that heroic and beautiful city, Philip II handed her over to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany, and many Sienese families emigrated, rather than
submit to the rule of the Medici. Camillo Borghese, the father of Paul
V, emigrated to Rome, where his son Camillo, the future pontiff, was
born. This was in 1552, Julius III being then Pope. Camillo’s career
began in the law, as has been the case with so many of those who have
risen to the See of St. Peter. He studied in Perugia and Padua; was
sent on a mission to Spain, and, proving successful there, was given
the Red Hat in 1596 by Clement VIII, he being at that time forty-four
years of age. Living as cardinal, quietly and unobtrusively among his
books and documents, he had seemed to Peter Aldobrandini, who was the
all-powerful nephew of Clement VIII, the very man to carry on Clement’s
steady policy of restoring the French influence at Rome and of keeping
his own family in power. The Aldobrandini had left Florence from hatred
of the Medici, as the Borghese had left Siena, and Peter felt that in
the case of Camillo Borghese he could rely upon feelings similar to his
own to back up the coalition of himself and France against Spain. With
the premature death of Leo XI all the complicated machinery of the
conclave had had to be put in motion once again, and in this second
conclave the nephew of Clement VIII was the most powerful of the forces
at work. He threw his influence for Cardinal Borghese, and Paul V
undoubtedly owed his election to that fact. Peter Aldobrandini had been
a very great papal nephew, indeed, and he expected from the Borghese
pontiff a proper recognition of his services. Even with the keenest
sense of humor in the world, Cardinal Aldobrandini would have found it
hard not to feel resentment when he learned that Cardinal Borghese,
now Paul V, considered his unsought-for election to the papal chair
entirely due to the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, and that
in consequence he owed nothing whatever to earthly aid. It was because
Paul V carried this idea so far on the one hand, and on the other
poured such lavish favors upon his own kin, that he won for himself the
name of “the Grand Ingrate.” Looking upon himself as divinely appointed
in a marked and special degree, the quiet, unassuming cardinal became
the opinionated and inflexible pontiff. He administered the papal
power, temporal and spiritual, with the arrogance of a despot, the
intolerance of an inquisitor, and the formality of the jurist. During
the sixteen years of his pontificate he succeeded in rousing bitter
hostility on all sides. The aged Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had lived
through nine pontificates and had known both Sixtus V and Clement VIII,
complained that this Pope judged of the world as he would of one of
the towns belonging to the papal territory where everything was done
according to the letter of the law, and went on to say that in this
respect there would soon have to be a change. The year before his
election the gunpowder plot had fanned England into a white heat of
patriotism, and a new oath of allegiance was required by Parliament.
Paul V was the Pope who forbade the English Catholics to take it. He
also was the Pope who so mishandled the Gallican Church that he forced
the States General of 1614 to declare that the King of France held
his power from God alone; and, finally, it was Paul V who spent the
first two years of his pontificate in such a quarrel with Venice as
threatened to involve all Christendom. The Republic so unflinchingly
endured excommunication and interdict that the Pope even thought of
subduing her by arms. He was brought to his senses only by the fear
that Venice in her extremity might call Protestant powers to her aid
and thus bring confusion and disaster not only upon Italy but upon all
Catholic countries. In this grave crisis France took it upon herself to
mediate, and the dispute was finally settled, but with little honor to
the papacy. It was a Venetian ambassador who has recorded of Clement
VIII that when he found he could not reform Florence without great
trouble he reformed his own mind. But Paul V did not, like the wise
Clement VIII, “look to his predecessors” when in difficulties. Paul
V had certainly no cause to love the Venetians, and it is one of the
quaint tricks of history that his magnificent fountain on the Janiculum
was at last finished by a Venetian Pope.
Although the Fontanone was built in the seventeenth century, its
most interesting associations are connected with modern Rome. It is
pre-eminently the fountain of the Risorgimento, for the last stand in
Garibaldi’s three months’ defense of the Roman Republic was made upon
the terraces surrounding this water, and it was just above here that
the worst fighting occurred.
