recently changed to Piazza del Quirinale, was given to it by the great
horses that stand on each side of the fountain, and which were found
long ago, according to tradition, between the Palazzo Rospigliosi and
the Palazzo della Consulta. In the times of Sixtus the Fifth, they were
in a pitiable state, their forelegs and tails gone, their necks broken,
their heads propped up by bits of masonry. When he finished the Quirinal
palace he restored them and set them up, side by side, before the
entrance, and when Pius the Sixth changed their position and turned them
round, the ever conservative and ever discontented Roman people were
disgusted by the change. On the pedestal of one of them are the words,
'Opus Phidiae,' 'the work of Phidias,' A punning placard was at once
stuck upon the inscription with the legend, 'Opus Perfidiae Pii
Sexti'--'the work of perfidy of Pius the Sixth.'
The Quirinal palace cannot be said to have played a part in the history
of Rome. Its existence is largely due to the common sense of Sixtus the
Fifth, and to his love of good air. He was a shepherd by birth, and it
is recorded that the first of his bitter disappointments was that the
farmer whom he served set him to feed the pigs because he could not
learn how to drive sheep to pasture; a disgrace which ultimately made
him run away, when he fell in with a monk whose face he liked. He
informed the astonished father that he meant to follow him everywhere,
'to Hell, if he chose,'--which was a forcible if not a pious
resolution,--and explained that the pigs would find their way home
alone. Later, when he had quarrelled with all the monks in Naples,
including his superiors, he came to Rome, and, being by that time very
learned, he was employed to expound the 'Formalities' of Scotus to the
'Signor' Marcantonio Colonna, abbot of the Monastery of the Apostles;
and there he resided as a guest for a long time till his brilliant pupil
was himself master of the subject, as well as a firm friend of the
quarrelsome monk; and in their intercourse the seeds were no doubt sown
of that implacable hatred against the Orsini which, under the great and
just provocation of a kinsman's murder, ended in the exile and temporary
ruin of the Colonna's rivals. No doubt, also, the abbot and the monk
often strolled together in the Colonna gardens, and the future Pope
breathed the high air of the Quirinal hill with a sense of relief, and
dreamed of living up there, far above the city, literally in an
atmosphere of his own. Therefore, when he was Pope, he made the great
palace that crowns the eminence, completing and extending a much smaller
building planned by the wise Gregory the Thirteenth, and ever since
then, until 1870, the Popes lived there during some part of the year. It
is modern, as age is reckoned in Rome, and it has modern associations in
the memory of living men.
It was from the great balcony of the Quirinal that Pius the Ninth
pronounced his famous benediction to an enthusiastic and patriotic
multitude in 1846. It will be remembered that a month after his
election, Pius proclaimed a general amnesty in favour of all persons
imprisoned for political crimes, and a decree by which all criminal
prosecutions for political offences should be immediately discontinued,
unless the persons accused were ecclesiastics, soldiers, or servants of
the government, or criminals in the universal sense of the word.
The announcement was received with a frenzy of enthusiasm, and Rome went
mad with delight. Instinctively, the people began to move towards the
Quirinal from all parts of the city, as soon as the proclamation was
published; the stragglers became a band, and swelled to a crowd; music
was heard, flags appeared and the crowd swelled to a multitude that
thronged the streets, singing, cheering and shouting for joy as they
pushed their way up to the palace, filling the square, the streets that
led to it and the Via della Dateria below it, to overflowing. In answer
to this popular demonstration the Pope appeared upon the great balcony
above the main entrance; a shout louder than all the rest burst from
below, the long drawn 'Viva!' of the southern races; he lifted his
hand, and there was silence; and in the calm summer air his quiet eyes
were raised towards the sky as he imparted his benediction to the people
of Rome.
Twenty-four years later, when the Italians had taken Rome, a detachment
of soldiers accompanied by a smith and his assistants marched up to the
same gate. Not a soul was within, and they had instructions to enter and
take possession of the palace. In the presence of a small and silent
crowd of sullen-looking men of the people, the doors were forced.
The difference between Unity under Augustus and Unity under Victor
Emmanuel is that under the Empire the Romans took Italy, whereas under
the Kingdom the Italians have taken Rome. Without pretending that there
can be any moral distinction between the two, one may safely admit that
there is a great and vital one between the two conditions of Rome, at
the two periods of history, a distinction no less than that which
separates the conqueror from the conquered, and the fruits of conquest
from the consequences of subjection. But thinking men do not forget that
they look at the past in one way and at the present in another; and that
while the actions of a nation are dictated by the impulses of contagious
sentiment, the judgments of history are too often based upon an all but
commercial reckoning and balancing of profit and loss.
