ancient fountain facing Saint Peter's distant dome, and dream the great
review of history, and call up a vast, changing picture at one's feet
between the heights and the yellow river. First, the broad corn-field of
the Tarquin Kings, rich and ripe under the evening breeze of summer that
runs along swiftly, bending the golden surface in soft moving waves from
the Tiber's edge to the foot of the wooded slope. Then, the hurried
harvesting, the sheaves cast into the river, the dry, stiff stubble
baking in the sun, and presently the men of Rome coming forth in
procession from the dark Servian wall on the left to dedicate the field
to the War God with prayer and chant and smoking sacrifice. By and by
the stubble trodden down under horses' hoofs, the dusty plain the
exercising ground of young conquerors, the voting place, later, of a
strong Republic, whither the centuries went out to choose their consuls,
to decide upon peace or war, to declare the voice of the people in grave
matters, while the great signal flag waved on the Janiculum, well in
sight though far away, to fall suddenly at the approach of any foe and
suspend the 'comitia' on the instant. And in the flat and dusty plain,
buildings begin to rise; first, the Altar of Mars and the holy place of
the infernal gods, Dis and Proserpine; later, the great 'Sheepfold,' the
lists and hustings for the voting, and, encroaching a little upon the
training ground, the temple of Venus Victorious and the huge theatre of
Pompey, wherein the Orsini held their own so long; but in the times of
Lucullus, when his gardens and his marvellous villa covered the Pincian
hill, the plain was still a wide field, and still the field of Mars,
without the walls, broken by few landmarks, and trodden to deep white
dust by the scampering hoofs of half-drilled cavalry. Under the
Emperors, then, first beautified in part, as Caesar traces the great
Septa for the voting, and Augustus erects the Altar of Peace and builds
up his cypress-clad tomb, crowned by his own image, and Agrippa raises
his triple temple, and Hadrian builds the Pantheon upon its ruins, while
the obelisk that now stands on Monte Citorio before the House of
Parliament points out the brass-figured hours on the broad marble floor
of the first Emperor's sun-clock and marks the high noon of Rome's
glory--and the Portico of Neptune and many other splendid works spring
up. Isis and Serapis have a temple next, and Domitian's race-course
appears behind Agrippa's Baths, straight and white. By and by the
Antonines raise columns and triumphal arches, but always to southward,
leaving the field of Mars a field still, for its old uses, and the tired
recruits, sweating from exercise, gather under the high shade of
Augustus' tomb at midday for an hour's rest.
Last of all, the great temple of the Sun, with its vast portico, and the
Mithraeum at the other end, and when the walls of Aurelian are built, and
when ruin comes upon Rome from the north, the Campus Martius is still
almost an open stretch of dusty earth on which soldiers have learned
their trade through a thousand years of hard training.
Not till the poor days when the waterless, ruined city sends its people
down from the heights to drink of the muddy stream does Campo Marzo
become a town, and then, around the castle-tomb of the Colonna and the
castle-theatre of the Orsini the wretched houses begin to rise here and
there, thickening to a low, dark forest of miserable dwellings threaded
through and through, up and down and crosswise, by narrow and crooked
streets, out of which by degrees the lofty churches and palaces of the
later age are to spring up. From a training ground it has become a
fighting ground, a labyrinth of often barricaded ways and lanes, deeper
and darker towards the water-gates cut in the wall that runs along the
Tiber, from Porta del Popolo nearly to the island of Saint Bartholomew,
and almost all that is left of Rome is crowded and huddled into the
narrow pen overshadowed and dominated here and there by black fortresses
and brown brick towers. The man who then might have looked down from the
Pincian hill would have seen that sight; houses little better than those
of the poorest mountain village in the Southern Italy of today, black
with smoke, black with dirt, blacker with patches made by shadowy
windows that had no glass. A silent town, too, surly and defensive; now
and then the call of the water-carrier disturbs the stillness, more
rarely, the cry of a wandering peddler; and sometimes a distant sound of
hoofs, a far clash of iron and steel, and the echoing yell of furious
fighting men--'Orsini!' 'Colonna!'--the long-drawn syllables coming up
distinct through the evening air to the garden where Messalina died,
while the sun sets red behind the spire of old Saint Peter's across the
river, and gilds the huge girth of dark Sant' Angelo to a rusty red,
like battered iron bathed in blood.
