in movies and eventually founded a theater company with great success.