When Sixtus the Fifth was building the Quirinal palace, he was not
working in a wilderness resembling the deserted fields of the outlying
Monti. The hill was covered with gardens and villas. Ippolito d'Este,
the son of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and of Lucrezia Borgia, had built
himself a residence on the west side of the hill, surrounded by gardens.
It was in the manner of his magnificent palace at Tivoli, that Villa
d'Este of which the melancholy charm had such a mysterious attraction
for Liszt, where the dark cypresses reflect their solemn beauty in the
stagnant water, and a weed-grown terrace mourns the dead artist in the
silence of decay.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DEL QUIRINALE]
Further on, along the Via Venti Settembre, stretched the pleasure
grounds of Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, who is remembered as the man who
first recognized the merits of the beautiful mutilated group
subsequently known as 'Pasquino,' and set it upon the pedestal which
made it famous, and gave its name a place in all languages, by the witty
lampoons and stinging satires almost daily affixed to the block of
stone. Many other villas followed in the same direction, and in those
insecure days not a few Romans, when the summer days grew hot, were
content to move up from their palaces in the lower parts of the city to
breathe the somewhat better air of the Quirinal and the Esquiline,
instead of risking a journey to the country.
Sixtus the Fifth died in the Quirinal palace, and twenty-one other Popes
have died there since, all following the curious custom of bequeathing
their hearts and viscera to the parish Church of the Saints Vincent and
Anastasius, which is known as the Church of Cardinal Mazarin, because
the tasteless front was built by him, though the rest existed much
earlier. It stands opposite the fountain of Trevi, at one corner of the
little square; the vault in which the urns were placed is just behind
and below the high altar; but Benedict the Fourteenth built a special
monument for them on the left of the apse, and a tablet on the right
records the names of the Popes who left these strange legacies to the
church.
In passing, one may remember that Mazarin himself was born in the Region
of Trevi, the son of a Sicilian,--like Crispi and Rudini. His father was
employed at first as a butler and then as a steward by the Colonna,
married an illegitimate daughter of the family, and lived to see his
granddaughter, Maria Mancini, married to the head of the house, and his
son a cardinal and despot of France, and himself, after the death of his
first wife, the honoured husband of Porzia Orsini, so that he was the
only man in history who was married both to an Orsini and to a Colonna.
In the light of his father's extraordinary good fortune, the success of
the son, though not less great, is at least less astonishing. The
magnificent Rospigliosi palace, often ascribed by a mistake to Cardinal
Scipio Borghese, was the Palazzo Mazarini and Mazarin's father died
there; it was inherited by the Dukes of Nevers, through another niece of
the Cardinal's, and was bought from them between 1667 and 1670, by
Prince Rospigliosi, brother of Pope Clement the Ninth, then reigning.
Urban the Eighth, the Barberini Pope, had already left his mark on the
Quirinal hill. The great Barberini palace was built by him, it is said,
of stones taken from the Colosseum, whereupon a Pasquinade announced
that 'the Barberini had done what the Barbarians had not.' The
Barbarians did not pull down the Colosseum, it is true, but they could
assuredly not have built as Urban did, and in that particular instance,
without wishing to justify the vandalisms of the centuries succeeding
the Renascence, it may well be asked whether the Amphitheatre is not
more picturesque in its half-ruined state, as it stands, and whether the
city is not richer by a great work of art in the princely dwelling which
faces the street of the Four Fountains.
Among the many memories of the Quirinal there is one more mysterious
than the rest. The great Baths of Constantine extended over the site of
the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and the ruins were in part standing at the end
of the sixteenth century. It is related by a writer of those days and an
eye-witness of the fact, that a vault was discovered beneath the old
baths, about eighty feet long by twenty wide, closed at one end by a
wall thrown up with evident haste and lack of skill, and completely
filled with human bodies that fell to dust at the first touch, evidently
laid there all at the same time, just after death, and probably
numbering at least a thousand. In vain one conjectures the reason of
such wholesale burial--one of Nero's massacres, perhaps, or a plague. No
one can tell.
The invaluable Baracconi, often quoted, recalls the fact that Tasso,
when a child, lived with his father in some house on the Monte Cavallo,
when the execrable Carafa cardinal and his brother had temporarily
succeeded in seizing all the Colonna property; and he gives a letter of
Bernardo, the poet's father, written in July to his wife, who was away
just then.
