since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies;
and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third--a famous
chronicler in his day--and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the
restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were
brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the
Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between
Colonna and Orsini.
It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of
Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed
the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine.
So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had
taken their title, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of
their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of
crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at
any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and
without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which
Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see
one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole
by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose
name was 'of the oak'--for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one
please.
Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of
piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little
above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last
vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure
which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last
trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days
there were strange superstitions and ceremonies connected with the
bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the
procession on the Ides of May,--the fifteenth of that month,--when the
Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men
who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies,
and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and
hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was
believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once
sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere
thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to
prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber
for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise
sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnaeus Cornelius
Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a
law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for
scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark
superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the
frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more
barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable.
[Illustration: THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE]
Within the limits of this region the ancient Brotherhood of Saint John
Beheaded have had their church and place of meeting for centuries. It
was their chief function to help and comfort condemned criminals from
the midnight preceding their death until the end. To this confraternity
belonged Michelangelo, among other famous men whose names stand on the
rolls to this day; and doubtless the great master, hooded in black and
unrecognizable among the rest, and chanting the penitential psalms in
the voice that could speak so sharply, must have spent dark hours in
gloomy prisons, from midnight to dawn, beside pale-faced men who were
not to see the sun go down again; and in the morning, he must have stood
upon the very scaffold with the others, and seen the bright axe smite
out the poor life. But neither he nor any others of the brethren spoke
of these things except among themselves, and they alone knew who had
been of the band, when they bore the dead man to his rest at last, by
their little church, when they laid Beatrice Cenci before the altar in
Saint Peter's on the Janiculum, and Lucrezia in the quiet church of
Saint Gregory by the Aventine. They wrote down in their journal the
day, the hour, the name, the death; no more than that. And they went
back to their daily life in silence.
But for their good deeds they obtained the right of saving one man from
death each year, conceded them by Paul the Third, the Farnese Pope,
while Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment--a right perhaps asked
for by him, as one of the brothers, and granted for his sake. Baracconi
has discovered an account of the ceremony. At the first meeting in
August, the governor of the confraternity appointed three brethren to
visit all the prisons of Rome and note the names of the prisoners
condemned to death, drawing up a precise account of each case, but
ascertaining especially which ones had obtained the forgiveness of those
whom they had injured. At the second meeting in August, the reports were
read, and the brethren chose the fortunate man by ballot.
[Illustration: PORTO SAN SEBASTIANO]
Then the whole dark company went in procession to the prison. The beadle
of the order marched first, bearing his black wand in one hand, and in
the other a robe of scarlet silk and a torch for the pardoned man; two
brothers followed with staves, others with lanterns, more with lighted
torches, and after them was borne the crucifix, the sacred figure's arms
hanging down, perhaps supposed to be in the act of receiving the
pardoned man, and a crown of silvered olive hung at its feet--then more
brothers, and last of all the Governor and the chaplain. The prison
doors were draped with tapestries, box and myrtle strewed the ground,
and the Governor received the condemned person and signed a receipt for
his body. The happy man prostrated himself before the crucifix, was
crowned with the olive garland, the Te Deum was intoned, and he was led
away to the brotherhood's church, where he heard high mass in sight of
all the people. Last, and not least, if he was a pauper, the brethren
provided him with a little money and obtained him some occupation; if a
stranger, they paid his journey home.
But the Roman rabble, says the writer, far preferred an execution to a
pardon, and would follow a condemned man to the scaffold in thousands.
If he was to be hanged, the person who touched the halter was the most
fortunate, and much money was often paid for bits of the rope; and at
night, when the wretched corpse was carried away to the church by the
brethren, the crowd followed in long procession, mumbling prayers, to
kneel on the church steps at last and implore the dead man's liberated
spirit to suggest to them, by some accident, numbers to be played at the
lottery--custom which recalls the incantations of the witches by the
crosses of executed slaves on the Esquiline.
[Illustration]
REGION XIII TRASTEVERE
All that part of Rome which lies on the right bank of the Tiber is
divided into two Regions; namely, Trastevere and Borgo. The first of
these is included between the river and the walls of Urban the Eighth
from Porta Portese and the new bridge opposite the Aventine to the
bastions and the gate of San Spirito; and Trastevere was the last of the
thirteen Regions until the end of the sixteenth century, when the
so-called Leonine City was made the fourteenth and granted a captain and
a standard of its own.
