of the so-called 'poor cardinals' who received from the Pope a daily
allowance known as 'the Dish,' had nevertheless accumulated a good deal
of property before he became Pope under the name of Sixtus the Fifth,
and had brought some of his relatives to Rome. Among these was his well
beloved nephew, Francesco Peretti, for whom he naturally sought an
advantageous marriage. There was at that time in Rome a notary, named
Accoramboni, a native of the Marches of Ancona and a man of some wealth
and of good repute. He had one daughter, Vittoria, a girl of excessive
vanity, as ambitious as she was vain and as singularly beautiful as she
was ambitious. But she was also clever in a remarkable degree, and seems
to have had no difficulty in hiding her bad qualities. Francesco Peretti
fell in love with her, the Cardinal approved the match, though he was a
man not easily deceived, and the two were married and settled in the
Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of
Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains
to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and
to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome
and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal,
devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife
and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever
men, too, he was more than reasonably angry at having been deceived in
his judgment of a girl's character. So far, there is nothing not
commonplace about the tale.
At that time Paolo Giordano Orsini, the head of the house, Duke of
Bracciano and lord of a hundred domains, was one of the greatest
personages in Italy. No longer young and already enormously fat, he was
married to Isabella de' Medici, the daughter of Cosimo, reigning in
Florence. She was a beautiful and evil woman, and those who have
endeavoured to make a martyr of her forget the nameless doings of her
youth. Giordano was weak and extravagant, and paid little attention to
his wife. She consoled herself with his kinsman, the young and handsome
Troilo Orsini, who was as constantly at her side as an official
'cavalier servente' of later days. But the fat Giordano, indolent and
pleasure seeking, saw nothing. Nor is there anything much more than
vulgar and commonplace in all this.
Paolo Giordano meets Vittoria Peretti in Rome, and the two commonplaces
begin the tragedy. On his part, love at first sight; ridiculous, at
first, when one thinks of his vast bulk and advancing years, terrible,
by and by, as the hereditary passions of his fierce race could be,
backed by the almost boundless power which a great Italian lord
possessed in his surroundings. Vittoria, tired of her dull and virtuous
husband and of the lectures and parsimony of his uncle, and not dreaming
that the latter was soon to be Pope, saw herself in a dream of glory
controlling every mood and action of the greatest noble in the land. And
she met Giordano again and again, and he pleaded and implored, and was
alternately ridiculous and almost pathetic in his hopeless passion for
the notary's daughter. But she had no thought of yielding to his
entreaties. She would have marriage, or nothing. Neither words nor gifts
could move her.
She had a husband, he had a wife; and she demanded that he should marry
her, and was grimly silent as to the means. Until she was married to him
he should not so much as touch the tips of her jewelled fingers, nor
have a lock of her hair to wear in his bosom. He was blindly in love,
and he was Paolo Giordano Orsini. It was not likely that he should
hesitate. He who had seen nothing of his wife's doings, suddenly saw his
kinsman, Troilo, and Isabella was doomed. Troilo fled to Paris, and
Orsini took Isabella from Bracciano to the lonely castle of Galera.
There he told her his mind and strangled her, as was his right, being
feudal lord and master with powers of life and death. Then from
Bracciano he sent messengers to kill Francesco Peretti. One of them had
a slight acquaintance with the Cardinal's nephew.
They came to the Villa Negroni by night, and called him out, saying that
his best friend was in need of him, and was waiting for him at Monte
Cavallo. He hesitated, for it was very late. They had torches and
weapons, and would protect him, they said. Still he wavered. Then
Vittoria, his wife, scoffed at him, and called him coward, and thrust
him out to die; for she knew. The men walked beside him with their
torches, talking as they went. They passed the deserted land in the
Baths of Diocletian, and turned at Saint Bernard's Church to go towards
the Quirinal. Then they put out the lights and killed him quickly in the
dark.