[Illustration: PIAZZA BARBERINI]
'I do not wish the children to go to the vineyard because they get too
hot, and the air is bad there this summer, but in order that they may
have a change, I took steps to have the use of the Boccaccio Vineyard
[Villa Colonna], and the Duke of Paliano [then a Carafa, for the latter
had stolen the title as well as the lands] has let me have it, and we
have been here a week and shall stay all summer in this good air.'
The words call up a picture of Tasso, a small boy, pale with the heat of
a Roman summer, but restless and for ever running about, overheated and
catching cold like all delicate children, which brings the unhappy poet
a little nearer to us.
Of those great villas and gardens there remain the Colonna, the
Rospigliosi and the Quirinal, by far the largest of the three, and
enclosing between four walls an area almost, if not quite, equal to the
Pincio. The great palace where twenty-two popes died is inhabited by the
royal family of Italy and crowns the height, as the Vatican, far away
across the Tiber, is also on an eminence of its own. They face each
other, like two principles in natural and eternal opposition,--Rome the
conqueror of the world, and Italy the conqueror of Rome. And he who
loves the land for its own sake can only pray that if they must oppose
each other for ever in heart, they may abide in that state of civilized
though unreconciled peace, which is the nation's last and only hope of
prosperity.
[Illustration]
REGION III COLONNA
When the present Queen of Italy first came to Rome as Princess Margaret,
and drove through the city to obtain a general impression of it, she
reached the Piazza Colonna and asked what the column might be which is
the most conspicuous landmark in that part of Rome and gives a name to
the square, and to the whole Region. The answer of the elderly officer
who accompanied the Princess and her ladies is historical. 'That
column,' he answered, 'is the Column of Piazza Colonna'--'the Column of
Column Square,' as we might say--and that was all he could tell
concerning it, for his business was not archaeology, but soldiering. The
column was erected by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose equestrian
statue stands on the Capitol, to commemorate his victory over the
Marcomanni.
[Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS]
It is remarkable that so many of the monuments still preserved
comparatively intact should have been set up by the adoptive line of the
so-called Antonines, from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, and that the two
monster columns, the one in Piazza Colonna and the one in Trajan's
Forum, should be the work of the last and the first of those emperors,
respectively. Among other memorials of them are the Colosseum, the Arch
of Titus and the statue mentioned above. The lofty Septizonium is
levelled to the ground, the Palaces of the Caesars are a mountain of
ruins, the triumphal arches of Marcus Aurelius and of Domitian have
disappeared with those of Gratian, of Valens, of Arcadius and of many
others; but the two gigantic columns still stand erect with their
sculptured tales of victory and triumph almost unbroken, surmounted by
the statues of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, whose memory was sacred to
all Christians long before the monuments were erected, and to whom,
respectively, they have been dedicated by a later age.
There may have been a connection, too, in the minds of the people,
between the 'Column of Piazza Colonna' and the Column of the Colonna
family, since a great part of this Region had fallen under the
domination of the noble house, and was held by them with a chain of
towers and fortifications; but the pillar which is the device of the
Region terminates in the statue of the Apostle Peter, whereas the one
which figures in the shield of Colonna is crowned with a royal crown, in
memory of the coronation of Lewis the Bavarian by Sciarra, who himself
generally lived in a palace facing the small square which bears his
name, and which is only a widening of the Corso just north of San
Marcello, the scene of Jacopo Colonna's brave protest against his
kinsman's mistaken imperialism.
The straight Corso itself, or what is the most important part of it to
Romans, runs through the Region from San Lorenzo in Lucina to Piazza di
Sciarra, and beyond that, southwards, it forms the western boundary of
Trevi as far as the Palazzo di Venezia, and the Ripresa de' Barberi--the
'Catching of the Racers.' West of the Corso, the Region takes in the
Monte Citorio and the Piazza of the Pantheon, but not the Pantheon
itself, and eastwards it embraces the new quarter which was formerly the
Villa Ludovisi, and follows the Aurelian wall, from Porta Salaria to
Porta Pinciana. Corso means a 'course,' and the Venetian Paul the
Second, who found Rome dull compared with Venice, gave it the name when
he made it a race-course for the Carnival, towards the close of the
fifteenth century. Before that it was Via Lata,--'Broad Street,'--and
was a straight continuation of the Via Flaminia, the main northern
highway from the city. For centuries it has been the chief playground of
the Roman Carnival, a festival of which, perhaps, nothing but the memory
will remain in a few years, when the world will wonder how it could be
possible that the population of the grave old city should have gone mad
each year for ten days and behaved itself by day and night like a crowd
of schoolboys let loose.