Back come the Popes from Avignon, and streets grow wider and houses
cleaner and men richer--all for the Bourbon's Spaniards to sack, and
burn, and destroy before the last city grows up, and the rounded domes
raise their helmet-like heads out of the chaos, and the broad Piazza del
Popolo is cleared, and old Saint Peter's goes down in dust to make way
for the Cathedral of all Christendom as it stands. Then far away, on
Saint Peter's evening, when it is dusk, the great dome, and the small
domes, and the colonnades, and the broad facade are traced in silver
lights that shine out quietly as the air darkens. The solemn bells toll
the first hour of the June night; the city is hushed, and all at once
the silver lines are turned to gold, as the red flame runs in magic
change from the topmost cross down the dome, in rivers, to the roof, and
the pillars and the columns of the square below--the grandest
illumination of the grandest church the world has ever seen.
[Illustration]
REGION V PONTE
The Region of Ponte, 'the Bridge,' takes its name from the ancient
Triumphal Bridge which led from the city to the Vatican Fields, and at
low water some fragments of the original piers may be seen in the river
at the bend just below Ponte Sant' Angelo, between the Church of Saint
John of the Florentines on the one bank, and the Hospital of Santo
Spirito on the other. In the Middle Age, according to Baracconi and
others, the broken arches still extended into the stream, and upon them
was built a small fortress, the outpost of the Orsini on that side. The
device, however, appears to represent a portion of the later Bridge of
Sant' Angelo, built upon the foundations of the AElian Bridge of
Hadrian, which connected his tomb with the Campus Martius. The Region
consists of the northwest point of the city, bounded by the Tiber, from
Monte Brianzo round the bend, and down stream to the new Lungara bridge,
and on the land side by a very irregular line running across the Corso
Vittorio Emanuele, close to the Chiesa Nuova, and then eastward and
northward in a zigzag, so as to take in most of the fortresses of the
Orsini family, Monte Giordano, Tor Millina, Tor Sanguigna, and the now
demolished Torre di Nona. The Sixth and Seventh Regions adjacent to the
Fifth and to each other would have to be included in order to take in
all that part of Rome once held by the only family that rivalled, and
sometimes surpassed, the Colonna in power.
As has been said before, the original difference between the two was
that the Colonna were Ghibellines and for the Emperors, while the Orsini
were Guelphs and generally adhered to the Popes. In the violent changes
of the Middle Age, it happened indeed that the Colonna had at least one
Pope of their own, and that more than one, such as Nicholas the Fourth,
favoured their race to the point of exciting popular indignation. But,
on the whole, they kept to their parties. When Lewis the Bavarian was to
be crowned by force, Sciarra Colonna crowned him; when Henry the Seventh
of Luxemburg had come to Rome for the same purpose, a few years earlier,
the Orsini had been obliged to be satisfied with a sort of second-rate
coronation at Saint John Lateran's; and when the struggle between the
two families was at its height, nearly two centuries later, and Sixtus
the Fourth 'assumed the part of mediator,' as the chronicle expresses
it, one of his first acts of mediation was to cut off the head of a
Colonna, and his next was to lay regular siege to the strongholds of the
family in the Roman hills; but before he had brought this singular
process of mediation to an issue he suddenly died, the Colonna returned
to their dwellings in Rome 'with great clamour and triumph,' got the
better of the Orsini, and proceeded to elect a Pope after their own
hearts, in the person of Cardinal Cibo, of Genoa, known as Innocent the
Eighth. He it is who lies under the beautiful bronze monument in the
inner left aisle of Saint Peter's, which shows him holding in his hand a
model of the spear-head that pierced Christ's side, a relic believed to
have been sent to the Pope as a gift by Sultan Bajazet the Second.
The origin of the hatred between Colonna and Orsini is unknown, for the
archives of the former have as yet thrown no light upon the subject, and
those of the latter were almost entirely destroyed by fire in the last
century. In the year 1305, Pope Clement the Fifth was elected Pope at
Perugia. He was a Frenchman, and was Archbishop of Bordeaux, the
candidate of Philip the Fair, whose tutor had been a Colonna, and he
was chosen by the opposing factions of two Orsini cardinals because the
people of Perugia were tired of a quarrel that had lasted eleven months,
and had adopted the practical and always infallible expedient of
deliberately starving the conclave to a vote. Muratori calls it a
scandalous and illicit election, which brought about the ruin of Italy
and struck a memorable blow at the power of the Holy See. Though not a
great man, Philip the Fair was one of the cleverest that ever lived.