His body lay there all night, and when it was told the next day that
Montalto's nephew had been murdered, the two men said that they had left
him at Monte Cavallo and that he must have been killed as he came home
alone. The Cardinal buried him without a word, and though he guessed the
truth he asked neither vengeance nor justice of the Pope.
[Illustration: VILLA NEGRONI
From a print of the last century]
Gregory the Thirteenth guessed it, too, and when Orsini would have
married Vittoria, the Pope forbade the banns and interdicted their union
for ever. That much he dared to do against the greatest peer in the
country.
To this, Orsini replied by plighting his faith to Vittoria with a ring,
in the presence of a serving woman, an irregular ceremony which he
afterwards described as a marriage, and he thereupon took his bride and
her mother under his protection. The Pope retorted by a determined
effort to arrest the murderers of Francesco; the Bargello and his men
went in the evening to the Orsini palace at Pompey's Theatre and
demanded that Giordano should give up the criminals; the porter replied
that the Duke was asleep; the Orsini men-at-arms lunged out with their
weapons, looked on during the interview, and considering the presence of
the Bargello derogatory to their master, drove him away, killing one of
his men and wounding several others. Thereupon Pope Gregory forbade the
Duke from seeing Vittoria or communicating with her by messengers, on
pain of a fine of ten thousand gold ducats, an order to which Orsini
would have paid no attention but which Vittoria was too prudent to
disregard, and she retired to her brother's house, leaving the Duke in a
state of frenzied rage that threatened insanity. Then the Pope seemed to
waver again, and then again learning that the lovers saw each other
constantly in spite of his commands, he suddenly had Vittoria seized and
imprisoned in Sant' Angelo. It is impossible to follow the long struggle
that ensued. It lasted four years, at the end of which time the Duke and
Vittoria were living at Bracciano, where the Orsini was absolute lord
and master and beyond the jurisdiction of the Church--two hours' ride
from the gates of Rome. But no further formality of marriage had taken
place and Vittoria was not satisfied. Then Gregory the Thirteenth died.
During the vacancy of the Holy See, all interdictions of the late Pope
were suspended. Instantly Giordano determined to be married, and came to
Rome with Vittoria. They believed that the Conclave would last some time
and were making their arrangements without haste, living in Pompey's
Theatre, when a messenger brought word that Cardinal Montalto would
surely be elected Pope within a few hours. In the fortress is the small
family church of Santa Maria di Grotta Pinta. The Duke sent down word to
his chaplain that the latter must marry him at once. That night a
retainer of the house had been found murdered at the gate; his body lay
on a trestle bier before the altar of the chapel when the Duke's message
came; the Duke himself and Vittoria were already in the little winding
stair that leads down from the apartments; there was not a moment to be
lost; the frightened chaplain and the messenger hurriedly raised a
marble slab which closed an unused vault, dropped the murdered man's
body into the chasm, and had scarcely replaced the stone when the ducal
pair entered the church. The priest married them before the altar in
fear and trembling, and when they were gone entered the whole story in
the little register in the sacristy. The leaf is extant.
Within a few hours, Montalto was Pope, the humble cardinal was changed
in a moment to the despotic pontiff, whose nephew's murder was
unavenged; instead of the vacillating Gregory, Orsini had to face the
terrible Sixtus, and his defeat and exile were foregone conclusions. He
could no longer hold his own and he took refuge in the States of Venice,
where his kinsman, Ludovico, was a fortunate general. He made a will
which divided his personal estate between Vittoria and his son,
Virginio, greatly to the woman's advantage; and overcome by the
infirmity of his monstrous size, spent by the terrible passions of his
later years, and broken in heart by an edict of exile which he could no
longer defy, he died at Salo within seven months of his great enemy's
coronation, in the forty-ninth year of his age.
Vittoria retired to Padua, and the authorities declared the inheritance
valid, but Ludovico Orsini's long standing hatred of her was inflamed to
madness by the conditions of the will. Six weeks after the Duke's death,
at evening, Vittoria was in her chamber; her boy brother, Flaminio, was
singing a Miserere to his lute by the fire in the great hall. A sound of
quick feet, the glare of torches, and Ludovico's masked men filled the
house. Vittoria died bravely with one deep stab in her heart. The boy,
Flaminio, was torn to pieces with seventy-four wounds.
