Rome. The Biography of the City

ELEVEN RECOVERY AND REFORM

Less than ten years after the Sack of Rome, the city prepared to welcome the Emperor under whose banners the plunderers had invaded it. Charles V, now revered in Rome for his crusade against the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa, and crowned in 1520 as Holy Roman Emperor, was to enter Rome through the Porta S. Sebastiano which was to be extravagantly decorated with frescos and stucco work. He was to be escorted past the Baths of Caracalla and the Septizonium, under the Arch of Titus and across the Forum by a specially constructed road to the Arch of Septimius Severus, then down the Via di Marforio to the Piazza di S. Marco and over the river to the Piazza of St Peter's. All buildings which stood in the way of the Emperor's path were to be demolished: there was to be no impediment to the progress of the five hundred horsemen, the four thousand foot-soldiers marching seven abreast, and the fifty young men from Rome's leading families, all clad in violet silk, who, with cardinals, dignitaries and resplendent bodyguards, were to accompany the Emperor through the city. François Rabelais, who was then living in Rome as physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay, calculated that over two hundred houses had been pulled down as well as three or four churches. The while route was decorated under the supervision of Antonio da Sangallo the younger, assisted by Battista Franco, Raffaelo da Montelupo and Maerten van Heemskerck.

The pope responsible for this grand display was Alexander Farnese whose coronation as Paul III in 1534 had been celebrated by tournaments and pageants as if to assure the people that the sad days which had followed the Sack of Rome were now at last over. Soon afterwards the Pope had revived the Roman Carnival and had subsequently attended the traditional spectacle in which a herd of swine were driven with oxen off the summit of Monte Testaccio and were stabbed to death by mounted men with lances as they thudded to the ground.

Shrewd, clever and cunning, Pope Paul was also amiable and courteous. He spoke quietly, slowly and at length. Yet there was a sharp gleam in his small eyes, a hint of impatient combativeness that made men wary in his presence. He was feared as well as liked. His grandfather, a highly successful condottiere, had extended the already considerable possessions of his family around Lake Bolsena; his father had married an heiress of the powerful Caetani family; his beautiful sister, Giulia, had married an Orsini and had become the mistress of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. With the help of this useful connection, Alexander Farnese had prospered in the Church. As a cardinal, he had become its Treasurer, and he had much enlarged his fortune by the acquisition of numerous benefices. He had become rich enough to begin the building of that most splendid of High Renaissance palaces, the Palazzo Farnese,¹ which cost so much that even his resources were for a time exhausted by it and work had to cease, a misfortune advertised to passers-by in the Via Giulia by a placard inscribed with the words, ‘Alms for the building of the Farnese.’

In those days Alexander Farnese had been renowned for his worldly ways. He had four illegitimate children and was as unscrupulous in promoting their interests as any of his predecessors had been in promoting theirs: two of his grandchildren were created cardinals while still in their teens. But, although he never lost his faith in astrologers, consulting them before embarking upon any transaction or journey and rewarding them liberally when their prognostications proved well founded, he abandoned his most questionable secular habits before becoming Pope. As Pope, he displayed a real concern for Church reform, supporting new religious orders, confirming the militant Jesuit Order, founded by Ignatius Loyola, and calling the Council of Trent, thus encouraging the Counter-Reformation which the Sack of Rome had made imperative.

In Rome he was often to be seen walking about the streets inspecting the building projects which were at last beginning to make the city whole again after its devastation. Although his finances were sometimes so strained that he had to resort to a renewed sale of indulgences and even to appropriate money contributed by Spain for a crusade against the Turks, he kept Antonio da Sangallo and numerous other architects and craftsmen busy in reconstructing the Belvedere and the buildings on the Capitoline hill, in renewing the city's fortifications, in forming the Sala Regia² and the Cappella Paolina³ in the Vatican, and in resumed work upon St Peter's. He restored the University of Rome and increased the subsidies of the Vatican Library. He had himself painted three times by Titian and, determined to enlist the services of Michelangelo, he set out with ten cardinals for the great man's house on the Macel' de' Corvi.

Michelangelo had returned to Rome, aged fifty-nine, at the request of Clement VII who had asked him to decorate the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. He had not wanted to accept this commission, since he was desperately anxious to get back to work on Julius II's tomb. And in the time of the ill and weary Pope Clement he had been able to work on the tomb in secret while progressing slowly with cartoons for the Sistine Chapel wall. With the forceful Pope Paul III, however, Michelangelo could not prevaricate. The Pope was determined to have Michelangelo working for himself alone. ‘I have harboured this ambition for thirty years,’ he is reported to have said to Michelangelo. ‘And now that I am Pope I shall have it satisfied. I shall tear the tomb contract up. I am quite set upon having you in my service, come what may.’ One of the attendant cardinals, looking around the sculptor's studio, observed that the statue of Moses was alone worthy to do honour to the memory of Pope Julius. Another suggested that the remaining statues could be made by assistants from Michelangelo's models. The Pope, having seen the cartoons for the Sistine Chapel wall, became more insistent than ever. So Michelangelo gave way. He was appointed Chief Architect, Sculptor and Painter to the Vatican and began work on The Last Judgement in 1535.

When the fresco was revealed on All Hallows' Eve 1541, ‘it was seen’, so Vasari said, ‘that Michelangelo had not only excelled the masters who had worked in the chapel previously but had also striven to excel even the vaulting that he had made so famous. For The Last Judgement was by far the finer since Michelangelo imagined to himself all the terror of those fearful days.’⁴

The Pope himself was evidently so overwhelmed with emotion that he fell to his knees, crying ‘Lord, charge me not with my sins when thou shalt come on the Day of Judgement.’ So enthralled was he, indeed, by Michelangelo's genius that he would give him no respite from his labours, instructing him to start work now on frescos for the Cappella Paolina. Already he had interrupted his work on The Last Judgement by asking him to consider the problem of there being in Rome no impressive central square in which so great a state visitor as Charles V could be received. The Capitol was the natural place for such a square; and Michelangelo was required to construct one on the summit of the hill, and to design a suitable grand approach to it, the Cordonata.

Michelangelo began by designing a new base for the statue of Marcus Aurelius which the Pope decided should be the centre of the new piazza, the Piazza del Campidoglio. He then proposed that an oval shape, decorated with a complicated geometric design, should be inscribed around it. Opposite the Cordonata, beyond the statue and its oval surround, was to be a restored Palazzo del Senatore; on either side of this, opposite each other at a slightly canted angle, were to be a reconstructed Palazzo dei Conservatori and a new palace, the Palazzo Nuovo, now the Capitoline Museum. The whole design was not to be realized until the middle of the next century, but successive architects were careful to follow the master's plans.⁵

As it was with the Capitol, so it was with the Palazzo Farnese which, left unfinished at the time of Antonio da Sangallo's death, was completed by Giacomo della Porta who incorporated in it Michelangelo's designs for the cornice and the upper storey of the courtyard. So it was also with the Porta Pia which, designed by Michelangelo in 1561, was not finished until 1565, the year after he died. And so it was with St Peter's upon which, as capomaestro in unwilling succession to Antonio da Sangallo, Michelangelo spent his last unhappy years.

Still vigorous in old age, he could work almost as concentratedly as he had when carving one of St Peter's most treasured possessions, the Pietà.⁶ Even now he continued his labours far into the night, a heavy paper cap of his own devising serving as a holder for a candle. ‘He can hammer more chips out of very hard marble in fifteen minutes than three young stonecarvers can do in three or four hours,’ a French visitor to Rome recorded. ‘It has to be seen to be believed. He went at it with such fury and impetuosity that I thought the whole work would be knocked to pieces. He struck off with one blow chips three or four inches thick, so close to the mark that, if he had gone just a fraction beyond, he would have ruined the entire work.’

But these bursts of almost frenzied activity were now succeeded by bouts of illness, of cantankerous depression, of moods of bitterness in which he felt that the work on St Peter's had been imposed upon him as a penance by God. There were differences with the members of the Congregazione della Fabbrica di San Pietro, the works committee, whom the Pope's high regard allowed him to dominate. There were quarrels, too, with the assistants and followers of Sangallo who had hoped to carry on their master's plan. Michelangelo disapproved of this plan. He had never liked Bramante, but he conceded in a letter to a member of the Fabbrica that he was ‘as skilful in architecture as anyone from the time of the ancients up to now’, and he condemned Sangallo's plan on the grounds that it deprived Bramante's design ‘of all light’. ‘And that's not all,’ he added in a passage that illustrates the hazards of life in sixteenth-century Rome. ‘It has no light of its own. And its numerous hiding-places, above and below, all dark, lend themselves to innumerable knaveries, such as providing shelter for bandits, for coining money, ravishing nuns, and other rascalities, so that in the evening when the church is to be closed, it would take twenty-five men to seek out those who are hiding inside, and because of its peculiar construction, they would be hard to find.’

Michelangelo put forward a new design, closer in spirit to Bramante's, though proposing a dome of a different shape and dispensing with the corner towers. A wooden model of this design was offered to the Pope in 1547 and was eagerly accepted. So the work proceeded under Michelangelo's directions. But it proceeded slowly. Money was short, the members of the Fabbrica were hostile; in 1549 Paul III died and was succeeded by Julius III who was sympathetic towards the capomaestro yet less willing to support him unreservedly. Michelangelo himself was growing very old and was often ill, suffering from stone which made it difficult for him to urinate, gave him intense pain in his back and side and prevented him from going to St Peter's as often as he should have done. The Fabbrica, increasingly dissatisfied with him, appointed one of his leading critics, Nanni di Baccio Bigio, as Superintendent of the Basilica. This indifferent artist was dismissed by the Pope, who disposed also of another rival, Pirro Ligorio, by giving him the post of Palace Architect, in which capacity he created the delightful Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens.⁷ But Michelangelo, approaching ninety, was now too aged to cope with the multiple difficulties and frustrations that daily beset him. He was rumoured to be in his dotage, and he confirmed the stories himself. ‘I've lost my brains and my memory,’ he told Vasari; and to his nephew, Lionardo, he wrote, ‘I am so ill in body so often that I cannot climb the stairs and the worst is that I am filled with pains… I did not acknowledge the trebbiano [white wine]… Writing, being old as I am, is very irksome to me… But thank you… It's the best you've ever sent me… I'm sorry, though, you put yourself to this expense, particularly as I've no longer anyone to give it to, since all my friends are dead.’

Michelangelo himself died on 18 February 1564. He was followed to the tomb, in Vasari's words, by a great concourse of artists and ‘was buried in the Church of SS. Apostoli in the presence of all Rome’.⁸ Florence claimed his remains, however, and his body was ‘smuggled out of Rome by some merchants, concealed in a bale, so that there should be no tumult’.

The final months of his long life had been clouded by disappointment that the last of the popes he had served, Paul IV, had had no real sympathy for Renaissance art and had been so disgusted by the nudes in Michelangelo's The Last Judgement that he was with difficulty dissuaded from having the whole fresco destroyed. His predecessor, Julius III, on the other hand, while also a dedicated reformer who reopened the Council of Trent and supported the Jesuits, was much more enlightened and far more responsive to beauty. He built the enchanting Villa Giulia,⁹ whose gardens, planted with nearly forty thousand trees – cypress, pomegranates, myrtles and bays - contained a beautiful fountain by Bartolommeo Ammanati. He bought the so-called ‘statue of Pompey’,¹⁰ against which Caesar was supposed to have been murdered and which was discovered in the 1550s in the Via dei Leutari, and he arranged for it to be placed in the Palazzo Spada,¹¹ then the home of Cardinal Capodiferro. And he appointed the greatest of Italian Renaissance composers, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, director of the Cappella Giulia in St Peter's.