The second stage of the siege consisted of the nine days’ defense of
the Aurelian wall, behind which Garibaldi was intrenched.
This bit of wall runs northwest and southeast on the eastern slope of
the hill, and within the walls of Pope Urban VIII. At its northern
end it is at about an equal distance from the Fontanone and the
Porta San Pancrazio. When this defense broke down, the French troops
entered the city through a breach in the Urban walls to the southwest
of the fountain. The narrow lane leading from this point to Porta
San Pancrazio was soon choked with the dead and dying. The Italians
and French fought hand to hand in the darkness, along the road in
front of the Villa Aurelia, that road which is to-day so quiet and so
clean! During the previous eight days bursting shells from the French
batteries erected on the walls and near the Villa Corsini and the
Convent of San Pancrazio had wrought far-reaching havoc.
The Church of San Pietro in Montorio was used by Garibaldi as a
hospital, but its roof had collapsed, and on the slopes above it all
the great villas were in ruins. To the northwest of the fountain,
just above the Porta San Pancrazio, the Villa Savorelli (now the
Villa Aurelia and the present home of the American Academy) stood up
against the sky, a mere shell of blackened walls. Outside the porta,
the Vascello lay in masses of crumbled masonry, although Medici still
held it for Garibaldi. Farther up the hill, over the spot now occupied
by the triumphal arch, towered the remains of the magnificent Villa
Corsini; before it the body of Masina, still lying where the young
lancer had fallen after his last wild charge up the villa steps. Amid
the general devastation the Fontanone stood unscathed. Its splendid
stream of water flowed unpolluted, and it fulfilled the noblest
functions of a fountain during the heat and carnage of that Roman June.
To those who are familiar with the story of the heroic “Defense” a
visit to Paul V’s great fountain on the Janiculum is not a bit of
sight-seeing--it has become a pilgrimage.
MONTE CAVALLO
[Illustration]
MONTE CAVALLO
The fountain of the Monte Cavallo is overshadowed both literally and
figuratively by the size and importance of the objects which surround
it. Without it the obelisk, which forms its background, and the great
groups of the Dioscuri, which flank it on either side, would be
sufficiently imposing and significant, either separately or together,
to form the central decoration of the Piazza of Monte Cavallo, or of
any piazza in any city; but the fountain is not entirely superfluous.
Its magnificent jet of water, thrown upward between the heads of the
rearing horses and swept hither and thither at the will of the wind,
binds together the otherwise disjointed and inharmonious group.
This fountain is not the first one to be erected on Monte Cavallo,
but the first fountain was as subservient as the present one to the
colossal groups which have given the name “Cavallo” to this entire
district. The Dioscuri were once a part of a kind of open-air museum
which, during the earliest days of the papacy, existed on the slope
of the Quirinal Hill. Gregory XIII had them removed to the Capitol,
but when Sixtus V had purchased from the heirs of Cardinal Caraffa the
site and the partly erected buildings of the Quirinal, he brought them
back again and subjected them to a thorough restoration, using for this
purpose the material from the base of one of them.
There has existed a villa on this spot antedating Pope Sixtus V’s time
by many years. It had been called the Villa d’Este, but it should not
be confused with the Villa d’Este, at Tivoli, although it was built by
the same Cardinal Ippolito of that family.
Sixtus V was extremely fond of this portion of the city and with
Fontana’s assistance he created the magnificent palace and surroundings
which ever since his day have been associated with sovereign power in
Rome. Fontana enlarged the piazza before the palace in order to make it
“commodious for consistories,” and he also lowered the grade in order
to bring hither the Acqua Felice.