The men of Trastevere boast that they are of better blood than the other
Romans, and they may be right. In many parts of Italy just such small
ancient tribes have kept alive, never intermarrying with their
neighbours nor losing their original speech. There are villages in the
south where Greek is spoken, and others where Albanian is the language.
There is one in Calabria where the people speak nothing but Piedmontese,
which is as different from the Southern dialects as German is from
French. Italy has always been a land of individualities rather than of
amalgamations, and a country of great men, rather than a great country.
It is true that the Trasteverines have preserved their individuality,
cut off as they have been by the river from the modernizing influences
which spread like a fever through the length and breadth of Rome. Their
quarter is full of crooked little streets and irregularly shaped open
places, the houses are not high, the windows are small and old
fashioned, and the entrances dark and low. There are but few palaces and
not many public buildings. Yet Trastevere is not a dirty quarter; on the
contrary, to eyes that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity
in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod
publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The
contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region,
has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome
is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was
trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In
the architecture of the so-called new quarters the very gifts of the
Italians turned against them; for they are born engineers and
mathematicians, and by a really marvellous refinement of calculation
they have worked miracles in the construction of big buildings out of
altogether insufficient material, while the Italian workman's
traditional skill in modelling stucco has covered vast surfaces of
unsafe masonry with elaborately tasteless ornamentation. One result of
all this has been a series of catastrophes of which a detailed account
would appal grave men in other countries; another consequence is the
existence of a quantity of grotesquely bad street decoration, much of
which is already beginning to crumble under the action of the weather.
It is sadder still, in many parts of Monti to see the modern ruins of
houses which were not even finished when the crash put an end to the
building mania, roofless, windowless, plasterless, falling to pieces and
never to be inhabited--landmarks of bankruptcy, whole streets of
dwellings built to lodge an imaginary population, and which will have
fallen to dust long before they are ever needed, stuccoed palaces meant
to be the homes of a rich middle class, and given over at derisory rents
to be the refuge of the very poor. In the Monti, ruin stares one in the
face, and poverty has battened upon ruin, as flies upon garbage.
But Trastevere escaped, being despised by the builders on account of its
distance from the chief centres. It has even preserved something of the
ancient city in its looks and habits. Then, as now, the wine shops and
cook shops opened directly upon the street, because they were, as they
still often are, mere single, vaulted chambers, having no communication
with the inner house by door or stairway. The little inner court, where
the well is, may have been wider in those days, but it must always have
been a cool, secluded place, where the women could wrangle and tear one
another's hair in decent privacy. In the days when everything went to
the gutter, it was a wise precaution to have as few windows as possible
looking outward. In old Rome, as in Trastevere, there must have been an
air of mystery about all dwelling-houses, as there is everywhere in the
East. In those days, far more than now, the head of the house was lord
and despot within his own walls; but something of that power remains by
tradition of right at the present time, and the patriarchal system is
not yet wholly dead. The business of the man was to work and fight for
his wife and children, just as to fight and hunt for his family were the
occupations of the American Indian. In return, he received absolute
obedience and abject acknowledgment of his superiority. The
government-fed Indian and the Roman father of today do very little
fighting, working, or hunting, but in their several ways they still
claim much of the same slavish obedience as in old times. One is
inclined to wonder whether nowadays the independence of women is not due
to the fall in value of men, since it is no longer necessary to pursue
wild beasts for food, since fighting is reduced to a science, taught in
three months, and seldom needed for a long time, and since work has
become so largely the monopoly of the nimble typewriter. Women ask
themselves and others, with at least a show of justice, since man's
occupation is to sit still and think, whether they might not, with a
little practice, sit quite as still as he and think to as good a
purpose. In America, for instance, it was one thing to fell big trees,
build log huts, dam rivers, plough stony ground, kill bears, and fight
Indians; it is altogether another to sit in a comfortable chair before a
plate-glass window, and dictate notes to a dumb and skilful
stenographer.
But with the development of women's independence, the air of privacy,
not to say of mystery, disappears from the modern dwelling. In
Trastevere things have not gone as far as that. One cannot tread the
narrow streets without wondering a little about the lives of the grave,
black-haired, harsh-voiced people who go in and out by the dark
entrances, and stand together in groups in Piazza Romana, or close to
Ponte Sisto, early in the morning, and just before midday, and again in
the cool of the evening.