Pope Paul IV, in striking contrast, declined to concern himself with such activities. Austere, uncompromising and rigidly orthodox, he was a member of the noble Neapolitan Carafa family and an unquestioning supporter of the Roman Inquisition. Preoccupied with Church discipline and international affairs, with the detested Spanish monarchy, with the excommunication of Elizabeth of England, the threat from the Muslims and the suppression of the heretics of the Netherlands, he insisted that virtue, not beauty, should be the concern of popes. He had the statuary taken out of the Villa Giulia and would have removed it also from the Cortile del Belvedere had he not been persuaded to content himself with stripping the reliefs from the walls and closing it to the public.

Paul IV would, indeed, have liked to destroy all the ancient monuments in the city on the grounds that they were the work of pagans. During his reign, sexual misconduct was punished with the most savage ferocity and sodomites were burned alive. Jews, confined in the ghetto, were made to wear an identifying badge and excluded from many occupations and all honourable positions. The Pope made himself so detested in Rome that upon his death the head of his statue upon the Capitol was struck off, dragged through the streets and thrown into the Tiber, while the monastery of the Dominicans, blamed for the excesses of the Inquisition, was stormed by a furious mob.

The former Dominican friar who became Pope Pius V in 1566 was quite as austere and ascetic a man and as severe a reformer as Paul IV. The son of poor parents and a shepherd himself until he was fourteen, he had achieved high office in the Inquisition, even though he had displayed such excessive zeal in pursuing and punishing the unfaithful during his first appointment in Como that he had been recalled. He had been promoted Commissary General of the Roman Inquisition and afterwards Grand Inquisitor. After his election as Pope, the Curia, the Church and the city were alike subject to disciplines which satisfied all but the most rigorous proponents of the Counter-Reformation. Members of religious orders were subjected to far stricter rules; bishops were required to spend much longer periods in their sees; nepotism was suppressed and the granting of indulgences and dispensations restricted. The powers of the Inquisition were increased and its scope widened so that none was safe from its grasp. The Congregation of the Index drew up a list of prohibited books, and obliged several printers to flee from Rome. Prostitutes were driven out of the city or required to live in restricted areas. Jews, expelled from the Papal States, were permitted to remain in Rome only in conditions even more humiliating than those to which they had been subjected in the days of Paul IV. Their traditional race during the Carnival was no longer allowed to take place along the course between S. Lucia¹² and St Peter's which it had followed for many years, but was moved to the Corso ‘out of respect for the Apostles’.

Pius V's two successors, Gregory XIII and Sixtus V, both continued the process of reform which had followed upon the Sack of Rome, and both on occasions appeared excessive in their zeal: Gregory, who was responsible for the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 and for promoting the world-wide missionary activity of the Church, went so far as to celebrate the massacre of the Huguenots in France on St Bartholomew's Day with a Te Deum, while Sixtus, who reformed the Curia and limited the number of members of the Sacred College to seventy, had had to be recalled from Venice because of his extreme severity there as Inquisitor General. But both these popes were also dedicated builders and both enriched Rome. Pope Gregory founded the Collegio Romano¹³ and gave large sums of money to the Jesuit Church, the Gesù,¹⁴ as well as to S. Maria in Vallicella.¹⁵ This last was the church of the Oratorians, the congregation founded by St Philip Neri, whose stress on beauty in worship, especially on good music, and whose advocacy of visual imagery as an aid to devotion helped to make them not only one of the greatest religious orders of the Counter-Reformation but also a pervasive influence on the artistic life of Rome. Their patron, Gregory XIII, also built the conduits from which the Via Condotti takes its name and had fountains constructed throughout the city such as those in Piazza Nicosia and Piazza Colonna.¹⁶ He founded the Accademia di S. Luca;¹⁷ and in 1574, as a summer residence for the popes, he began the Quirinal Palace.¹⁸

It was the strong-willed Sixtus V, however, who left his mark upon Rome more indelibly than any other pope of the Counter-Reformation. An ambitious, not to say ruthless, town-planner, he achieved so much in his short reign from 1585 to 1590 that men supposed him to have been considering the transformation of the city long before his election. Certainly it seems that, although he was the son of the poorest parents and had spent his early years as a swineherd in the bleak mountains of the Marche, he had for long believed that he, Felice Peretti, would one day rise to supreme authority in the Church. Sixty-four at the time of his election, in poor health and suffering from persistent insomnia, he undertook the task he had set himself as though he had no time to lose. He first restored the city's water supply, mending Alexander Severus's aqueduct, the Acqua Alessandrina – renamed after himself the Acqua Felice – as well as the underground pipes which led from Palestrina, thus providing an ample source for the houses and gardens and the twenty-seven fountains of Rome. He then turned his attention to the building of new bridges across the Tiber, and to the construction, widening and rerouting of streets, determined to extend Rome beyond the congested older parts of the city, northwards and eastwards up to and beyond S. Maria Maggiore and Trinità dei Monti, these two churches themselves being connected by a new street, the Via Sistina. Other streets were planned to radiate from S. Maria Maggiore to link together the major basilicas. Obelisks were re-erected at important crossings, such as the obelisk which was brought from Heliopolis by Augustus and, formerly standing in the Circus Maximus, was placed in 1589 in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo.¹⁹ ‘In three years’ wrote the Venetian ambassador admiringly, ‘all this area will be inhabited.’

Praiseworthy as this town-planning was deemed to be, the Pope's treatment of ancient buildings horrified many Romans. It was considered perfectly acceptable to place statues of Saints Peter and Paul on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; but his demolition of the remains of the Septizonium and his intention, unrealized, to turn the Colosseum into a wool factory aroused widespread condemnation. So did the destruction of large parts of the Lateran Palace which he ruthlessly carried out, insisting that, in time, he would deal with other ‘ugly antiquities’ in the same way. He did not live long enough to execute his threat, even had he meant it to be taken seriously. But, before he died, additions to the Lateran, the Vatican and the Quirinal Palaces had all been begun or completed. Pius V's library had been extended across the Court of the Pine-cone²⁰ at the Vatican, while the Court of St Damasus²¹ had been completed by adding on to the papal apartments. The Sistine Loggia²² had been built at St John Lateran and the Cappella Sistina²³ in S. Maria Maggiore. Most gratifying of all, the work on St Peter's dome was almost finished at last.

For some years after the death of Michelangelo, little progress had been made at St Peter's. His successor as Chief Architect, Pirro Ligorio, had been dismissed in favour of Vignola who in 1573 had been succeeded by Giacomo della Porta. This Capomaestro had completed the Cappella Gregoriana²⁴ for his patron Gregory XIII; but it was not until the advent of Sixtus V that he was provided with the steadfast encouragement and, above all, with the funds, to press on with the dome as fast as he could. Financial reforms and traditional malpractices provided the money for over eight hundred workmen to be kept constantly employed not only by day but also at night so that the Pope might live to see the dome, as designed by Michelangelo, though modified into an ovoid rather than hemispherical shape by della Porta, soar triumphantly above the church.

At the same time, the Pope was determined to realize an ambition which others had set aside as too daunting – the removal to a more commanding setting of the great Egyptian obelisk,²⁵ for ages a major landmark of Rome, which was believed to have stood in the circus where the Christian martyrs were slaughtered in the days of Nero. It now rose to the south of the basilica, adjoining the chapel of St Andrew.²⁶ The Pope wanted it moved to the middle of the piazza in front of St Peter's and, having had erected there a wooden replica to see how the original would look, he advertised for a Leonardo da Vinci to undertake an operation that Michelangelo had said was impossible. Hundreds of plans were submitted from all over Europe, from mathematicians and engineers, from natural scientists and master masons, from philosophers and necromancers and, so it was said, from more than five hundred architects. Some were ludicrous, others ingenious, but none seemed practicable as a means of moving a solid stone monument eighty feet high and weighing five hundred tons through a densely built-up area. Bartolommeo Ammanati said that he could not at the moment think of a solution but that if the Pope would wait a year he was sure he would come up with the answer by then, a suggestion calculated to try His Holiness's limited patience to the utmost. Then, assuming a confidence he was far from feeling, Domenico Fontana, assistant Capomaestro at St Peter's, claimed that he could undertake the task and produced a little wooden model which lifted a leaden obelisk without difficulty. The Pope watched the operation approvingly and told Fontana to go ahead immediately and waste no further time.

As the days went by, Fontana became increasingly apprehensive. He was a small, self-satisfied man, loquacious, didactic, opinionated and pedantic. Several of his colleagues found him so irritating that they could not help hoping that his career would end in disaster. As he looked down into the huge hole which had been dug around the base of the obelisk, whose weight over the centuries had sunk it deep below the surface of the ground, he had forebodings of disaster himself. He thought it as well to order a relay of post-horses to be held in readiness in case he had to fly from the Pope's fury. But though an uninspired architect, Fontana was a most meticulous and methodical engineer. He had made all his calculations with the utmost care.

At two o'clock on 30 April 1586 the operation began. Every window and rooftop from which it could be observed was crammed with expectant faces. Below them the 800-strong St Peter's work-force, who had heard Mass at dawn, stood waiting by the ropes and windlasses for Fontana, standing on a raised platform, to give the signal for the obelisk to be raised from its pit. Protected by straw mats and by planks encircled with iron bands, it stood motionless and, so some of the crowd declared, immovable in its pyramidal scaffolding of stout poles and cross-beams.

And then as Fontana lifted up his hand, as trumpets blared and the workmen and 140 cart-horses pulled with all their strength upon the ropes, the windlasses creaked into motion and, to the cheers of the spectators, to the thunder of the guns of Castel Sant' Angelo and the pealing of bells, the immense monolith rose slowly out of the earth. It was later laid horizontally to the ground upon rollers.

An even larger crowd than had witnessed the raising of the obelisk gathered in the piazza of St Peter's to watch its re-erection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. They did so, however, in breathless silence, for the Pope had ordained that anyone uttering the slightest sound that might endanger the operation would be instantly executed: a gallows was erected in the piazza to lend fearsome authority to his order. Even so, as the obelisk was raised and for a moment seemed in danger of thudding back to the ground, a man's loud voice called out in Genoese dialect, ‘Aigua ae corde!’, ‘Water on the ropes!’ It was a sailor from Bordighera who had seen that they were about to burn and split with the heat of friction. His brave disobedience to the Pope's demand was rewarded by his being asked to name a favour he would like His Holiness to grant. He is said to have asked that his home town should be allowed to supply palms for St Peter's on Palm Sunday every year thereafter. The request was willingly granted and for centuries observed.

That night, as the obelisk stood firmly in position, resting on the backs of the four satisfied-looking bronze lions which still support it today, there were happy rejoicings in Rome, banquets, fireworks and dancing. The golden ball on the summit of the needle, long supposed to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar, was removed and found to be solid. It was replaced with a bronze cross, in one of whose arms was later placed a piece of the Holy Cross; and on the base of the obelisk were inscribed the words, ‘Ecce Crux Domini Fugite Partes Adversae’, the challenge of the Counter-Reformation.

Other pieces of the Holy Cross, contained in a lead casket, were placed within the crowning cross raised above the dome of St Peter's, which was finally completed on 21 May 1590. Together with these fragments were inserted relics of St Andrew, of St James the Great, of Popes St Clement I, Calixtus I and Sixtus III and seven Agni Dei – medallions of the Lamb of God, made of wax from paschal candles and dust from the bones of martyrs and blessed by the Pope in the first year of his pontificate and every seventh year afterwards.