There must have been many discussions between Pope Sixtus V and his
architect with regard to the fountain on the Quirinal. Everything
that Sixtus V did he did thoroughly and magnificently, and it was
quite natural that he should desire a splendid fountain before his own
palace, considering that it was he himself who had made it possible,
by the introduction of the Acqua Felice, to have a fountain in that
place at all. A rare old engraving shows that the fountain, as at first
planned, resembled the Fountain of the Moses. In it the Dioscuri occupy
the niches as does the Moses in the fountain on the Viminal. This plan
was happily abandoned. The great classic figures were erected as they
stand to-day in front of the palace, and Fontana placed between the two
groups, in the same position as the fountain of the present day, the
conventional large basin and central vase which is to be seen in the
old engravings of the seventeenth century. It was certainly neither a
very original nor a very interesting design and it must have relied
for its effect entirely upon the copious supply of water which was
described by Evelyn in 1644 as “two great rivers.”
It is difficult to say when this old fountain of Fontana’s disappeared.
It was probably removed either at the time when Antinori erected the
obelisk for Pius VI or in the following pontificate when the same
architect suggested to Pius VII the idea of replacing it by the present
granite basin. This basin had stood since 1594 in the Campo Vaccino,
the mediæval name for the ruins of the Roman Forum. It had been placed
there during the pontificate of Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) by the city
magistrates on a piece of ground given to them by Cardinal Farnese,
near the three columns of Castor and Pollux and the Church of S.
Maria Liberatrice. They had provided a high travertine base for it,
and it was fed from three jets of the Acqua Felice, which, some eight
or nine years previously, had been brought to Rome by Sixtus V. The
basin was used as a watering-trough for cattle, and by the time Pius
VII rescued it the travertine base had entirely disappeared under the
gradually rising level of the Campo Vaccino--that strange composite
mass of rubbish, earth, and ruins which, up to the second half of the
nineteenth century, covered the old Forum floor to a depth of more than
twenty feet. The basin measures twenty-three metres in circumference,
and when it was thus sunk in the ground it became a pleasant pool
through which the carters walked their horses to refresh them on a warm
and dusty day. The removal of this basin was actually accomplished in
1818, when the architect Raphael Stern (who built for Pius VII the
Bracchio Nuovo) designed the present fountain of Monte Cavallo. He sank
the basin in the pavement between the horse-tamers and erected in the
middle of it a second basin which rests upon a travertine base. The
water of the fountain rises in a copious jet from the centre of the
second basin to a height somewhat below the heads of the horses and,
returning on itself, falls in a generous overflow into the lower basin.
[Illustration: The Fountain of Monte Cavallo.]
To some, the chief interest of this composite group of obelisk,
statuary, and fountain centres in this lower basin, for it is none
other than the granite tazza into which Marforio once poured the water
from his urn, far, far back in the days of Charlemagne, and no one
knows for how many years before that.
The obelisk which forms the centre of this group of antiquities now
clustered together in the Monte Cavallo is one of a pair which flanked
the entrance to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Its mate was erected by
Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana near the Church of S. Maria Maggiore.
Pius VI and Pius VII were the two Popes whose pontificates coincide
with the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests.
Their unhappy stories are bound up with the history of the Quirinal
Palace, which fronts upon the Monte Cavallo; and they form a pitiful
contrast to the life of that masterful old Pontiff Sixtus V, in
whose reign the history of the palace and the modern piazza begins.
Sixtus, having destroyed, for no reason now known, the old mediæval
papal palace of the Lateran, decided to rebuild it to suit himself,
but found, as the new building progressed, that it was too cold and
uncomfortable for a residence. So the Lateran, which had been the
papal palace since the seventh century, holding its own against the
magnificence and enormous size of the Vatican, was gradually abandoned
as a residence, and Sixtus established himself in the Quirinal.
Sixtus V, for all his detestation of classic statuary, must have shared
with his people the profound respect and admiration always aroused by
the Dioscuri. These colossal groups were among the few rare works of
antiquity which were cherished by the semi-barbarous Romans of the
Middle Ages, and the web of fable spun about them during those dark
years proves the hold they had over the superstitious imagination of
the times. “Nothing is beyond question” about them, says Lanciani,
except that they once adorned the temple which the Emperor Aurelian
built to the sun on his return from the conquest of Palmyra in 272.