But Venice would permit no such outrageous deeds. Ludovico was besieged
in his house, by horse and foot and artillery, and was taken alive with
many of his men and swiftly conveyed to Venice; and a week had not
passed from the day of the murder before he was strangled by the
Bargello in the latter's own room, with the red silk cord by which it
was a noble's privilege to die. The first one broke, and they had to
take another, but Ludovico Orsini did not wince. An hour later his body
was borne out with forty torches, in solemn procession, to lie in state
in Saint Mark's Church. His men were done to death with hideous tortures
in the public square. So ended the story of Vittoria Accoramboni.
[Illustration]
REGION VI PARIONE
The principal point of this Region is Piazza Navona, which exactly
coincides with Domitian's race-course, and the Region consists of an
irregular triangle of which the huge square is at the northern angle,
the western one being the Piazza della Chiesa Nuova and the southern
extremity the theatre of Pompey, so often referred to in these pages as
one of the Orsini's strongholds and containing the little church in
which Paolo Giordano married Vittoria Accoramboni, close to the Campo
dei Fiori which was the place of public executions by fire. The name
Parione is said to be derived from the Latin 'Paries,' a wall, applied
to a massive remnant of ancient masonry which once stood somewhere in
the Via di Parione. It matters little; nor can we find any satisfactory
explanation of the gryphon which serves as a device for the whole
quarter, included during the Middle Age, with Ponte and Regola, in the
large portion of the city dominated by the Orsini.
The Befana, which is a corruption of Epifania, the Feast of the
Epiphany, is and always has been the season of giving presents in Rome,
corresponding with our Christmas; and the Befana is personated as a
gruff old woman who brings gifts to little children after the manner of
our Saint Nicholas. But in the minds of Romans, from earliest childhood,
the name is associated with the night fair, opened on the eve of the
Epiphany in Piazza Navona, and which was certainly one of the most
extraordinary popular festivals ever invented to amuse children and make
children of grown people, a sort of foreshadowing of Carnival, but
having at the same time a flavour and a colour of its own, unlike
anything else in the world.
During the days after Christmas a regular line of booths is erected,
encircling the whole circus-shaped space. It is a peculiarity of Roman
festivals that all the material for adornment is kept together from year
to year, ready for use at a moment's notice, and when one sees the
enormous amount of lumber required for the Carnival, for the fireworks
on the Pincio, or for the Befana, one cannot help wondering where it is
all kept. From year to year it lies somewhere, in those vast
subterranean places and great empty houses used for that especial
purpose, of which only Romans guess the extent. When needed, it is
suddenly produced without confusion, marked and numbered, ready to be
put together and regilt or repainted, or hung with the acres of
draperies which Latins know so well how to display in everything
approaching to public pageantry.
At dark, on the Eve of the Epiphany, the Befana begins. The hundreds of
booths are choked with toys and gleam with thousands of little lights,
the open spaces are thronged by a moving crowd, the air splits with the
infernal din of ten thousand whistles and tin trumpets. Noise is the
first consideration for a successful befana, noise of any kind, shrill,
gruff, high, low--any sort of noise; and the first purchase of everyone
who comes must be a tin horn, a pipe, or one of those grotesque little
figures of painted earthenware, representing some characteristic type of
Roman life and having a whistle attached to it, so cleverly modelled in
the clay as to produce the most hideous noises without even the addition
of a wooden plug. But anything will do. On a memorable night nearly
thirty years ago, the whole cornopean stop of an organ was sold in the
fair, amounting to seventy or eighty pipes with their reeds. The
instrument in the old English Protestant Church outside of Porta del
Popolo had been improved, and the organist, who was a practical
Anglo-Saxon, conceived the original and economical idea of selling the
useless pipes at the night fair for the benefit of the church. The
braying of the high, cracked reeds was frightful and never to be
forgotten.