Before the election he had made his bishop swear upon the Sacred Host to
accept his conditions, without expressing them all; and the most
important proved to be the transference of the Papal See to France. The
new Pope obeyed his master, established himself in Avignon, and the King
to all intents and purposes had taken the Pontificate captive and lost
no time in using it for his own ends against the Empire, his hereditary
foe. Such, in a few words, is the history of that memorable transaction;
and but for the previous quarrels of Colonna, Caetani and Orsini, it
could never have taken place. The Orsini repented bitterly of what they
had done, for one of Clement the Fifth's first acts was to 'annul
altogether all sentences whatsoever pronounced against the Colonna.'
But the Pope being gone, the Barons had Rome in their power and used it
for a battlefield. Four years later, we find in Villani the first record
of a skirmish fought between Orsini and Colonna. In the month of
October, 1309, says the chronicler, certain of the Orsini and of the
Colonna met outside the walls of Rome with their followers, to the
number of four hundred horse, and fought together, and the Colonna won;
and there died the Count of Anguillara, and six of the Orsini were
taken, and Messer Riccardo degli Annibaleschi who was in their company.
Three years afterwards, Henry of Luxemburg alternately feasted and
fought his way to Rome to be crowned Emperor in spite of Philip the
Fair, the Tuscan league and Robert, King of Naples, who sent a thousand
horsemen out of the south to hinder the coronation. In a day Rome was
divided into two great camps. Colonna held for the Emperor the Lateran,
Santa Maria Maggiore, the Colosseum, the Torre delle Milizie,--the brick
tower on the lower part of the modern Via Nazionale,--the Pantheon, as
an advanced post in one direction, and Santa Sabina, a church that was
almost a fortress, on the south, by the Tiber,--a chain of fortresses
which would be formidable in any modern revolution. Against Henry,
however, the Orsini held the Vatican and Saint Peter's, the Castle of
Sant' Angelo and all Trastevere, their fortresses in the Region of
Ponte, and, moreover, the Capitol itself. The parties were well matched,
for, though Henry entered Rome on the seventh of May, the struggle
lasted till the twenty-ninth of June.
Those who have seen revolutions can guess at the desperate fighting in
the barricaded streets, and at the well-guarded bridges from one end of
the city to the other. Backwards and forwards the battle raged for days
and weeks, by day and night, with small time for rest and refreshment.
Forward rode the Colonna, the stolid Germans, Henry himself, the eagle
of the Empire waving in the dim streets beside the flag that displayed
the simple column in a plain field. It is not hard to hear and see it
all again--the clanging gallop of armoured knights, princes, nobles and
bishops, with visors down, and long swords and maces in their hands, the
high, fierce cries of the light-armed footmen, the bowmen and the
slingers, the roar of the rabble rout behind, the shrill voices of women
at upper windows, peering down for the face of brother, husband, or
lover in the dashing press below,--the dust, the heat, the fierce June
sunshine blazing on broad steel, and the deep, black shadows putting out
all light as the bands rush past. Then, on a sudden, the answering shout
of the Orsini, the standard of the Bear, the Bourbon lilies of Anjou,
the scarlet and white colours of the Guelph house, the great black
horses, and the dark mail--the enemies surging together in the street
like swift rivers of loose iron meeting in a stone channel, with a
rending crash and the quick hammering of steel raining desperate blows
on steel--horses rearing their height, footmen crushed, knights reeling
in the saddle, sparks flying, steel-clad arms and long swords whirling
in great circles through the air. Foremost of all in fight the Bishop of
Liege, his purple mantle flying back from his corselet, trampling down
everything, sworn to win the barricade or die, riding at it like a
madman, forcing his horse up to it over the heaps of quivering bodies
that made a causeway, leaping it alone at last, like a demon in air, and
standing in the thick of the Orsini, slaying to right and left.
In an instant they had him down and bound and prisoner, one man against
a thousand; and they fastened him behind a man-at-arms, on the crupper,
to take him into Sant' Angelo alive. But a soldier, whose brother he had
slain a moment earlier, followed stealthily on foot and sought the joint
in the back of the armour, and ran in his pike quickly, and killed
him--'whereof,' says the chronicle, 'was great pity, for the Bishop was
a man of high courage and authority.' But on the other side of the
barricade, those who had followed him so far, and lost him, felt their
hearts sink, for not one of them could do what he had done; and after
that, though they fought a whole month longer, they had but little hope
of ever getting to the Vatican. So the Colonna took Henry up to the
Lateran, where they were masters, and he was crowned there by three
cardinals in the Pope's stead, while the Orsini remained grimly
intrenched in their own quarter, and each party held its own, even after
Henry had prudently retired to Tivoli, in the hills.