This most magnificent of all Roman temples, to quote the same great
modern authority, became a quarry for building materials, even as early
as the sixth century. The Emperor Justinian is said to have taken some
porphyry columns from it to adorn the Church of St. Sophia in his new
capital of Constantinople. The Dioscuri must have been discovered later
in the Baths of Constantine. The relative positions of the horses and
their tamers were ascertained from antique coins. Modern authorities
are of the opinion that they are Roman copies of Greek originals, and
they are counted among the great inheritances from imperial Rome.
It is curious to trace the working of the mediæval intelligence,
groping its way through mysticism and allegory to find some
explanation for the undeniable impression made by these heroic figures
upon the minds of all who behold them. The attempt to read into them
some abstruse ethical meaning was abandoned long ago, and the world of
to-day accepts the Dioscuri frankly for what they are, admiring, with
a wonder not unmixed with despair, the unreclaimable art of ancient
Greece.
“Ye too marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo
Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement,
Stand with upstretched arms and tranquil, regardant faces,
Stand as instinct with life, in the might of immutable manhood--
Oh, ye mighty and strange--ye ancient divine ones of Hellas!”
Whatever may have been the lot of the Dioscuri in the unaccounted-for
days of the past, since Sixtus V placed them here they have been in
the very thick of Roman political life. Around and about them have
surged some of the worst mobs of modern Roman history; and under their
“tranquil, regardant faces” crowds of peaceful, expectant citizens
have gathered from time to time during the last two centuries of papal
government. Here they have waited during papal elections to watch for
the smoke from the chimney of the Quirinal which should indicate to the
outside world that no choice had yet been made by the Conclave, since
the cardinals were burning the ballots. Here they have received the
blessing of the newly elected Pope, which was given from the balcony of
the window over the entrance.
Sixtus V died in the Quirinal Palace. His pontificate had lasted but
five years, and it remains to this day one of the most memorable
periods in the development and power of Rome. Never had Pope done
more for his people; yet, when he came to die, the Romans had
already forgotten the benefits of his pontificate and remembered
only the severities. They recalled the fact that this Sixtus who was
dying as the head of Christendom had been born a poor gardener’s
son. Such dramatic contrasts exercise great sway over the Roman
mind--superstition and fancy played with the story, and strange rumors
drifted about concerning an unholy bargain which Sixtus was said to
have made for power. Here, before the palace which he had built, the
silent crowds gathered to await his end; and when, as the old pontiff
drew his last breath, that terrific thunderstorm broke over the
Quirinal, men shuddered and fled, saying and believing that the Prince
of Darkness had come in person for the soul of the monk whom he had
made Pope. Kindly old Sixtus! It was well that he could not know how
the poor whom he had always remembered would remember him!
Across the Monte Cavallo, to pause before the balcony of the Quirinal,
came in 1840 that extraordinary funeral cortège which carried the body
of Lady Gwendolin Talbot, Princess Borghese, to be laid in the Borghese
chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At seven in the evening of October 30,
by torchlight, amid a silence so profound that the low prayers of the
priests were distinctly audible, the procession moved slowly along the
three-quarters of a league from the Borghese Palace to the church of S.
Maria Maggiore. Soldiers with reversed arms, mounted dragoons, mourning
carriages, religious societies, priests, prelates, and all the Roman
poor, comprised the train. The funeral car was drawn, not by horses
but by forty Romans dressed in deep mourning. Flowers were thrown upon
the bier from the palaces along the Corso, and when the procession
reached Monte Cavallo and paused before the Quirinal, from the balcony
over the entrance Pope Gregory XVI gave his final blessing to the
beautiful young princess, dead at twenty-two, and saint if ever there
has been one. All the poor of Rome felt that they had lost a friend and
benefactress, the like of whom would not come again. Later, when Prince
Borghese wished to know the names of those who had drawn the funeral
car, he was only told that they were Romans!
Up the slopes of Monte Cavallo in February, 1798, came with their
tricolored cockades the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army.