Round and round the square, three generations of families, children,
parents and even grandparents, move in a regular stream, closer and
closer towards midnight and supper-time; nor is the place deserted till
three o'clock in the morning. Toys everywhere, original with an
attractive ugliness, nine-tenths of them made of earthenware dashed with
a kind of bright and harmless paint of which every Roman child remembers
the taste for life; and old and young and middle-aged all blow their
whistles and horns with solemnly ridiculous pertinacity, pausing only to
make some little purchase at the booths, or to exchange a greeting with
passing friends, followed by an especially vigorous burst of noise as
the whistles are brought close to each other's ears, and the party that
can make the more atrocious din drives the other half deafened from the
field. And the old women who help to keep the booths sit warming their
skinny hands over earthen pots of coals and looking on without a smile
on their Sibylline faces, while their sons and daughters sell clay
hunchbacks and little old women of clay, the counterparts of their
mothers, to the passing customers. Thousands upon thousands of people
throng the place, and it is warm with the presence of so much humanity,
even under the clear winter sky. And there is no confusion, no
accident, no trouble, there are no drunken men and no pickpockets. But
Romans are not like other people.
In a few days all is cleared away again, and Bernini's great fountain
faces Borromini's big Church of Saint Agnes, in the silence; and the
officious guide tells the credulous foreigner how the figure of the Nile
in the group is veiling his head to hide the sight of the hideous
architecture, and how the face of the Danube expresses the River God's
terror lest the tower should fall upon him; and how the architect
retorted upon the sculptor by placing Saint Agnes on the summit of the
church, in the act of reassuring the Romans as to the safety of her
shrine; and again, how Bernini's enemies said that the obelisk of the
fountain was tottering, till he came alone on foot and tied four lengths
of twine to the four corners of the pedestal, and fastened the strings
to the nearest houses, in derision, and went away laughing. It was at
that time that he modelled four grinning masks for the corners of his
sedan-chair, so that they seemed to be making scornful grimaces at his
detractors as he was carried along. He could afford to laugh. He had
been the favourite of Urban the Eighth who, when Cardinal Barberini, had
actually held the looking-glass by the aid of which the handsome young
sculptor modelled his own portrait in the figure of David with the
sling, now in the Museum of Villa Borghese. After a brief period of
disgrace under the next reign, brought about by the sharpness of his
Neapolitan tongue, Bernini was restored to the favour of Innocent the
Tenth, the Pamfili Pope, to please whose economical tastes he executed
the fountain in Piazza Navona, after a design greatly reduced in extent
as well as in beauty, compared with the first he had sketched. But an
account of Bernini would lead far and profit little; the catalogue of
his works would fill a small volume; and after all, he was successful
only in an age when art had fallen low. In place of Michelangelo's
universal genius, Bernini possessed a born Neapolitan's universal
facility. He could do something of everything, circumstances gave him
enormous opportunities, and there were few things which he did not
attempt, from classic sculpture to the final architecture of Saint
Peter's and the fortifications of Sant' Angelo. He was afflicted by the
hereditary giantism of the Latins, and was often moved by motives of
petty spite against his inferior rival, Borromini. His best work is the
statue of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a figure which has
recently excited the ecstatic admiration of a French critic, expressed
in language that betrays at once the fault of the conception, the taste
of the age in which Bernini lived, and the unhealthy nature of the
sculptor's prolific talent. Only the seventeenth century could have
represented such a disquieting fusion of the sensuous and the
spiritual, and it was reserved for the decadence of our own days to find
words that could describe it. Bernini has been praised as the
Michelangelo of his day, but no one has yet been bold enough, or foolish
enough, to call Michelangelo the Bernini of the sixteenth century.
Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the
other, and the space of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the
Renascence from the nadir of Barocco art.