Pope Sixtus V had lived to see the dome completed; but it was left to the pious Florentine, Pope Clement VIII, to have it covered with lead and to see the cross installed above the lantern. In 1594 Pope Clement celebrated his first Mass at the new high altar in St Peter's where della Porta had built for him the Cappella Clementina²⁷ opposite the Cappella Gregoriana by the entrance to the crypt. Soon afterwards, della Porta died and Fontana's nephew, Carlo Maderno, was appointed to succeed him. The age of the Baroque had begun.

TWELVE BERNINI AND THE BAROQUE

‘A little before my Comming to the Citty,’ wrote the English diarist, John Evelyn, during his visit to Rome in 1644, ‘Cavaliero Bernini, Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet… gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind) where in he painted the Seanes, cut the Statues, invented the Engines, composed the Musique, writ the Comedy and built the Theater all himself.’

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, then at the height of his astonishing powers, had been brought to Rome as a child by his father, a sculptor who had come from Naples to work in the Cappella Paolina¹ in the Church of S. Maria Maggiore. A precociously gifted and industrious boy, he had spent long hours studying in the Vatican, copying paintings and, as his own son was later to testify, making ‘so many sketches you wouldn't believe it’. By the age of eight he had already, with expert skill, carved a head in marble. The painter Annibale Carracci, who had been summoned to Rome to work at the Farnese Palace, said of him that he had arrived in childhood where others would be proud to be in their old age. He may have been as young as fifteen when he finished the assured Martyrdom of St Laurence, having put his own leg in the fire to study in a looking-glass the features of torment. Within a year or so he had completed the Martyrdom of St Sebastian and had long since gained the admiration of the Pope who, having commissioned a portrait bust from him, had expressed the hope that the young artist would ‘become the Michelangelo of this century’.

Camillo Borghese had been elected Pope and had chosen the title of Paul V in 1605. Tall, strong, healthy and vigorous with a neat moustache, triangular beard and myopic eyes that rendered his peering gaze disconcerting, he had the appearance of a shrewd and successful merchant; and he certainly made sure that his family, to whom he was devoted, enjoyed all the benefits that riches could bestow. Yet he was a devout man, most assiduous in prayer: he made his confession and said Mass every day; and, when celebrating, was ‘the ideal of the priesthood’. He was believed to have preserved his baptismal innocence. Charitable to the poor, he was also cultivated and indefatigably industrious. While he lavished money upon building and works of art, and indulged his nephews in their every whim, creating Marcantonio Borghese Prince of Vivaro, and loading Scipione with ecclesiastical offices and revenues, it was generally felt that such extravagance might be excused in one so conscientious, pious and chaste.

There was also a political motive behind his artistic patronage. The Roman Church which had evolved from the Counter-Reformation could not afford to be complacent: constantly assailed by its enemies, it was still vulnerable to attack, still beset by problems. There was trouble with the Venetian Republic over papal jurisdiction and ecclesiastical immunity; there was trouble, too, with England where the Protestant King James I had required Roman Catholics to take an unacceptable oath of allegiance; there were disturbances in Germany where differences between Catholics and Protestants were soon to lead to the Thirty Years’ War. Yet, while there was no cause for complacency, the Church could now afford to present – and, so its leaders henceforth believed, should present – a less formidable aspect to the world, to offer exhilaration rather than repression, to welcome rather than exclude, to enlist a less austere art in the service of the faith, to replace the cold mannerism into which the High Renaissance classicism had degenerated with that enthusiasm of feeling, that exuberant style later to be known as Baroque.

The many monumental fountains which Paul V created in Rome were harbingers of the wonders to come. In the days of the Emperor Trajan, as the Pope was fond of reminding visitors, there had been as many as 1,300 fountains in the city supplied by eleven aqueducts. And modern Rome, while it could not expect to have so many, deserved far more than it had. To provide an abundant supply of water for his new fountains, the Pope repaired the aqueduct of the Emperor Trajan, renamed the Acqua Paola, which carried water from the lake of Bracciano as far as the Trastevere; and to celebrate the completion of the restoration in 1612 he built the grandiose Fontanone dell' Acqua Paola on the Janiculum.² Other fountains were erected in the Cortile del Belvedere, in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, in the Piazza di Castello (destroyed in the revolution of 1849), in the Piazza di S. Maria Maggiore, in that of the Lateran, in the Via Cernaia ‘for the thirsty country people and the dust-covered carriers’, and, for the Jews, in the piazza of the synagogue. Three magnificent fountains were built in the Vatican gardens, the Fontana degli Specchi, the Fontana delle Torri and the Fontana dello Scoglio, all designed by Carlo Maderno who also built the fine fountain on the north side of St Peter's piazza, later to be matched on the south side by a fountain by Bernini.³

While these fountains were being erected all over Rome, the Pope was busy supervising the construction of the Borghese Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore, the removal of the huge classical pine-cone to the Cortile della Pigna at the Vatican, the restoration and decoration of several churches and the building of the new Church of S. Maria della Vittoria.⁴ He was also actively occupied in the enlargement of the Quirinal Palace, the embellishment of the Vatican, the paving of streets, and the adornment of his family's three palaces. These were the palace which had been built for Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto in the Borgo and which later became known as the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia; the Borghese Palace which, designed for the Spanish Cardinal Deza by Martino Longhi the elder, had been bought by the Pope in 1605 and soon afterwards presented to his nephew, Marcantonio;⁵ and the palace, later to be known as the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, which was designed by Giovanni Vasanzio and Carlo Maderno for the Pope's nephew, Scipione Borghese.⁶

Scipione, the extravagant, sybaritic and amiable cardinal whose expressive features have been captured for all time in Bernini's extraordinary lifelike bust,⁷ was as prodigal a patron as his uncle. He not only paid for the restoration of the Basilica of S. Sebastiano and for the construction of Giovan Battista Soria's magnificent façades for S. Gregorio Magno⁸ and S. Maria della Vittoria, but he also assembled one of the finest private collections of art and antiquities that the world has known. It contained some of the most impressive of Bernini's early works, including the Apollo and Daphne and the David, which were displayed – and can still be seen – in the villa that the Cardinal built for his own pleasure and the entertainment of his friends in the large park he had created beyond the Church of Trinità dei Monti.⁹

John Evelyn went to see this park one November day and thought that, from a distance, its wall, ‘full of small turrets and banqueting houses’, gave it the appearance of ‘a little Towne’.

Within is an Elysium of delight [Evelyn continued]… The Garden abounds with all sorts of the most delicious fruit, and Exotique simples: Fountaines of sundry inventions, Groves & small Rivulets of Water. There is also adjoyning it a Vivarium for Estriges, Peacocks, Swanns, Cranes, etc; and divers strange Beasts, Deare & Hares. The Grotto is very rare, and represents among other devices artificial raines and sundry shapes of vessells, Flowers & which is effected by changing the heads of the Fountaines. The Groves are of Cypresse and Lawrell, Pine, Myrtil, Olive etc. The 4 Sphinxes are very Antique and worthy observation. To this is a Volary full of curious birds… The prospect towards Rome & the invironing hills is incomparable, cover'd as they were with Snow (as commonly they continue even a greate part of summer) which afforded a sweet refreshing. About the house there is a stately Balustre of white Marble, with frequent jettos of Water & adorned with statues standing on a multitude of Bases, rendering a most graceful ascent. The walls of the house are covered with antique incrustations of history as that of… Europe's ravishment & that of Leda. The Cornices above them consist of frontages and Festoons, betwixt which are Niches furnished with statues, which order is observed to the very roofe. In the Lodges at the Entry are divers good statues of Consuls etc. with two Pieces of Field Artillery upon Carriages (a mode much practiz'd in Italy before the Greate Men's houses) which they looke on as a piece of state more than defence.

Inside the villa Evelyn was shown a wonderful collection of art and curiosities, of antique statues, oriental urns, ‘Tables of Pietra-Commessa’ and vases of porphyry, looking-glasses, clocks, ‘Instruments of Musique’, Bernini's sculptures, which he considered ‘for the incomparable Candor of the stone & art of the statuary, plainely stupendious’, and a ‘World of rare Pictures of infinite Value & of the best Masters’. ‘In a word nothing but magnificent [was] to be seene in this Paradise.’ Among the curiosities were a toy satyr ‘which so artificially express's an human Voice with the motion of eyes & head that would easily affright one who were not prepared for that most extravagant vision’, and a chair ‘which Catches fast any who sitte downe in it, so as not to be able to stir out of it, by certaine springs conceiled in the Arms and back thereoff, locking him in armes & thighs after a true tretcherous Italian guize’.

Beyond the walls of the villa the gardens were fully worthy of the horticultural centre which Rome had now become. There were giardini segreti in which the fragrance of orange blossom mingled with that of rare herbs; a sunken garden planted with anemones, hyacinths and narcissi, herbaceous borders, beds of carnations and tuberose; a tulip garden surrounded by roses; rows of strawberries hedged with jasmine. And at the approach to these delights the visitor was welcomed by a large marble tablet inscribed with the words, ‘Whoever thou art, so long as thou art a free man, fear not here the bonds of the laws! Go where thou wilt, ask whatever thou desirest, go away whenever thou wishest… Let seemly enjoyment be the guest's only law…’

At first all were freely admitted to the grounds, Romans and foreign visitors alike; but when a staid tourist was shocked by some of the pictures in a summerhouse, the Pope, sympathetic to such aversions, took the opportunity of ordering that the park should be closed to strangers. And thereafter he could retire to the villa in perfect peace to contemplate the view across the green park to the Campagna, while his more gregarious nephew could entertain his many friends without disturbance.

Throughout the life of Paul V, Bernini remained on excellent terms with the Pope and his family, his principal and generous patrons. But when Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came to the papal throne as Urban VIII in 1623, he required the exclusive services of the great sculptor and allowed him no time for other patrons, making only one exception in the case of Scipione Borghese who had helped him in his election. Otherwise Bernini was now a Barberini man; and when Cardinal Mazarin attempted to persuade him to go to work in France, the Pope was adamant in his refusal. ‘Bernini was made for Rome,’ he said, ‘and Rome was made for him.’

Maffeo Barberini was fifty-five at the time of his election, a good-looking, accomplished, masterful and highly intelligent man, a scholar and a poet. The son of a rich Florentine, he had both the means and taste to ensure that Rome deriveded the fullest benefits from Bernini's genius. He had known him well for long. Indeed, while Bernini was working on his David he supposedly held a looking-glass to the sculptor's face to provide a model for the hero's look of tense concentration. And as soon as he became Pope he sent for Bernini, then aged twenty-three, and said to him, ‘It is your great fortune, Cavaliere, to see Maffeo Barberini made Pope; yet our fortune is even greater, since Bernini lives in our pontificate.’

The friendship between the two men now deepened. The Pope was devoted to the younger man, as he might have been to a beloved son. ‘He is a rare man,’ the Pope declared, ‘a sublime artist, born by Divine Disposition and for the gory of Rome to illuminate the century.’ He gave instructions that the sculptor should be allowed to enter his room whenever he chose to do so, and begged him to have no reserve in his presence now that he was Pope. He asked Bernini to sit and talk to him while he was having dinner, and to stay until he fell asleep. And Bernini, a small, spare man who ate little apart from fruit, did what he was told. Wherea with others he was renowned for his independence and fiery temper, with the Pope, himself liable to bouts of excessive irascibility, Bernini was always pliable and patient, equable and polite.

Although the sculptor's earlier works in the new pontificate were relatively minor – a new façade for the Church of S. Bibiana,¹⁰ for example, and a statue of the saint to be placed inside it – the Pope had great plans for him in mind. And in the summer of 1626 Bernini was given the most important commission of his career so far, a monumental work for St Peter's which was to occupy him and numerous assistants, including his father, for nearly ten years.