They entered the Quirinal and called upon Pope Pius VI to renounce the
temporal power. The eighteenth-century pontiff calmly refused to comply
with this preposterous demand. That refusal lost him the tiara and
brought about his death eighteen months later in a French fortress.
Rome was metamorphosed into a republic, but this obscuration of the
papal power was only temporary. When Pius VI died, at Valence, in
August, 1799, the cardinals held their Conclave at Venice, and on March
14, 1804, elected Pius VII (Chiaramonti, 1804–1823), who returned to
Rome the following July. This was the Pope who, after many misgivings,
consented to crown Napoleon. Five years later, when the Emperor
proceeded to annex the Papal States to his empire, this was the Pope
who excommunicated him.
Few of St. Peter’s successors have been called upon to suffer and
to dare more than the good and gentle Pius VII. His Italian nature
comprehended to an unusual degree the strange character of Napoleon,
enduring with perfect composure the Emperor’s outbursts of histrionic
rage, and daring to bring him back to business by the single word,
“comedian.” He braved no less calmly Napoleon’s genuine anger at the
bull of excommunication, and refused to cancel it. Consequently, on the
night of July 5, 1809, the Emperor’s soldiers broke into the Quirinal
and took the Pope prisoner. For a moment, standing under the stars
which looked down upon Monte Cavallo, Pius VII blessed his sleeping
city, and then was hurried away from Rome to that wandering exile,
depicted in the frescoes of the Vatican Library, which was only brought
to an end by Napoleon’s fall. Then the States of the Church were
restored to the papacy, and the Quirinal Palace once more received the
aged pontiff.
In the quiet sunset of his days, which outlasted by two years the
life of the great conqueror, the Pope had time to erect the fountain
of Monte Cavallo, and to begin or continue the architectural and
archæological projects connected with his name.
In that brief halcyon period immediately following Pius IX’s election
to the Holy See, in 1846, the Quirinal Palace and the Monte Cavallo
were in a state of unwonted and constant activity. Pius played with
all his heart the rôle of the liberal Pope, both he and the Romans
mistaking his amiable disposition for liberal political convictions.
Day after day the Romans thronged the space before the palace, waiting
for their idol, who was sure to appear some time on the balcony over
the entrance. Standing there in his white robe, his dark eyes glowing
with sympathetic emotion, he would bless the people with uplifted hand
and in the most moving and beautiful of voices. If the hour was late,
he might add the injunction to go home to bed! The attitude of the Pope
and people at this time is epitomized in the story of the ragged little
boy who one day found himself in the Quirinal Gardens face to face with
the Holy Father. Dazed and enraptured, he poured forth the pitiful
tale of his hardships to the handsome and compassionate countenance
bending over him, and the wonderful voice comforted him with promises
of redress--promises which both pontiff and child believed in
passionately.
There is about this period of Pius IX’s life, with its visits to the
prisons, its charities and public appearances, a strange atmosphere of
unreality. A factitious glamour blinded the popular mind, and the Pope
lived upon pious and ideal illusions--as Marie Antoinette had played at
simplicity and a return to Nature on the eve of the Revolution.
When the golden charm was broken by the outbreak of the Revolution in
Palermo and the murder of Pellegrino Rossi in Rome, the frightened
pontiff, turning from an angry people, whom in the nature of things
he could not possibly satisfy, appealed to the most reactionary of
all the Italian powers, the King of Naples, or “Bomba.” Then the
Quirinal witnessed the last act which the papacy was to play within
its precincts. The Pope and one attendant escaped from the palace by
a small side door in the garden wall and fled across the frontier to
Gaeta, on Neapolitan territory. He carried with him the pyx which
Pius VII had carried when he also had quitted the Quirinal in haste
thirty-nine years before; but, unlike Pius VII, Pius IX never returned
thither. When he came back to Rome the Vatican received him.
The Quirinal, the third one of the papal palaces, has become a symbol
of the actual sovereignty of Rome, and, in 1871, it passed with the
temporal power from Pope Pius IX to Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy.