[Illustration: ISLAND IN THE TIBER]
At last the great houses made a truce and a compromise, by which they
attempted to govern Rome jointly, and chose Sciarra--the same who had
taken Pope Boniface prisoner in Anagni--and Matteo Orsini of Monte
Giordano, to be Senators together; and there was peace between them for
a time, in the year in which Rienzi was born. But in that very year, as
though foreshadowing his destiny, the rabble of Rome rose up, and chose
a dictator; and somehow, by surprise or treachery, he got possession of
the Barons' chief fortresses, and of Sant' Angelo, and set up the
standard of terror against the nobles. In a few days he sacked and
burned their strongholds, and the high and mighty lords who had made the
reigning Pope, and had fought to an issue for the Crown of the Holy
Roman Empire, were conquered, humiliated and imprisoned by an upstart
plebeian of Trastevere. The portcullis of Monte Giordano was lifted, and
the mysterious gates were thrown wide to the curiosity of a populace
drunk with victory; Giovanni degli Stefaneschi issued edicts of
sovereign power from the sacred precincts of the Capitol; and the
vagabond thieves of Rome feasted in the lordly halls of the Colonna
palace. But though the tribune and the people could seize Rome,
outnumbering the nobles as ten to one, they had neither the means nor
the organization to besiege the fortified towns of the great houses,
which hemmed in the city and the Campagna on every side. Thither the
nobles retired to recruit fresh armies among their retainers, to forge
new swords in their own smithies, and to concert new plans for
recovering their ancient domination; and thence they returned in their
strength, from their towers and their towns and fortresses, from
Palestrina and Subiaco, Genazzano, San Vito and Paliano on the south,
and from Bracciano and Galera and Anguillara, and all the Orsini castles
on the north, to teach the people of Rome the great truth of those days,
that 'aristocracy' meant not the careless supremacy of the nobly born,
but the power of the strongest hands and the coolest heads to take and
hold. Back came Colonna and Orsini, and the people, who a few months
earlier had acclaimed their dictator in a fit of justifiable ill-temper
against their masters, opened the gates for the nobles again, and no man
lifted a hand to help Giovanni degli Stefaneschi, when the men-at-arms
bound him and dragged him off to prison. Strange to say, no further
vengeance was taken upon him, and for once in their history, the nobles
shed no blood in revenge for a mortal injury.
No man could count the tragedies that swept over the Region of Ponte
from the first outbreak of war between the Orsini and the Colonna, till
Paolo Giordano Orsini, the last of the elder branch, breathed out his
life in exile under the ban of Sixtus the Fifth, three hundred years
later. There was no end of them till then, and there was little
interruption of them while they lasted; there is no stone left standing
from those days in that great quarter that may not have been splashed
with their fierce blood, nor is there, perhaps, a church or chapel
within their old holding into which an Orsini has not been borne dead or
dying from some deadly fight. Even today it is gloomy, and the broad
modern street, which swept down a straight harvest of memories through
the quarter to the very Bridge of Sant' Angelo, has left the mediaeval
shadows on each side as dark as ever. Of the three parts of the city,
which still recall the Middle Age most vividly, namely, the
neighbourhood of San Pietro in Vincoli, in the first Region, the by-ways
of Trastevere and the Region of Ponte, the latter is by far the most
interesting. It was the abode of the Orsini; it was also the chief place
of business for the bankers and money-changers who congregated there
under the comparatively secure protection of the Guelph lords; and it
was the quarter of prisons, of tortures, and of executions both secret
and public. The names of the streets had terrible meaning: there was the
Vicolo della Corda, and the Corda was the rope by which criminals were
hoisted twenty feet in the air, and allowed to drop till their toes were
just above the ground; there was the Piazza della Berlina Vecchia, the
place of the Old Pillory; there was a little church known as the 'Church
of the Gallows'; and there was a lane ominously called Vicolo dello
Mastro; the Mastro was the Master of judicial executions, in other
words, the Executioner himself. Before the Castle of Sant' Angelo stood
the permanent gallows, rarely long unoccupied, and from an upper window
of the dark Torre di Nona, on the hither side of the bridge, a rope hung
swinging slowly in the wind, sometimes with a human body at the end of
it, sometimes without. It was the place, and that was the manner, of
executions that took place in the night. In Via di Monserrato stood the
old fortress of the Savelli, long ago converted into a prison, and
called the Corte Savella, the most terrible of all Roman dungeons for
the horror of damp darkness, for ever associated with Beatrice Cenci's
trial and death. Through those very streets she was taken in the cart to
the little open space before the bridge, where she laid down her life
upon the scaffold three hundred years ago, and left her story of
offended innocence, of revenge and of expiation, which will not be
forgotten while Rome is remembered.