[Illustration: PIAZZA NAVONA]
The names of Bernini and of Piazza Navona recall Innocent the Tenth, who
built the palace beside the Church of Saint Agnes, his meannesses, his
nepotism, his weakness, and his miserable end; how his relatives
stripped him of all they could lay hands on, and how at the last, when
he died in the only shirt he possessed, covered by a single ragged
blanket, his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldachini, dragged from beneath his
pallet bed the two small chests of money which he had succeeded in
concealing to the end. A brass candlestick with a single burning taper
stood beside him in his last moments, and before he was quite dead, a
servant stole it and put a wooden one in its place. When he was dead at
the Quirinal, his body was carried to Saint Peter's in a bier so short
that the poor Pope's feet stuck out over the end, and three days later,
no one could be found to pay for the burial. Olimpia declared that she
was a starving widow and could do nothing; the corpse was thrust into a
place where the masons of the Vatican kept their tools, and one of the
workmen, out of charity or superstition, lit a tallow candle beside it.
In the end, the maggiordomo paid for a deal coffin, and Monsignor Segni
gave five scudi--an English pound--to have the body taken away and
buried. It was slung between two mules and taken by night to the Church
of Saint Agnes, where in the changing course of human and domestic
events, it ultimately got an expensive monument in the worst possible
taste. The learned and sometimes witty Baracconi, who has set down the
story, notes the fact that Leo the Tenth, Pius the Fourth and Gregory
the Sixteenth fared little better in their obsequies, and he comments
upon the democratic spirit of a city in which such things can happen.
Close to the Piazza Navona stands the famous mutilated group, known as
Pasquino, of which the mere name conveys a better idea of the Roman
character than volumes of description, for it was here that the
pasquinades were published, by affixing them to a pedestal at the corner
of the Palazzo Braschi. And one of Pasquino's bitterest jests was
directed against Olimpia Maldachini. Her name was cut in two, to make a
good Latin pun: 'Olim pia, nunc impia,' 'once pious, now impious,' or
'Olimpia, now impious,' as one chose to join or separate the syllables.
Whole books have been filled with the short and pithy imaginary
conversations between Marforio, the statue of a river god which used to
stand in the Monti, and Pasquino, beneath whom the Roman children used
to be told that the book of all wisdom was buried for ever.
In the Region of Parione stands the famous Cancelleria, a masterpiece of
Bramante's architecture, celebrated for many events in the later history
of Rome, and successively the princely residence of several cardinals,
chief of whom was that strong Pompeo Colonna, the ally of the Emperor
Charles the Fifth, who was responsible for the sacking of Rome by the
Constable of Bourbon, who ultimately ruined the Holy League, and imposed
his terrible terms of peace upon Clement the Seventh, a prisoner in
Sant' Angelo. Considering the devastation and the horrors which were the
result of that contest, and its importance in Rome's history, it is
worth while to tell the story again. Connected with it was the last
great struggle between Orsini and Colonna, Orsini, as usual, siding for
the Pope, and therefore for the Holy League, and Colonna for the
Emperor.
Charles the Fifth had vanquished Francis the First at Pavia, in the year
1525, and had taken the French King prisoner. A year later the Holy
League was formed, between Pope Clement the Seventh, the King of France,
the Republics of Venice and Florence, and Francesco Sforza, Duke of
Milan. Its object was to fight the Emperor, to sustain Sforza, and to
seize the Kingdom of Naples by force. Immediately upon the proclamation
of the League, the Emperor's ambassadors left Rome, the Colonna retired
to their strongholds, and the Emperor made preparations to send Charles,
Duke of Bourbon, the disgraced relative of King Francis, to storm Rome
and reduce the imprisoned Pope to submission. The latter's first and
nearest source of fear lay in the Colonna, who held the fortresses and
passes between Rome and the Neapolitan frontier, and his first instinct
was to attack them with the help of the Orsini. But neither side was
ready for the fight, and the timid Pontiff eagerly accepted the promise
of peace made by the Colonna in order to gain time, and he dismissed the
forces he had hastily raised against them.
[Illustration: PALAZZO MASSIMO ALLE COLONNA]
[Illustration: PONTE SISTO
From a print of the last century]