The cardinals’ coaches no longer drive about the fountain of Pius VII.
The consistories are held in the Vatican; and on the Monte Cavallo the
Bersaglieri have superseded the papal Zouaves. Over the Quirinal the
pontifical yellow and white has given way to the green and white and
red of United Italy. “Old things are passed away. Behold, all things
have become new”--once again in the city of eternal change.
[Illustration]
APPENDIX
INSCRIPTIONS IN PIAZZA DI SPAGNA ON THE SPANISH STEPS
I
D. O. M.
MAGNIFICAM HANC SPECTATOR QVAM MIRARIS SCALAM
VT COMMODAM AC ORNAMENTVM NON EXIGVVM
REGIO COENOBIO IPSIQ. VRBI ALLATVRAM
ANIMO CONCEPIT LEGATAQ. SVPREMIS IN TABVLIS PECVNIA
VNDE SVMPTVS SVPPEDITARENTVR CONSTRVI MANDAVIT
NOBILIS GALLVS STEPHANVS GVEFFIER
QVI REGIO IN MINISTERIO DIV PLVRES APVD PONTIFICES
ALIOSQVE SVBLIMES PRINCIPES EGREGIE VERSATVS
ROMAE VIVERE DESIIT XXX. IVNII MDCLXI.
OPVS AVTEM VARIO RERVM INTERVENTV
PRIMVM SVB CLEMENTE XI
CVM MVLTI PROPONERENTVR MODVLI ET FORMAE
IN DELIBERATIONE POSITVM
DEINDE SVB INNOCENTIO XIII. STABILITVM
ET R. P. BERTRANDI MONSINAT TOLOSATIS
ORD. MINIMORVM S. FRANCISCI DE PAVLA CORRECTORIS GENLIS
FIDEI CVRAEQ. COMMISSVM AC INCHOATVM
TANDEM BENEDICTO XIII FELICITER SEDENTE
CONFECTVM ABSOLVTVMQVE EST
ANNO JVBILEI MDCCXXV
II
D. O. M.
SEDENTE BENEDICTO XIII
PONT. MAX.
LUDOVICO XV
IN GALLIIS REGNANTE
EIVSQ. APVD SANCTAM SEDEM
NEGOTIIS PRÆPOSITO
MELCHIORE S. R. ECCLESIÆ
CARDINALI DE POLIGNAC
ARCHIEPISCOPO AVSCITANO
AD SACRÆ ÆDIS ALMÆQVE VRBIS
ORNAMENTVM
AC CIVIVM COMMODVM
MARMOREA SCALA
DIGNO TANTIS AVSPICIIS OPERE
ABSOLVTA
ANNO DOMINI MDCCXXV
TRANSLATION OF ABOVE
I
O spectator, this magnificent stairway which you gaze at in wonder,
that it might afford convenience and no small ornament to the city,
the noble Frenchman Etienne Guéffier conceived in his mind, and, money
having been left in his will whence to defray expenses, ordered it to
be built. He conducted himself with distinction in the service of the
King at the courts of several pontiffs and other sublime princes, and
died in Rome the thirtieth of June, 1661.
The work, however, was interrupted by a variety of things, and first
in the reign of Clement XI there were placed before a council many
plans and designs. It was decided upon under Clement XI, and, being
intrusted to the faithful care of the Reverend Father Bertrand Monsinat
of Toulouse, corrector generalis of the lesser order of St. Francis de
Paul, was begun, and finally, Benedict XIII blessedly seated upon the
papal chair, was brought to an end in the year of jubilee, 1725.
II
Benedict XIII sitting in the papal chair as Pontifex Maximus; Louis XV
reigning in France; Melchior de Polignac, Cardinal of the Holy Roman
Church, and Archbishop of Aquitaine, being his minister at the sacred
see; these marble steps, in a manner worthy of such auspices, for the
ornamentation of the sacred temple (the church above) and the beloved
city, and for the convenience of the citizens, were completed in the
year of our Lord, 1725.
FOOTNOTES