The appearance of St Peter's had changed dramatically since the death of Michelangelo. The confused clutter of buildings of all periods and styles, mostly dilapidated and some dangerous, which still clustered beneath the dome when it was finished in 1590, had all been swept away. For, one stormy day in 1605, a big block of marble had fallen to the pavement during Mass, narrowly missing those members of the congregation who were standing by the altar of the Madonna della Colonna and driving them screaming from the church. The Fabbrica had been forced to conclude that the whole of the old, tottering remaining parts of the basilica must be demolished, and the Pope had reluctantly agreed, despite the protests from various cardinals and conservative Romans who reiterated the protests which Julius II and Bramante had had to face a hundred years before. Far more respect had been shown for the monuments and relics, however, than ‘il ruinante’ and Julius had had the patience to grant them. Records had been kept; corpses had been reverently disinterred and reburied with full honours elsewhere; treasures had been carefully packed and taken away, in many cases to the lasting benefit of other churches.

As della Porta's successor, and an architect whose work was much admired by Paul V, it had fallen to Carlo Maderno to build the new nave. He was then fifty-one years old, good-natured and amenable. He had worked with his uncle, Domenico Fontana, in erecting obelisks for Sixtus V; he had subsequently worked for another uncle whose studio specialized in the design of fountains; and he had himself designed several fountains, other than the one in St Peter's piazza, as well as a new façaade for the Church of S. Susanna.¹¹ He watched work begin on digging the foundations for his new nave at St Peter's on 8 March 1607, and he remained chief architect until his death over twenty years later, having provided the basilica with a nave which has been severely criticized for blocking the view of the dome from the piazza and a façade which has been as strongly condemned for being too wide in relation to its height.¹²

Appointed to succeed Maderno, Bernini proposed improving the facade by providing it with towers at either end as Maderno had originally intended. Pope Urban agreed to this and work began. Soon the first two stages of the south tower were finished, and a wooden and painted canvas model of the third stage had been placed in position above them. This addition to the basilica's facade was admired by all except Bernini's most jealous rivals. But then, to the architect's horrified mortification, cracks began to appear not only in the tower but also in the facade to which it was attached. Bernini's structure, hastily built while the unreliable members of the Fabbrica still approved of its design, was evidently much too heavy for Maderno's foundations which had not been intended for such a weight. Orders were immediately given for the tower to be demolished before further damage was done. Humiliated and castigated by the Fabbrica and even by the Pope, Bernini retired to his house where he was reported to be ill in bed, while other architects were commissioned to propose plans in place of the capomaestro's disastrous enterprise.

Fortunately for Bernini's reputation, he had already begun work on the great canopy under the dome, the baldacchino over St Peter's grave¹³ which, followed by the nearby statue of Longinus¹⁴ and the tomb beneath which Pope Urban was to be buried,¹⁵ ensured that his failure with the towers was ultimately eclipsed. The construction of the baldacchino also nearly ended in failure, since the erection of so massive a bronze monument, as high as the Farnese Palace, required extensive foundations; and the digging of these beneath the pavement of St Peter's necessitated the disturbance of many holy graves and relics. Protests against such sacrilege were vociferous; and when several men engaged upon the work died in mysterious circumstances and others refused to carry on, fearing the whole project was accursed, there were demonstrations in the piazza and marches of angry objectors throughout the Borgo. But the Pope, although himself seriously ill – an additional sign of God's disfavour – was determined that the baldacchino should be completed. He authorized the payment of additional wages to the workmen, and he even sanctioned the stripping of the bronze revetment from the portico of the Pantheon, an act of vandalism which gave rise to the celebrated pasquinade, attributed to the Pope's physician:

Quod non fecerunt barbari,

Fecerunt Barberini.

What the barbarians did not do,

the Barberini did.

So long as the Barberini Pope lived, Bernini was secure in his position as the recognized artistic director of Rome. But he was still only thirty-four when the baldacchino was completed; and the especial esteem in which he was held by the Pope aroused the deepest resentment among his older rivals, a resentment which his manner did little to alleviate. Increasingly moody and unpredictable, he was at times friendly and amenable, at others arrogant and dismissive. His sardonic sense of humour was always unsettling: it was difficult to be sure when he was making a joke. He maintained with all apparent seriousness, for example, that the dilapidated Hellenistic ‘Mastro Pasquino’, was the finest of all antique statues. Also, while he never spoke ill of his rivals, it was felt that he regarded their work as decidedly inferior to his own on which he was always careful to place a high price; and, being acquisitive, he became extremely rich. Deeply religious, he went every day to the Church of the Gesù for vespers and was most exact about confession. And his enemies declared that he had much to confess. It was believed that he had contracted the morbo gallico and this may, indeed, be why the Pope, paying the compliment of visiting him when he was ill, suggested that he should settle down, marry when he recovered and have children. He replied that his statues were his children. But soon afterwards he did marry and he did have children, eleven of them; and the marriage seems to have been a very contented one.

Bernini's professional career, however, suffered a severe setback on the death of his patron in 1644 and the election of Cardinal Giambattista Pamphilj as Innocent X. The new pope was a dour, uncommunicative and distrustful man, without close friends and much influenced by an astute, grasping and interfering sister-in law, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini. Tall, gaunt and excessively unprepossessing, with a furrowed brow, ugly chin, bulbous nose and bilious complexion, he made the sad, resigned comment when shown the remarkable portrait of him by Velasquez, which hangs in the Palazzo Doria picture gallery, ‘Troppo vero, too true, too true.’¹⁶

Recognizing that there was no trace of beauty in his own form, he had a horror of displays of nudity in art. And parsimonious though he was, he paid for fig leaves and metal tunics to cover the genitals and breasts of numerous offending statues in Rome. He was even said to have required Pietro da Cortona to clothe a nude figure of the child Jesus by Guercino. With Bernini and with Poussin, who had become one of the leading painters in Rome, he had as little as possible to do. ‘Things in Rome have greatly changed under the present papacy,’ wrote Poussin to a friend in Paris, ‘and we no longer enjoy any special favour at Court.’ Associating them with the family of his detested Barberini predecessor, whose extravagance and largesse towards his family had left the papacy almost bankrupt, Pope Innocent turned to other artists instead, to the sculptor, Alessandro Algardi, one of whose early commissions was the huge statue of S. Filippo Neri in S. Maria in Vallicella, to Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, and to an architect a few months younger than Bernini, Francesco Borromini.

A gloomy, solitary man, often depressed, usually irascible and always difficult, Borromini was bitterly conscious of his humble origins, of his early years as a stonemason in the studio of his relative, Carlo Maderno, and he was inordinately jealous of Bernini's easy success and self-assurance. His own dealings with his clients were constantly disrupted by quarrels and often ended in acrimony, while with his assistants he was a demanding, rarely satisfied and sometimes violent master. On one occasion he had a workman beaten so savagely for a misdemeanour that he died of the wounds inflicted upon him. Disdainful of the smart clothes that Bernini wore, Borromini dressed like a workman, deriding his rival's concern about money and fashionable living, and finding it impossible to forget that his smart contemporary had been hailed as a genius long before his own exceptional talents had been recognized. When his chance to overtake Bernini came with the accession of Innocent X, Borromini lost no opportunity of blackening his rival's name and of bringing up the errors that had led to the demolition of the tower on the façade of St Peter's.

Yet Innocent was a man of taste and discernment. While appreciating Borromini's exceptional gifts, he could not be blind to Bernini's, however predisposed he was to dislike him personally. When the tomb of Urban VIII was unveiled in 1647, he was heard to declare, ‘They say bad things about Bernini, but he is a great and rare man.’ It was not long before he was persuaded to take him into his own employment.

The Pope's family, the Pamphilj, had originally come from Umbria; but in the sixteenth century they had settled in Rome where they had an unpretentious palace on Piazza Navona. Pope Innocent determined to rebuild this palace on a much grander scale and to make its surroundings as distinctive and imposing a memorial to his own family and reign as the neighbourhood of the Palazzo Barberini¹⁷ was to that of Urban VIII. He commissioned Girolamo Rainaldi to undertake both the new palace¹⁸ and, assisted by Carlo Rainaldi, a new church beside it, S. Agnese in Agone.¹⁹ Borromini was later called in to help with both these buildings and had already been consulted about a fountain which was to be created in the piazza around an obelisk that the Pope had noticed, lying broken in pieces, by the Via Appia.

Artists other than Borromini had also been asked to submit designs for this fountain, but Bernini had not been one of them, although his Triton fountain²⁰ in the Piazza Barberini was an acknowledged masterpiece and the Fountain of the Barcaccia²¹ in the Piazza di Spagna²² had shown how ingenious he was in solving any problems which might be presented by a lack of pressure in the water supply. It seems, however, that a friend of his, Prince Niccolò Ludovisi, who had married a niece of the Pope, persuaded Bernini to submit a model and arranged for it to be placed in a room where His Holiness could not fail to see it. Another story, related by the Modenese ambassador, has it that a silver model of Bernini's design was presented to the Pope's bossy and influential sister-in-law who told him he need look no further. In any event, the Pope was enchanted by Bernini's model. ‘We must indeed employ Bernini,’ he said. ‘The only way to resist executing his works is not to see them.’ And so the splendid Fountain of the Four Rivers came into existence and Bernini was restored to papal favour.²³

He remained in favour throughout the pontificate of Innocent X, making two fine busts of him, designing the Fonseca Chapel in the Church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina²⁴ for the Pope's doctor, Gabriele Fonseca, and building the Church of S. Andrea al Quirinale²⁵ for the Jesuit novices living on the Quirinal hill with money provided by Cardinal Camillo Pamphilj. Bernini was also on excellent terms with the Chigi Pope, the devout and intellectual Alexander VII who, on the very day of his election in 1655, sent for him to ask for his services. And it was in Alexander VII's pontificate that St Peter's piazza was transformed into the most dramatically realized public space in Europe by Bernini's colonnades,²⁶ that the beautiful staircase connecting the Vatican palace with the basilica, the Scala Regia,²⁷ was built, and that the basilica itself was enriched by the Cathedra of St Peter, the grand frame for the throne of St Peter which Bernini created in the apse.²⁸

It was also in the reign of Alexander VII that Rome welcomed that most extraordinary of exiles, the former Queen of Sweden. Vivacious, witty and unconventional, Queen Christina had given up her throne eighteen months before at the age of twenty-seven, and had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Regardless of the impression she created, she seemed to take delight in shocking people and once introduced her intimate friend, Ebba Sparre, to the staid English Ambassador as her ‘bedfellow’, assuring him that her friend's mind was as lovely as her body. She often wore men's clothes and, although short in stature, spurned the high heels that women usually favoured and wore men's flat shoes instead.

Her voice and nearly all her actions are masculine [wrote the Duc de Guise who had seen much of her during a visit to France]. She has an ample figure and a large bottom, beautiful arms, white hands, but more like those of a man than a woman; one shoulder is higher than the other [she had been dropped as a baby], but she hides this defect so well by her bizarre dress, walk and movements… Her face is large but not to a fault, also all her features are marked: the nose aquiline, the mouth big but not disagreeably so, teeth passable, her eyes really beautiful and full of fire; in spite of some marks left by chickenpox her complexion is clear… The shape of her face is fair but framed by the most extraordinary coiffure. It's a man's wig, very heavy and piled high in front… She wears her skirt badly fastened and not very straight. She is always heavily powdered over a lot of face-cream… She loves to show off her mastery of horses… She speaks eight languages, but mostly French and that as if she had been born in Paris. She knows more than all our Academy and the Sorbonne put together, understands painting as well as anyone and knows much more about our court intrigues than I do. In fact she is an absolutely extraordinary person.