Beatrice Cenci's story has been often told, but nowhere more clearly and
justly than in Shelley's famous letter, written to explain his play.
There are several manuscript accounts of the last scene at the Ponte
Sant' Angelo, and I myself have lately read one, written by a
contemporary and not elsewhere mentioned, but differing only from the
rest in the horrible realism with which the picture is presented. The
truth is plain enough; the unspeakable crimes of Francesco Cenci, his
more than inhuman cruelty to his children and his wives, his monstrous
lust and devilish nature, outdo anything to be found in any history of
the world, not excepting the private lives of Tiberius, Nero, or
Commodus. His daughter and his second wife killed him in his sleep. His
death was merciful and swift, in an age when far less crimes were
visited with tortures at the very name of which we shudder. They were
driven to absolute desperation, and the world has forgiven them their
one quick blow, struck for freedom, for woman's honour and for life
itself in the dim castle of Petrella. Tormented with rack and cord they
all confessed the deed, save Beatrice, whom no bodily pain could move;
and if Paolo Santacroce had not murdered his mother for her money before
their death was determined, Clement the Eighth would have pardoned them.
But the times were evil, an example was called for, Santacroce had
escaped to Brescia, and the Pope's heart was hardened against the Cenci.
[Illustration: BRIDGE OF SANT' ANGELO]
They died bravely, there at the head of the bridge, in the calm May
morning, in the midst of a vast and restless crowd, among whom more than
one person was killed by accident, as by the falling of a pot of flowers
from a high window, and by the breaking down of a balcony over a shop,
where too many had crowded in to see. The old house opposite looked down
upon the scene, and the people watched Beatrice Cenci die from those
same arched windows. Above the sea of faces, high on the wooden
scaffold, rises the tall figure of a lovely girl, her hair gleaming in
the sunshine like threads of dazzling gold, her marvellous blue eyes
turned up to Heaven, her fresh young dimpled face not pale with fear,
her exquisite lips moving softly as she repeats the De Profundis of her
last appeal to God. Let the axe not fall. Let her stand there for ever
in the spotless purity that cost her life on earth and set her name for
ever among the high constellated stars of maidenly romance.
Close by the bridge, just opposite the Torre di Nona, stood the 'Lion
Inn,' once kept by the beautiful Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of
Rodrigo Borgia's children, of Caesar, and Gandia, and Lucrezia, and the
place was her property still when she was nominally married to her
second husband, Carlo Canale, the keeper of the prison across the way.
In the changing vicissitudes of the city, the Torre di Nona made way for
the once famous Apollo Theatre, built upon the lower dungeons and
foundations, and Faust's demon companion rose to the stage out of the
depths that had heard the groans of tortured criminals; the theatre
itself disappeared a few years ago in the works for improving the
Tiber's banks, and a name is all that remains of a fact that made men
tremble. In the late destruction, the old houses opposite were not
altogether pulled down, but were sliced, as it were, through their roofs
and rooms, at a safe angle; and there, no doubt, are still standing
portions of Vanozza's inn, while far below, the cellars where she kept
her wine free of excise, by papal privilege, are still as cool and
silent as ever.
Not far beyond her hostelry stands another Inn, famous from early days
and still open to such travellers as deign to accept its poor
hospitality. It is an inn for the people now, for wine carters, and the
better sort of hill peasants; it was once the best and most fashionable
in Rome, and there the great Montaigne once dwelt, and is believed to
have written at least a part of his famous Essay on Vanity. It is the
Albergo dell' Orso, the 'Bear Inn,' and perhaps it is not a coincidence
that Vanozza's sign of the Lion should have faced the approach to the
Leonine City beyond the Tiber, and that the sign of the Bear, 'The
Orsini Arms,' as an English innkeeper would christen it, should have
been the principal resort of the kind in a quarter which was
three-fourths the property and altogether the possession of the great
house that overshadowed it, from Monte Giordano on the one side, and
from Pompey's Theatre on the other.
The temporary fall of the Orsini at the end of the sixteenth century
came about by one of the most extraordinary concatenations of events to
be found in the chronicles. The story has filled more than one volume
and is nevertheless very far from complete; nor is it possible, since
the destruction of the Orsini archives, to reconstruct it with absolute
accuracy. Briefly told, it is this.