It seems to be a part of the real simplicity of the Italian Latin to put
on a perfectly useless look of mystery on all occasions, and to assume
the air of a conspirator when buying a cabbage; and more than one gifted
writer has fallen into the error of believing the Italian character to
be profoundly complicated. One is too apt to forget that it needs much
deeper duplicity to maintain an appearance of frankness under trying
circumstances than to make a mystery of one's marketing and a profound
secret of one's cookery. There are few things which the poor Italian
more dislikes than to be watched when he is buying and preparing his
food, though he will ask any one to share it with him when it is ready;
but he is almost as prone to hide everything else that goes on inside
his house, unless he has fair warning of a visit, and full time to make
preparation for a guest. In the feeling there is great decency and
self-respect, as well as a wish to show respect to others.
[Illustration: PONTE GARIBALDI]
To Romans, Trastevere suggests great names--Stefaneschi, Anguillara,
Mattei, Raphael, Tasso. The story of the first has been told already.
Straight from the end of the new bridge that bears the name of
Garibaldi, stands the ancient tower of the great Guelph house of
Anguillara that fought the Orsini long and fiercely, and went down at
last before them, when it turned against the Pope. And when he was dead
the Orsini bought the lands and strongholds he had given to his
so-called nephew, and set the eel of Anguillara in their own escutcheon,
in memory of a struggle that had lasted more than a hundred years. The
Anguillara were seldom heard of after that; nor does anything remain of
them today but the melancholy ruins of an ancient fortress on the lake
of Bracciano, not far from the magnificent castle, and the single tower
that bears their name in Rome.
But Baracconi has discovered a story or a legend about one of them who
lived a hundred years later, and who somehow was by that time lord of
Caere, or Ceri, again, as some of his ancestors had been. It was when
Charles the Fifth came to Rome, and there were great doings; for it was
then that the old houses that filled the lower Forum were torn down in a
few days to make him a triumphal street, and many other things were
done. Then the Emperor gave a public audience in Rome, and out of
curiosity the young Titta dell' Anguillara went in to see the imperial
show. There he saw that a few of the nobles wore their caps, and he,
thinking himself as good as they, put on his own. The Grand Chamberlain
asked him why he was covered. 'Because I have a cold,' he answered, and
laughed. He was told that only Grandees of Spain might wear their caps
in the Emperor's presence. 'Tell the Emperor,' said the boy, 'that I,
too, am a Grandee in my house, and that if he would take my cap from my
head, he must do it with his sword,' and he laid his hand to the hilt of
his own. And when the Emperor heard the story, he smiled and let him
alone.
Many years ago, before the change of government, the Trasteverine
family, into whose possession the ancient tower had come, used to set
out at Christmas-tide a little show of lay figures representing the
Nativity and the Adoration of the Kings, in the highest story of the
strange old place, and almost in the open air. It was a pretty and a
peaceful sight. The small figures of the Holy Family, of the Kings, of
the shepherds and their flocks, were modelled and coloured with
wonderful skill, and in the high, bright air, with the little landscape
as cleverly made up as the figures, it all stood out clearly and
strangely lifelike. There were many of these Presepi, as they were
called, in Rome at that season, but none so pretty as that in the gloomy
old tower, of which every step had been washed with blood.
Of all tales of household feud and vengeance and murder that can be
found in old Rome, one of the most terrible is told of the Mattei, whose
great palace used to stand almost opposite the bridge of Saint
Bartholomew, leading to the island, and not more than two hundred yards
from the Anguillara tower. It happened in the year 1555, about the time
when Paul the Fourth, of inquisitorial memory, was elected Pope, thirty
years before the sons of the Massimo murdered their father's unworthy
wife, and Orsini married Victoria Accoramboni; and the deeds were done
within the walls of the old house of which a fragment still remains in
the Lungaretta, with a door surmounted by the chequered shield of the
Mattei.
[Illustration: PALAZZO MATTEI
From a print of the last century]
At that time there were four brothers of the name, Marcantonio, Piero,
Alessandro, and Curzio; and the first two quarrelled mortally, wherefore
Piero caused Marcantonio to be murdered by hired assassins. Of these
men, Alessandro, who dearly loved both his murdered brother and his
younger brother Curzio, slew one with his own hand, but the rest
escaped, and he swore a blood feud against Piero. Yet, little by little,
his anger subsided, and there was a sort of armed peace between the two.