In Rome she was to be judged so, too. At first, however, she behaved with the utmost discretion, obviously delighted with the respect and honour shown to her. She was received in private audience by Pope Alexander who arranged for her to sit beside him, even though a chair had to be specially designed for her by Bernini, since only a ruling sovereign could sit in His Holiness's presence in a chair with arms and no chairs without arms which were sufficiently imposing could be found. She was invited to occupy apartments in the Torre dei Venti above the Cortile del Belvedere which had been beautifully furnished for her and provided with a blazing fire and a silver bed-warmer. She was presented with a splendid carriage and six horses, a litter and two mules, an exquisitely caparisoned palfrey and a sedan chair, designed, like her bed, by Bernini, with sky-blue velvet upholstery and silver mountings. She was invited to a banquet by the Pope, although protocol did not allow him to eat in the presence of a woman; and upon the table, fabricated by Bernini's assistants, were all manner of concoctions in gilded sugar, allegorical compliments to the Queen's character and attainments. The orchestra played; the choir of St Peter's sang; a sermon was preached by a Jesuit priest; and after the meal was over the Queen was accompanied by a procession of distinguished guests to the Palazzo Farnese, which a less favoured convert, Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt, had been required to vacate for her benefit.

From the Palazzo Farnese, which had been redecorated and refurnished for her, the Queen set out to see the sights of Rome under the direction of the charming and amusing Cardinal Azzolino. She was escorted everywhere, from St John Lateran to St Peter's, from the Sapienza where she was given over a hundred books, to the Propaganda Fide²⁹ where she was welcomed in over twenty languages, from the Collegio Romano where she was shown an apparatus used for making antidotes to poison, to Castel Sant' Angelo, where, having a meagre appetite and little taste for alcohol, she was not tempted by the offer of refreshments comprising the richest wines and huge mounds of crystallized fruits, nougat and sugared almonds. That year the Carnival was known as ‘the Carnival of the Queen’; and at the end of February a magnificent pageant, the Giostra delle Caroselle, was presented especially for her benefit. She was serenaded in her box as Cavaliers fought Amazons in the arena below and a fierce dragon, rockets issuing from its nostrils and flames from its mouth, was slain in her honour.

But by now the Queen's eccentric behaviour and the depredations of her unpaid servants, who went so far as to chop up the doors of the Palazzo Farnese for firewood, were causing widespread annoyance in Rome. Having given up male attire for the moment, the Queen now wore the most provocative dresses, even when receiving cardinals. She hung some extremely indelicate pictures on the walls of the palace and had fig leaves removed from its statues; and when the Pope was persuaded to remonstrate with her both about this and her refusal to make public displays of her conversion, she merely replied that she was not in the least interested in ‘considerations worthy only of priests’. It was rumoured that she was enamoured of a nun whom she had met in a convent in the Campo Marzio; and it was also said, with good reason, that she had fallen in love with Cardinal Azzolino. The news that Queen Christina was to leave Rome for a time was accordingly greeted with relief by the papal Court.

Missing the pleasures of power and hoping to solve her financial problems, she had decided to have herself made Queen of Naples. But her schemes foundered; and, having ordered the execution of her equerry, the Marchese Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, on the grounds that he had betrayed them, she returned to Rome, much to the annoyance of Pope Alexander who expressed the opinion that she was ‘a woman born a barbarian, barbarously brought up and having barbarous thoughts’. He was, however, slightly mollified when Cardinal Azzolino obtained the Palazzo Riario for her at a modest rent; she would not, therefore, be living so close to him as she had been at the Palazzo Farnese.

Soon her new palace was filled with treasures, despite her irregular allowances. Pictures and furniture from Stockholm, books and more pictures from Prague, carpets from Persia, musical instruments, marbles, sculptures and an extraordinary variety of other works of art, including one of the finest collections of paintings of the Venetian school ever assembled, were arranged in profusion in the rooms. In the garden exotic and beautiful flowers and shrubs appeared with each passing season; during the spring of 1663 alone 275 orange and lemon trees and 200 jasmine plants were passed in her name through the Roman customs. She remained as unpredictable as ever. One grand visitor who tediously complained of his solitary life, received the reply, ‘Better three days by oneself than half an hour with you.’

With the death of Pope Alexander VII in 1667, however, Queen Christina entered upon a more tranquil and less contentious stage of her life. The new Pope, Clement IX, in whose election her friend, Cardinal Azzolino, had played a critical role, was a kind-hearted, modest man, well disposed towards a highly intelligent woman who shared his love of pictures, music and the theatre. Anxious to make her feel at home in Rome, he came to visit her at the Palazzo Riario and gave a public banquet in her honour. At this banquet he provided a chair for her at his own table, a privilege no one could remember ever having seen granted by a pope to a woman before; and after Christmas he gave her a liberal pension.

Her finances now in more satisfactory condition, she added to her collections both at Palazzo Riario and at another palace which she leased, Palazzo Torlonia. The Queen also became a patron of archaeology, having obtained the Pope's permission to excavate the ruins of Decius's palace near the church of S. Lorenzo in Panisperna. She interested herself in alchemy and astronomy, providing a meeting-place at Palazzo Riario for the Accademia di Esperienza founded by Giovanni Giustino Campini; she granted her patronage to the oceanographer, Marsigli, and to the scientist, Borelli, and she took up writing, compiling books of maxims and essays in autobiography. She founded her own Academy, the Accademia Reale, forerunner of the celebrated Arcadia, at which distinguished scholars gave lectures, read papers and held seminars; and she gave her warm support to the theatre which was built on the site of the Tor di Nona prison³⁰ and in which many of the finest performances were given by singers in her service, such as Antonio Rivani, known as Cicciolino, whose departure from Rome for the court of the Duke of Savoy prompted an imperious letter to her French agent:

I want it to be known that [Cicciolino] is in this world only for me, and that if he does not sing for me he won't be able to sing for long for anyone else, no matter who they are… Get him back at any price. People are trying to make me believe that he has lost his voice. That doesn't matter. Whatever has become of him, he shall live and die in my service, or ill will befall him!

Cicciolino obediently returned and was still in her service when he died in 1686. Some years before, Alessandro Scarlatti, whose great gifts the Queen had been one of the first to recognize, had also entered her service as her Maestro di Cappella. Arcangelo Corelli was the director of her orchestra. She had long since acquired the services of Bernini who had created for her the lovely looking-glass which stood behind one of her most precious possessions, the bronze head of a Greek athlete of about 300 B.C.

Bernini still lived on, working hard. He survived the reign of Clement IX for whom he supervised the disposition of the angels on the Ponte Sant' Angelo, carving the full-size models of two of them himself;³¹ and he worked on through the reign of Emilio Altieri, the Roman who became Pope Clement X in 1670 and for whose relation by marriage, Cardinal Paluzzi degli Albertoni, he decorated the Altieri chapel in S. Francesco a Ripa.³²

He was in his mid-seventies when he set to work upon the deeply moving Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in this chapel, but his faculties were little impaired. On a visit to France a few years earlier, he had been described by Paul Fréart, Sieur de Chantelou:

He is of modest height, but well proportioned… with a temperament that is all fire. His eyebrows are long, his brow large, with slight projections over the eyes. He is bald, and the hair that remains is curly and white… He is vigorous for his age and always wants to go on foot as if he were thirty or forty. One could say that his mind is one of the most beautiful ever made by nature, since, without having studied, he has most of the advantages that knowledge can give a man. He has, as well, an excellent memory, a quick and lively imagination, and his judgement seems clear and precise. He is a very acute conversationalist, and has a very special gift of expressing things in words, with his face, and by gesture to make you see as easily as the greatest painters do with their brushes. This is doubtless why he has been so successful putting on his own plays…

More than ever devout and fully conscious of the imminence of death, he set little store by his secular works, by such palaces he had designed in Rome as the Palazzo di Montecitorio³³ and the Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi,³⁴ and by such conceits as the charming little elephant that carries the obelisk in the Piazza S. Maria sopra Minerva.³⁵ Once, when driving past the spectacularly theatrical Fountain of the Four Rivers, he pulled down the blinds of his carriage in distaste, exclaiming, ‘How ashamed I am to have done so poorly. What did satisfy him, at least, were his major religious works, his Ecstasy of St Teresa in S. Maria della Vittoria, which he thought the best thing he had ever done, and his Sant' Andrea al Quirinale. Towards the end of his life he was discovered by his son, who had gone to say his prayers in this church, wandering about in it, as though he were a tourist. Domenico approached his father and asked him what he was doing there ‘all alone and silent’. ‘My son,’ Bernini replied, ‘I feel special satisfaction at the bottom of my heart for this one piece of architecture. I often come here as a relief from my duties to console myself with my work.’

He went on working to the end. In the last months of his life he was still as busy as ever, restoring the Palazzo della Cancelleria; and it was this activity, his doctors suggested, that resulted in paralysis in his right arm: it deserved a rest, he said resignedly, after all the hard labour it had performed. He died on 28 November 1680. Nine days later it would have been his eighty-second birthday. His last completed work had been an over life-size bust of Christ carved for Queen Christina.

The Queen had been bitterly disappointed by the election of Innocent XI in 1676, for this new Pope was a severely economical reformer, stern and austere. He strictly limited the festivities of the Carnival, refused favours asked of him with such regularity that the Romans called him ‘Papa No’, ordered the private parts of statues not already concealed by Innocent X to be decently covered, and the breast of Guido Reni's Madonna to be painted over. He had the public theatres closed, and banished women from every stage. Queen Christina's Tor di Nona became a granary. Yet, for all her regret for the lost pleasures of the past, the Queen was as entertaining as ever, and as obliging as she had always been to those who did not bore her, willingly allowing visitors to see her collections as though they were contained in a public museum, and sometimes inviting sightseers to come to see her, too. She was now, after all, as she herself liked to admit, an ancient monument, one of the sights of Rome.

She is exceeding fat [wrote one French visitor in 1688]. Her complexion, voice and face are those of a man… She has a double chin from which sprout a number of isolated tufts of beard… a smiling expression and a very amiable manner. Imagine, as regards her costume, a man's knee-length black satin skirted coat, buttoned all the way down… men's shoes. A very large bow of black ribbons instead of a cravat. A belt drawn tightly round the coat over the lower part of the stomach revealing its rotundity.

She died a year after this description of her was written. She had expressed the wish that she should be buried quietly in the Pantheon, the church of the Rotonda, where the bones of Raphael lay. But this was considered an unsuitable resting-place and, in the ‘pomp and vanity’ she had wished to avoid, her body was carried to St Peter's and placed in the crypt where the remains of only four other women had previously been placed. Some years later, when the seventeenth century was nearly over, Carlo Fontana was asked to design a monument for her.

The Rome in which she died had changed out of all recognition from the city to which Michelangelo had been summoned. The gentle shapes of domes and cupolas beneath the greater dome of St Peter's had replaced the bristling tower of the medieval nobles. The forbidding fortresses of earlier ages, when swordsmen fought each other through the streets, had given way to fine palaces and splendid villas in spacious, flower-filled gardens. And the travertine stone, so extensively used by the architects of the Baroque, had begun to predominate over the marble of the Renaissance. This was the Rome which the travellers of the eighteenth century now came south to enjoy.

THIRTEEN IL SETTECENTO

‘I would rather describe the rest of Italy four times over than give one account of Rome,’ the French magistrate, Charles de Brosses, wrote home to a friend in the early years of the eighteenth century. ‘Rome is beautiful – so beautiful that all the rest of Italy seems to me little in comparison.’