'Carnival' is supposed to be derived from 'Carnelevamen,' a 'solace for
the flesh.' Byron alone is responsible for the barbarous derivation
'Carne Vale,' farewell meat--a philological impossibility. In the minds
of the people it is probably most often translated as 'Meat Time,' a
name which had full meaning in times when occasional strict fasting and
frequent abstinence were imposed on Romans almost by law. Its beginnings
are lost in the dawnless night of time--of Time, who was Kronos, of
Kronos who was Saturn, of Saturn who gave his mysterious name to the
Saturnalia in which Carnival had its origin. His temple stood at the
foot of the Capitol hill, facing the corner of the Forum, and there are
remains of it today, tall columns in a row, with architrave and frieze
and cornice; from the golden milestone close at hand, as from the
beginning of time, were measured the ways of the world to the ends of
the earth; and the rites performed within it were older than any others,
and different, for here the pious Roman worshipped with uncovered head,
whereas in all other temples he drew up his robes as a veil lest any
sight of evil omen should meet his eyes, and here waxen tapers were
first burned in Rome in honour of a god. And those same tapers played a
part, to the end, on the last night of Carnival. But in the coincidence
of old feasts with new ones, the festival of Lupercus falls nearer to
the time of Ash Wednesday, for the Lupercalia were celebrated on the
fifteenth of February, whereas the Carnival of Saturn began on the
seventeenth of December.
Lupercus was but a little god, yet he was great among the shepherds in
Rome's pastoral beginnings, for he was the driver away of wolves, and on
his day the early settlers ran round and round their sheepfold on the
Palatine, all dressed in skins of fresh-slain goats, praising the Faun
god, and calling upon him to protect their flocks. And in truth, as the
winter, when wolves are hungry and daring, was over, his protection was
a foregone conclusion till the cold days came again. The grotto
dedicated to him was on the northwest slope of the Palatine, nearly
opposite the Church of Saint George in Velabro, across the Via di San
Teodoro; and all that remains of the great festival in which Mark Antony
and the rest ran like wild men through the streets of Rome, smiting men
and women with the purifying leathern thong, and offering at last that
crown which Caesar thrice refused, is merged and forgotten, with the
Saturnalia, in the ten days' feasting and rioting that change to the
ashes and sadness of Lent, as the darkest night follows the brightest
day. For the Romans always loved strong contrasts.
Carnival, in the wider sense, begins at Christmas and ends when Lent
begins; but to most people it means but the last ten days of the season,
when festivities crowd upon each other till pleasure fights for minutes
as for jewels; when tables are spread all night and lights are put out
at dawn; when society dances itself into distraction and poor men make
such feasting as they can; when no one works who can help it, and no
work done is worth having, because it is done for double price and half
its value; when affairs of love are hastened to solution or catastrophe,
and affairs of state are treated with the scorn they merit in the eyes
of youth, because the only sense is laughter, and the only wisdom,
folly. That is Carnival, personified by the people as a riotous old
red-cheeked, bottle-nosed hunchback, animated by the spirit of fun.
In a still closer sense, Carnival is the Carnival in the Corso, or was;
for it is dead beyond resuscitation, and such efforts as are made to
give it life again are but foolish incantations that call up sad ghosts
of joy, spiritless and witless. But within living memory, it was very
different. In those days which can never come back, the Corso was a
sight to see and not to be forgotten. The small citizens who had small
houses in the street let every window to the topmost story for the whole
ten days; the rich whose palaces faced the favoured line threw open
their doors to their friends; every window was decorated, from every
balcony gorgeous hangings, or rich carpets, or even richer tapestries
hung down; the street was strewn thick with yellow sand, and wheresoever
there was an open space wooden seats were built up, row above row, where
one might hire a place to see the show and join in throwing flowers, and
the lime-covered 'confetti' that stung like small shot and whitened
everything like meal, and forced everyone in the street or within reach
of it to wear a shield of thin wire netting to guard the face, and thick
gloves to shield the hands; or, in older times, a mask, black, white, or
red, or modelled and painted with extravagant features, like evil beings
in a dream.
[Illustration: TWIN CHURCHES AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE CORSO
From a print of the last century]