Then it happened that Piero, who was rich, fell in love with his own
niece, the beautiful Olimpia, the dowerless daughter of his other
brother Curzio; and Curzio, tempted by the hope of wealth, consented to
the match, and the dispensation of the Church was obtained for the
marriage. It is not rare, even nowadays, for a man to marry his niece in
Europe, whether they be Catholics or Protestants, but the Italians are
opposed to such marriages; and Alessandro Mattei, pitying the lovely
girl, whose life was to be sold for money, and bitterly hating the
murderer bridegroom, swore that the thing should not be. Yet he could
not prevent the wedding, for Piero was rich and powerful, and of a
determined character. So Piero was married, and after the wedding, in
the evening, he gave a great feast in his house, and invited to it all
the kinsmen of the family, with their wives.
And Alessandro Mattei came also, with his son, Girolamo, and bringing
with him two men whom he called his friends, but whom no one knew. These
were hired murderers, but Piero smiled pleasantly and made a pretence
of being well satisfied. The company feasted together, and drank old
wine, with songs and rejoicings of all sorts. Then Alessandro rose to go
home, for it was late, and Piero led him to the door of the hall to take
leave of him courteously, so that all the kinsfolk might see that there
was peace, for they were all looking on, some sitting in their places
and some standing up out of respect for the elder men as they went to
the door. Alessandro stood still, exchanging courtesies with his
brother, while his servants brought him his cloak, and the arquebuse he
carried at night for safety; for he had his palace across the Tiber,
where it stands today. Then taking the hand-gun, he spoke no more words,
but shot his brother in the breast, and killed him, and fled, leaving
his son behind, for the young man had wished to stay till the end of the
feast, and the two hired assassins had been brought by his father to
protect him, though he did not know it.
When they heard the shot, the women knew that there was blood, so they
sprang up and put out the lights in an instant, that the men might not
see to kill one another; therefore Curzio, the bride's father, did not
see that his brother Alessandro had gone out after the killing. He crept
about with a long knife, feeling in the dark for the embroidered doublet
which Alessandro wore, and when he thought that he had found it, he
struck; but it was Girolamo who was dressed like his father, and the
two who were to watch him were on each side of him, and one of them
feeling that Curzio was going to strike, and knowing him also by the
touch of what he wore, killed him quietly before his blow went home, and
dragged out Girolamo in haste, for the door was open, and there was some
light in the stairs, whence the servants had fled. But others had sought
Alessandro, and other blows had been dealt in the dark, and the bride
herself was wounded, but not mortally.
Girolamo and the man who had killed Curzio came to the Bridge of Saint
Bartholomew, where Alessandro was waiting, very anxious for his son; and
when he saw him in the starlight he drew a long breath. But when he knew
what had happened and how the murderer had killed Curzio to save the
boy, Alessandro was suddenly angry, for he had loved Curzio dearly. So
he quickly drew his dagger and stabbed the man in the breast, and threw
his body, yet breathing, over the bridge into the river. But that night
he left Rome secretly and quickly, and he lived out his days an outlaw,
while Girolamo, who was innocent of all, became the head of the Mattei
in Rome.
It is no wonder that the knife is a tradition in Trastevere. Even now it
is the means of settling difficulties, but less often by treachery than
in the other regions. For when two young men have a difference it is
usual for them to go together into some quiet inner court or walled
garden, and there they wind their handkerchiefs round their right wrists
and round the hilt of the knife to get a good hold, and they muffle
their left arms in their jackets for a shield, and face each other till
one is dead. If it be barbarous, it is at least braver than stabbing in
the dark.
Raphael is remembered in Trastevere for the beautiful little palace of
the Farnesina, which he decorated for the great and generous banker,
Agostino Chigi, and for the Fornarina, whose small house with its Gothic
window stands near the Septimian gate, where the old Aurelian wall
crosses Trastevere and the Lungara to the Tiber. And he has made
Trastevere memorable for the endless types of beauty he found there,
besides the one well-loved woman, and whom he took as models for his
work. He lived at the last, not in the house on the Roman side, which
belonged to him and is still called his, but in another, built by
Bramante, close to the old Accoramboni Palace, in the Piazza Rusticucci,
before Saint Peter's, and that one has long been torn down.
[Illustration: HOUSE BUILT FOR RAPHAEL BY BRAMANTE, NOW TORN DOWN]