He had been enchanted from the beginning, for he thought that no other city he had ever seen had ‘such a fine approach as Rome’. Having crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle, he passed through the Porta del Popolo which forms the entrance of a quadrilateral space, in the centre of which rises an obelisk of granite that stood formerly in the great circus. At the base of this obelisk is a fountain. Opposite the gate the square is pierced by three long and narrow streets, like crow's feet, the ends of which are separated from each other by the porticoes and colonnades of two handsome, domed, twin churches [S. Maria di Montesanto and S. Maria dei Miracoli]. Of these three streets, the one on the left side [the Via del Babuino] leads to the Piazza di Spagna; the other to the port of the Tiber, called Ripetta [the Via di Ripetta]; the one in the middle, and by far the longest [the Corso] runs as straight as the letter I as far as the Palace of St Mark [the Palazzo Venezia], nearly in the centre of the town… Nothing can give a finer idea of the grandeur of Rome than this first sight of the city.

Later travellers agreed with him, even Tobias Smollett, the cantankerous Scottish writer who was ready to find fault with everything and was certainly exasperated on his visit in 1765 by the touts in the custom-house, formerly the hall of Antoninus Pius, where baggage was opened and its contents strewn about the floor, as a search was made for contraband goods until the customary bribes had changed hands. Smollett's coach was ‘surrounded by a number of servitori di piazza, offering their services with the most disagreeable importunity’. Although he told them several times he ‘had no occasion for any, three of them took possession of the coach, one mounting before and two of them behind’. Yet, once he had overcome his exasperation, Smollett had to agree with Charles de Brosses that the ‘noble’ Piazza del Popolo was such an ‘august entrance’ into Rome that it could ‘not fail to impress a stranger with a sublime idea of this venerable city’. And this first sight was but a foretaste of the delights to come.

De Brosses found that the Corso was ‘much too narrow for its length and was made still more so by the trottoirs for the use of pedestrians’. And he had to confess that he could not bear the everlasting drive of carriages along it, the tiresome ‘fashion of the Italians of promenading’ in their coaches in the midst of a town ‘suffocated by the heat and dust’. Yet there were fine buildings on both sides, and finer ones still as one approached the heart of the city and then crossed over the river again towards St Peter's.

St Peter's itself was ‘the finest thing in the universe… all is simple, natural, and august, consequently sublime… You might come to it every day without being bored. There is always something new to observe and it is only after many visits that one gets to know it at all… It is more amazing the oftener you see it.’ As for the fountains in the piazza, nothing had ever given de Brosses so much pleasure as these ‘two watery fireworks which play night and day without ceasing’. Indeed, like Smollett, he was more enraptured by the fountains of Rome – ‘this profusion of water and rushing streams’ – than by all the other wonders of the city, even the view from the Janiculum at sunset when one could look down upon ‘that stupendous panorama of domes, towers, and golden cupolas, churches, palaces, green trees and sparkling waters’.

The Roman people, too, were so pleasant and civil, ‘full of good breeding and more obliging than in any other part of Italy.’ ‘In short, to tell you in one word my impression of Rome,’ de Brosses concluded, ‘it is this – that it is the most beautiful city in the world… and the most agreeable and comfortable in Europe. I would sooner live here even than in Paris.’

There were certain drawbacks, of course, a principal one being the extraordinary indolence of the population, the greater part of whom spent their time avoiding work, doing ‘absolutely nothing’, living on charity and the money which found its way to Rome from all over Christian Europe. There was ‘no agriculture, no commerce, no manufactures'; and it was not in the least uncommon to be told in a shop, with complacent equability, that the goods required were available but were rather awkward to get at, so would the customer please come back another day.

The population of the city, which had numbered about 80,000 in 1563 and 118,356 in 1621, had now risen to about 150,000, according to a census taken in 1709, and was to rise again to 167,000 before the century was over. The residents were almost outnumbered by the tourists and pilgrims. It was estimated, on the basis of the extra bread baked in the city's ovens, that there were some 100,000 visitors in 1700. And a census kept by the large hospice of S. Trinità dei Pellegrini¹ indicates that in the Holy Year of 1750 no less than 134,603 pilgrims stayed at that hospice alone. Many of Rome's residents were officials, many more were priests: the 1709 census listed 2,646 priests and 5,370 monks, nuns and other religious; and there seemed more than this, since it was fashionable for men to dress as though they were in holy orders even when they were not. ‘Everyone in Rome,’ said Casanova, himself persuaded to adopt the attire, ‘was either a priest or trying to look like one.’ Nor did it seem, great though their numbers were, that there were too many ecclesiastics to serve the extraordinary number of religious houses in Rome. There were 240 monasteries, 73 convents, 23 seminaries and nearly 400 churches including those used by foreigners, the Germans' church of S. Maria dell' Anima, the Poles' S. Stanislao,² the Spaniards’ S. Maria in Monserrato,³ the Portuguese S. Antonio⁴ and the French S. Luigi dei Francesi.⁵

To most visitors it seemed astonishing that so many of those who were evidently not priests appeared to be quite content to pass their lives in utter idleness, thanks to the official Board of Charities and the sustenance provided by religious foundations and the richer families. If homeless, they could enter papal workshops where, between meals, they ‘sat with their arms folded’, or they could seek shelter in one of the city's many refuges where, provided they moved on after one night, their clothes were mended and their shoes cobbled. If ill, they would be visited, nursed and brought food by the Fatebenefratelli of S. Giovanni di Dio,⁶ or they would be given a bed in one of Rome's numerous hospitals, perhaps the vast S. Spirito where, beside walls hung with paintings, they would be entertained with musical concerts. If leprous, they would be cared for at S. Gallicano in Trastevere,⁷ if mad at S. Maria della Pietá,⁸ if too young or too old to look after themselves at the Ospizio di San Michele, where orphaned girls were given a dowry when they left.⁹ Injured children were looked after at S. Maria della Consolazione,¹⁰ pregnant women at the S. Rocco where their names would be kept secret if they so wished.¹¹

The unemployed could always earn ample pocket-money by begging, particularly in the streets around Piazza di Spagna where foreigners could most easily be waylaid. Mendicants, supplied with begging-letters by the scriveners who could be seen sitting beneath umbrellas in every square, were constantly to be observed hovering at the doors of palaces, sitting on the steps of churches ready to act as unwanted and incompetent guides, waiting in the streets at dusk with lanterns for the hesitant passer-by. The least service, from the opening of a door to the unnecessary brushing of a coat and the imparting of unsolicited information, was considered worthy of reward; a man could live well in Rome from the buona mancia elicited from pestered tourists and from the commissions received as touts, pimps and middlemen.

Servants in private houses and palaces were as ready to ask for a tip from their masters’ guests as they would have been from some stranger in the street. ‘You go to see a man,’ Montesquieu complained. ‘Immediately his servants come to ask you for money, often even before you have seen him.’ This was to a certain extent understandable, Charles de Brosses thought, since the palaces were more like hotels or picture galleries than homes.

All these great apartments which are so vast and so superb are only there for foreigners [he wrote of the Borghese Palace]. The master of the house cannot live in them, since they contain neither lavatories, comfort nor adequate furniture; and there is hardly any of the latter, even in the upper-storey apartments which are inhabited… The sole decoration in the rooms consists of pictures with which the four walls are covered from top to bottom in such profusion and with so little space between them that, to tell the truth, they are more tiring than attractive to the eye.

Romans who did work never worked hard. The hours of the siesta were long; and during those hours, so Father Labat said, the only living creatures to be seen in the streets were dogs, lunatics and Frenchmen. Even before and after the siesta, the seven hundred workshops of the masons and smiths, the painters and engravers, wood-carvers and potters were frequently closed and shuttered. Feast days and festivals were so common that almost every other day was a holiday; there were 150 religious festivals at the beginning of the century and only thirty less than this by 1770. There were, in addition, occasional pageants, such as the Sacro Possesso in which, after Pope Clement XIV had fallen off his palfrey in 1769, the Pope took part by riding in a coach; annual events like the incursion in December of peasants from the Abruzzi who, dressed in sheepskin coats and brigandish hats, would parade through the streets, playing bagpipes before the shrines; weekly summer festivals including the naumachia – the water jousts and mock sea-battles in the flooded Piazza Navona; local processions, fêtes and fairs in which each rione bid to outdo the next in the magnificence of its decorations, the loudness of its band, the originality of its floats and fancy dresses, and the brilliance of its fireworks; and, as a climax to the Feast of St Peter, there was the world-famous illumination of the basilica by the 365 marvellously agile and expert technicians of the Fabbrica who, clinging to ropes, leaping across the leads but remaining always out of sight, miraculously outlined the building with six thousand paper lanterns and flaring fire-lamps.

Every year, just before Lent, came the eight days of the Roman Carnival, a wild, tumultuous celebration that ended on Ash Wednesday. The festivities, heralded by the ringing of a bell on the Capitol which was otherwise sounded only for the death of a pope, were opened with a ceremony in which the Jews of Rome, excused by Clement IX from their former customary races, handed over a payment to meet the cost of the prizes to be awarded to the winners of the horse-races and were thanked by a pretended kick in the small of the Chief Rabbi's back. The lay and ecclesiastical authorities of Rome, escorted by halberdiers in black and violet uniforms, then proceeded down the Corso which was decorated with banners, foliage and flowers and thronged with people in masks and strange disguise. They were dressed as Cossacks and English sailors, Chinese mandarins and Barbary pirates, Scottish Highlanders, giants on stilts, and characters in the commedia dell'arte. There were men dressed as women, and women disguised as boys or army officers. In fact every conceivable costume was to be seen. Confetti and paper streamers, darts and pellets made of pozzolana and plaster, handfuls of flour and showers of water flew through the air as the people sang and danced, shouted and hugged each other, jumping out of the way of carriages, or clambering up on to their running-boards and shouting greetings through the windows.

There were parades of extravagantly decorated floats drawn by gaily caparisoned horses with silver bells, flowers and gorgeous plumes, the most admired often fabricated by the inventive students of the French Academy;¹² there were tournaments in palace courtyards; and every afternoon there was the longed-for race of the Barbary horses which began in the Piazza del Popolo. Filled with oats and often with stimulants, the excited animals had cords laid over their backs covered with sharp nails or rowels to act as spurs. Often they were only with difficulty prevented from jumping over the barriers. When all was ready, a party of dragoons rode down the sand-covered Corso making sure that all carriages had been moved off into side streets; then other cavalrymen rode at breakneck speed down the street, the crowds of spectators pressing against the walls on either side. As the horses thundered past towards the Piazza Venezia, sand spattering at their hooves, blood running down their backs, fireworks exploding around them, the noise of cheering was tumultuous. The owner of the winner was presented with a prize of money and a palio, a banner of gold brocade embroidered with the emblem of a galloping horse and fixed to a brightly painted pole.

On the last night of the Carnival the revellers poured out into the streets, carrying tapers, jostling and pushing, trying to blow out each other's flickering flames while keeping their own alight, climbing on to the tops of carriages to keep their lights out of reach, or holding them aloft on long sticks, crying the traditional threat, ‘May he who does not carry a candle be knocked senseless!’ On this night, as on others, there were dances in the palaces, in the theatres, in assembly rooms, and in the streets, where music and laughter filled the air until the sun came up.

On Sundays during the Carnival the churches, lit by brilliant candles and tapers, were decorated with flowers and velvet hangings, their statues and ubiquitous effigies of the Madonna bedecked with ornaments. Their naves and aisles, filled with the music of orchestras and the hubbub of the congregation, seemed more like theatres than places of worship; and so in a sense they were.

During Lent, services in the churches took on a more sombre note, with queues of women dressed in black outside the confessionals. But when Easter came, all was cheerfulness once more. Fireworks exploded in the sky and there was dancing in the streets. The religion of Rome, indeed, was much more characteristically reflected in the midnight revels around the porphyry obelisk in the Lateran piazza on the Festival of St John than in the services held amidst representations of suffering in San Stefano Rotondo on the anniversary of the martyrdom of St Stephen. Many of these festivals were of pagan origin as, for instance, the Rappresentazione dei Morti in All Saints, where wax models of the dead were propped against corpses from the hospitals, and the Festival of the Madonna of the Hams when the windows of the food shops were stuffed with cooked meats, pies and strings of sausages arranged in fantastic and often gruesome displays. But, whether pagan or Christian in origin, most festivals were celebratory rather than penitential, and all were designed to please the eye as much as to stir the soul. It was entirely in the tradition of Roman religion that a preacher should conclude his sermon on the virtues of fasting with a recipe for grilled cod.

Saints were honoured in the Roman calendar and given credit for such particular powers as had been accorded to the gods of the ancient past. Just as in the days of the old Republic, Rumina was looked to for the protection of farms and Matuta for watching over those in childbirth, so now sufferers from headaches sought the intercession of Santa Bibiena, while sore throats were the responsibility of San Biagio. Portents, too, were regarded with the same deep foreboding as they had been in the days of Augustus, and while statues in the temples had then shed tears and blood so now did the Madonnas and crucifixes of papal Rome.

Yet superstitious as they were, going in dread of the evil eye and imagining all manner of disasters consequent upon such portents as the netting of a two-headed sturgeon in the Tiber, the Romans were essentially a cheerful, easygoing people, happy to abide by their proverb, ‘Chi si contenta gode’, ‘The contented man enjoys himself’, apparently without envy of the rich with whom they mixed upon the most familiar terms. In the palaces of the cardinals and the nobility there was a constant procession of callers going in and out without hindrance. Fishmongers or fruit-sellers would set up their stalls beside the front doors without asking permission or requiring it, making themselves at home in the rooms where servants talked to their masters as though they were the most intimate of friends and where one might see a monk gratefully accept a pinch of snuff from a cardinal's proffered box. Even at the Vatican washing was hung out to dry from the windows; while at the Quirinal, relations of the Pope's numerous servants came to meals and sometimes even to live, and hawkers carried their wares along passages and into the crowded saloons. Yet the easy informality did not preclude the observation of the most elaborate protocol when the occasion arose. Ceremonies at the papal Court were regulated by the strictest rules; and few cardinals, however humble their personal tastes, would appear in the streets without a cavalcade of liveried attendants to accompany the black and gilded carriages drawn by horses with red silk ribbons in their manes. If, while driving, a cardinal met a fellow-prelate on foot, he was expected to alight and to greet him with due ceremony. A visitor to Rome once observed this ceremonia and described how ‘after many bows, gracious smiles, and protestations of attachment, the cardinals took leave of one another. But the one who had been in the coach had to walk on some distance instead of reentering it, and keep turning back and bowing to the one on foot. He for his part did the same and so they continued until each was out of sight.’

The cavalcades of Cardinal de Bernis were particularly impressive, for he was the French ambassador and rarely appeared without an immense retinue including thirty-eight footmen, eight couriers, eight valets and two chaplains. At his palace a splendid banquet was given every year on 13 December in commemoration of King Henri IV's conversion to Roman Catholicism. One year Charles de Brosses was invited and discovered that the feast was a ‘real field-day for masters and servants alike, conducted in the boldest and most shocking manner’.

No sooner was food placed before us [de Brosses continued] than a horde of strange footmen bore down carrying empty plates and demanding this and that for their masters. There was one in particular who attached himself to me as the most promising member of the party. I gave him a turkey, then a chicken, a cut of sturgeon, a partridge, a slice of venison, some tongue, some ham, and always he came back. ‘My friend,’ I said to him, ‘we are all getting the same. Why doesn't your master eat what is before him?’ Detroy, sitting not far from me said, ‘Don't be silly. All he asks for his master he's taking for himself.’ And I could see that… lackeys were vying with one another in the amount they could stuff into their pockets, even wrapping the truffled poultry in napkins… for the linen was worth taking too. The cleverest ones were whisking the dishes away. You could see them filing out of the room and taking them home under their ferriacuoli, the big cloaks they wear.

Some servants had wives and children waiting on the staircases to carry the plunder off to their ‘miserable abodes’. And Charles de Brosses ‘was told as a fact’ that their masters indulged in pilfering as well. If any Italian gentleman fancied anything he simply sent his servant home with it, thus appropriating dish and contents together. The ambassador confided in him that he lost between twenty-five and thirty valuable pieces every year at least and, ‘even more annoyingly’, pieces he had borrowed.

Other rich men in Rome spared themselves this annoyance by not giving banquets at all and by contenting themselves with conversazioni, at the best of which the guests could not only enjoy good talk on all manner of subjects, but also an orchestra and singers or a game of cards. On these occasions only the lightest snacks were provided, often no more than dishes of ice-cream which was eaten in enormous quantities in Rome at all hours of the day and night, even in church, by rich and poor alike.

Apart from this indulgence, the Romans were not greedy, though foodstuffs were cheap enough. At the tables of those who could afford far more, a meal of pasta and salad, poached fish, cheese and fruit would be deemed quite adequate and, by the poor, ideal. The poor rarely cooked at home, fetching what they needed from the cucina or the pasticceria, going to those places in and around the city where food was prepared in the open, to the Piazza Colonna where cabbages were cooked, to the steps of the Church of S. Marcello where tripe simmered in huge pans, to the big market in Piazza Navona where peasants who had come in from the country with their produce could be persuaded to do a little cooking if pressed, or to the column of Marcus Aurelius in Piazza Colonna where the coffee-sellers roasted their beans, the only place in Rome where they were allowed to do so, the smell being considered offensive.

Indeed, the poor of Rome spent as little time as possible at home except in excessively cold weather when, rarely having fireplaces or even charcoal stoves, they would huddle together, their feet in muffs, passing caldini, pots filled with embers, from hand to hand. They preferred to gossip and gamble in the streets; to dance; to watch their version of football, a rough game with teams of up to thirty on each side, which was accompanied by constant shouts of encouragement and abuse and often ended in fights; to wander up to Monte Testaccio to enjoy the white Castelli wines kept cool in the cellars of the hill; and in the evenings, if they could afford it, to go to the theatre, to the Teatro delle Dame¹³ near the Piazza di Spagna or the Argentina,¹⁴ to the operette at the Capranica,¹⁵ the comedies at the Tor di Nona or the marionettes in the Piazza Navona. The performances, however, were not the only attraction perhaps not even the main attraction: people went to meet their friends, to eat ice-cream, have a picnic, or to gamble. ‘It is the fashion here to regard the theatre as a place for meeting people and paying social calls,’ wrote an English visitor. ‘Instead of listening to the music they all laugh and talk as though they were at home. This naturally did not encourage a happy relationship between the audiences, who armed themselves with rotten fruit in the expectation of having to pelt the performers, and the cast who were always ready to retaliate, as the actors at the Capranica did more than once, with broken tiles and stones. In the boxes where the chairs were set around gaming tables and servants stumbled about with wine and refreshments, the uproar was often as continuous as it was in the pit where the audience sat on benches, shouting to each other, eating, drinking and knocking over the candles by which those few who had come for the performance vainly tried to follow the score. But usually when arias began, the whole house fell into silence as the voices of the principal singers filled the theatre. The voices of the singers playing female parts were always those of castrati, for, although actresses had been seen briefly on the Roman stage in the middle of the sixteenth century and, again briefly, under the protection of Queen Christina, they had been banished by Innocent XI. The most popular of the castrati, though, were almost indistinguishable from women. ‘They have hips, buttocks, bosoms and plump round necks,’ a French visitor wrote. ‘You could mistake them for real girls. And, according to Montesquieu, an Englishman did mistake one of them, a transvestite castrato from the Capranica, for a girl and fell ‘madly in love’ with him. Emasculated when children in such surgeries as that near the Vatican whose services were advertised by a signboard proclaiming, ‘The Pope's Chapel Singers Castrated Here’, castrati were to be found in many a fashionable café where, so one English tourist thought, ‘they looked as pretty and tempting as may be’.

For those who could not afford to enter a theatre there were excitements and drama enough in the streets. In the Piazza Navona where mountebanks and acrobats performed their turns, astrologers told fortunes and barbers and tooth-drawers carried on their trades for all to see, in the Corso where the rich paraded in their carriages and on the Quirinal where they strolled in their gardens, in the tortuous streets of the Campo Marzio where grand palaces loomed over tiny houses squeezed into vacant plots, and in the dark, cramped, garlic-flavoured alleys of Trastevere, the life of Rome could be observed in all its wonderful variety. Shop signs hung on every side, so that tailors could be recognized by pairs of scissors or a cardinal's red hat, barbers by a shaving plate, surgeons by a bleeding arm or foot, and tobacconists by a man, usually a Turk, smoking a pipe. And this, combined with the convenience of being able to find most trades concentrated in certain areas – the clock-makers, for instance, in and about Piazza Capranica, the cabinetmakers between Via Arenula and Piazza Campitelli, the booksellers around the Chiesa Nuova, the hatters in Via dei Cappellari, the rosary makers in Via dei Coronari, the carriage-repairers in the Via delle Carrozze, and the locksmiths in Via dei Chiavari – made amends for there being, at least until 1744, no names on the streets or numbers on the houses, nor until 1803, when marble slabs were erected, any indication of rioni boundaries.

Since food was prepared and cooked in the open, and since shopkeepers, artisans and workmen pursued their crafts and labours out of doors, since rubbish was piled against the walls to wait for the highly irregular attention of the refuse-collectors, and since all classes of citizens were as ready to relieve themselves against any convenient wall as they were on the relative privacy of a cardinal's staircase, the streets, choked with dust in summer and clogged with mud in winter, were as filthy and noisome as may well be imagined. They were ‘badly paved and extremely dirty’, wrote Father Labat in 1715. In the evening a few carts were trundled about followed by a man who swung from side to side a leather tube attached to a water barrel. But the Romans did not really ‘know what sweeping means, they leave it to Providence. Heavy rain showers act as brushes in Rome.’ They were to do so for many years to come, and occasioned many a sour and wide-ranging condemnation of Rome in general, as for instance that by Hazlitt in his Notes of a Journey through France and Italy:

It is not the contrast of pigstyes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds growing under an imperial arch offended me not; but what has a greengrocer's stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber's sign, and old clothes or old picture shops or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome?

Yet most foreign visitors in the eighteenth century wrote home not so much to complain of the squalor of the city as to commend its delightful vistas, such as those to be enjoyed from the Piazza delle Quatro Fontane to the Porta Pia and the obelisks on the Quirinal, the Pincio and the Esquiline, and the romantic impression created by Rome's pastoral setting, by the animals that wandered to graze amongst the lichen-covered ruins, by the oxen drawing haycarts across the Forum and the shepherds resting in the shade of ruins, the scenes evoked in the tranquil, nostalgic engravings of Piranesi.

From time to time these peaceful scenes were shattered by violence. The Romans remained a fierily contentious people, quick to flare up in anger and slow to forgive. Murders were frequent, both crimes of passion and premeditated killings carried out in pursuit of revenge or in exasperated impatience with the cumbersome processes of antiquated laws. ‘What astonishes all foreigners and is the talk of the town again today,’ wrote Goethe on 24 September 1786, ‘are the murders. Four people have been murdered in our quarter within three weeks.’

The culprits frequently escaped justice, usually with the help of sympathetic friends or bystanders who helped them to reach one of the city's many places of sanctuary; and, when they were condemned, the spectators at their execution regarded them with pity rather than distaste. In some of Rome's prisons there were mechanical crucifixes from which the figure of Christ reached forward with arms outstretched to give the condemned man comfort before his ordeal. And on the scaffold he was expected to play his part in the dramatic ceremony of beheading with heroic fortitude. A drama it certainly was. Describing an execution such as those carried out in Rome, Lord Byron wrote that ‘the ceremony, including the masqued priests; the half-naked executioner; the bandaged criminals; the black Christ and his banner; the Scaffold; the soldiery; the slow procession, and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe; the splash of blood, and the ghastliness of the exposed heads – is altogether more impressive than the… dog-like agony of affliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence.’

During the Carnival the drama became a grotesque comedy with the headman disguised as Pulcinella and the audience expected to play their parts as at a pantomime. These Carnival executions usually took place in the Piazza del Popolo where criminals could also be seen undergoing the punishment of the cavalletto, a machine in which the miscreants were held face downwards while being flogged with a bull's penis, or being forced to parade through the streets with the nature of their offence and its punishment placarded on their backs. For the most heinous offences, the condemned might still be punished with the martello which ‘is to knock the malefactor on his temples with a hammer while he is on his knees, and almost at the same time to cut his throat and rip open his belly. Lesser crimes are frequently punished by the gallies [which, since the Roman authorities had no galleys, meant working, not too laboriously, in a chain-gang] or the strappado: the latter is hanging the criminals by the arms tied backwards, and thus bound they are drawn up on high, and let down again with a violent swing, which, if used with vigour, unjoins their backs and arms.’

But while punishments, when inflicted, could be savage, and murders, both committed and planned, were as common as the weapons still hanging in S. Maria in Trastevere and other churches even now testify, foreign visitors to Rome were rarely themselves in danger. Even on the darkest night they stood little chance of being robbed, not so much because the streets were patrolled by watchmen armed with long, hooked poles as because it was generally recognized that money, when required, could always be extracted in less troublesome ways from the unwary, particularly from the English.

The English swarm here [wrote Charles de Brosses] and they are the people who spend most money. The Romans like them on account of their open-handedness, but at heart they prefer the Germans, and this is the case all over Italy. I perceive that no nation is so thoroughly detested as ours and this comes from our foolish habit of lauding our manners to the detriment of other nationalities, and finding especial fault with everything that is not done in the French manner.

The money the English spend in Rome, and the custom they have of making this journey a part of their education does not seem to do them much benefit. There are a few who are intelligent and profit by their stay in Rome, but these are the exceptions. Most of them have a carriage ready harnessed stationed in the Piazza d'Espagna, which waits for them all day long, while they play at billiards, or pass the time in some such fashion. There are numbers of these people who leave Rome without having seen anything in it except their countrymen, and do not know where the Colosseum is.

It was certainly true that Rome abounded with English gentlemen on the Grand Tour known to the Romans as ‘milordi pelabili clienti’ (‘a soft touch as customers’), whose interest in the art and architecture of the city was as severely limited as the young man of Dr John Moore's acquaintance who considered two or three hours a day far too much time to spend ‘on a pursuit in which he felt no pleasure, and saw very little utility’. After six weeks, however, this young man did not want to admit that he had not seen all that his fellow-tourists had seen. So ‘he ordered a post-chaise and four horses to be ready early in the morning, and driving through churches, palaces, villas, and ruins with all possible expedition, he fairly saw, in two days, all that we had beheld during our crawling course of six weeks. I found afterwards, by the list he kept of what he had done, that we had not the advantage of him in a single picture, or the most mutilated remnant of a statue.’

An equally impatient tourist was the inordinately rich Lord Baltimore, ‘proprietor of all Maryland and Virginia, with an annual income of £30,000’. He travelled about with a doctor, two Negro eunuchs and eight women; and when asked by an official to point out which of the ladies was his wife, he replied that he was an Englishman, and it was not his practice to discuss his sexual arrangements: he would settle the matter with his fists. In Rome, so his guide wrote, he ‘went through the Villa Borghese in ten minutes… Nothing pleased him but St Peter's and the Apollo Belvedere… He thinks he has too much brain… and has wearied of everything in the world.’

There was another young tourist in Rome at this time, however, who was far more conscientious. This was James Boswell. He arrived in the city in March 1765 and guided by a fellow Scotsman, Colin Morison, a Jacobite refugee, he immediately embarked upon ‘a study of antiquities, of pictures, of architecture and of the other arts which are found in such great perfection at Rome’. He viewed the Forum and ‘experienced sublime and melancholy emotions’ as he thought of all the great scenes which had been enacted there, and ‘saw the place, now all in ruins, with the wretched huts of carpenters and other artisans occupying the site of that rostrum from which Cicero had flung forth his stunning eloquence’. From the Forum he went to the Colosseum which he was shocked to find full of dung and rented out as sheds for animals; but even so it was ‘hard to tell whether the astonishing massiveness or the exquisite taste of this superb building should be more admired’. He climbed the Palatine hill on which the cypresses seemed to mourn for the ruin of the imperial palaces, and there he saw a statue which so resembled Cicero that he began to talk Latin to Morison with whom he resolved always to speak the language thereafter, throughout his tour. The next day he climbed the Capitoline where, from the roof of the modern Senate, Morison pointed out ancient Rome on its seven hills and read a clear summary of the growth of the city; and he visited San Pietro in Carcere and saw inside it the remains of the ‘famous Tullia prison of which Sallust gives so hideous a picture He went over the Baths of Diocletian; studied the antiquities of the Campus Martius; admired the oriental marble columns in S. Maria Maggiore; walked round the Belvedere, the Borghese Palace and the Vatican Library; judged Michelangelo's Moscs ‘superb’, though the beard was too long and the ‘horns, though sacred, ludicrous as like a satyr’; and he deemed the Lacoön ‘supreme’. He was struck by the sight of ‘a strange fellow sitting in the sun reading Tasso to a group of others in rags like himself’; and by a procession of Roman girls ‘who had received dowries from a public foundation, some to be married, others to become nuns. They marched in separate groups, the nuns coming last and wearing crowns. Only a few of them were pretty and most of the pretty ones were nuns.’

At Santa Maria sopra Minerva on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Boswell saw the Pope, Clement XIII, being carried round the church ‘on a magnificent chair decorated with a figure of the Holy Ghost’. The whole congregation knelt in front of His Holiness who gave them his blessing before taking his place upon a sort of throne so that they could kiss his slipper. At St Peter's on Maundy Thursday, Boswell was present at another, more celebrated ceremony, the mandatum, or washing of the feet. This ceremony began with Mass in the Sistine Chapel followed by a procession to the Pauline Chapel, the Pope carrying the Sacrament; then His Holiness pronounced the benediction from the loggia of St Peter's before washing the feet of twelve priests of various nations. He performed these traditional ablutions with ‘great decency’, Boswell thought, and afterwards, when serving the priests their customary meal, he ‘mingled grandeur and modesty’, looking like ‘a jolly landlord,’ and smiling when he offered them wine.

In the midst of his sightseeing and studies Boswell naturally ‘indulged in sensual relaxations’, as he confessed to Jean Jacques Rousseau: ‘I sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion, and I had a little French painter, a young academician, always vain, always alert, always gay, who served as my jackal. I remembered the rakish deeds of Horace and other amorous Roman poets, and I thought that one might well allow one's self a little indulgence in a city where there are prostitute licensed by the Cardinal Vicar.’

After ‘much enjoyment’ with a fille charmante’, the sister of a nun, who cost him fourteen paoli (about seven shillings), Boswell resolved to have a girl every day and seems to have succeeded in doing so, taking particular pleasure in the girls employed in a small brothel run by three sisters named Cazenove and indulging himself also with older women, with one of whom, a ‘monstre’ who charged five shillings, he was ‘quite brutish’, until, as Rousseau had warned him he well might, he contracted a venereal disease.

Most tourists found Roman women accommodating as well as deeply attractive, as Goethe did the tavern-keeper's daughter who wrote her name in spilled wine on the table-top, intertwining it with his own and the hour of the night at which they should meet. These Roman girls were renowned for their lovely complexions, their dark and glossy hair, their brilliant eyes and – the result, so it was said, of the clear and sparkling water – their healthy, white teeth. They were also famous for the boldness of their glance: the French writer, Jean Baptiste Dupaty, found it impossible to get them to ‘drop their eyes before yours’. Another French visitor, Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont, wrote in his memoirs, ‘The freedom of the women passes all belief and their husbands permit it, speaking cheerfully and without embarrassment of their wives' lovers. I have heard M. Falconniere talk of his wife in a quite incredible way… In my role of young man and foreigner I was only too glad to benefit by the consequences.’ Husbands, indeed, generally asked of their wives only that they should not be openly promiscuous and that they should not disgrace themselves with their cicisbei.

Apart from whoring and sightseeing and writing those long accounts of his activities which were essential to his enjoyment of them, Boswell spent hours in Rome in the company of those other Scots and Englishmen who were to be encountered everywhere in the city. He had long conversations with Lord Mountstuart, son and heir of George III's friend, the Earl of Bute, and with John Wilkes, the entertaining demagogue exiled for his libel upon the King. He fell ‘quite in love’ with the ‘modest and amiable’ Swiss painter, Angelica Kauffmann, and he saw a good deal of three other painters then living in Rome, Nathaniel Dance, George Willison and Gavin Hamilton. He called upon Peter Grant, a member of the Scots College,¹⁶ who acted as his guide in St Peter's. And, although he was anxious not to be suspected of talking politics with traitors, he called at the Palazzo Muti-Papazzurri,¹⁷ home of the Old Pretender, the titular King James III, to see the old man's secretary, Andrew Lumisden, who became a close friend.

Boswell does not, however, mention Gibbon who was also in Rome at this time and who could ‘never forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated [his] mind as [he] first approached and entered the Eternal City’. After a sleepless night, Gibbon wandered amidst the ruins of the Forum, ‘each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke or Caesar fell, was at once present to [his] eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before [he] could descend to a cool and minute investigation’. Then, in the gloom of one October evening, as he sat musing on the Capitol, while barefoot friars were chanting their litanies in the church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli, he ‘conceived the first thought’ of his great history.

Few English gentlemen, so Charles de Brosses maintained, shared Gibbon's excited enthusiasm, although other observers contended that it was the young French tourists who were least interested in what they had come, or been sent, to see. In any event, after they had collected a few antiquities to take home with them, picking them up on the site, buying them in dealers’ shops, or acquiring them from one of the numerous cognoscenti who hawked marble fragments as well as more modern ‘masterpieces’ about the streets, many of these young French and English gentlemen decided they had had enough of ruins. Those who set out with maps and guidebooks, magnifying glasses and sketch-pads, mariner's compasses and quadrants, usually expressed themselves as disappointed by what they found: the arches of the Theatre of Marcellus were filled in and occupied by poor families; the Palatine was overrun with weeds; the Arch of Septimius Severus was half-buried and the part that could be discerned was used as a barber's shop. Almost all that could be seen of the Tabularium were the capitals of three columns; the Baths of Caracalla were smothered in foliage, and ‘a few tattered ropemakers working in the shade of a foot or two of ancient wall’ were the only live creatures whom one visitor found on the deserted Palatine. The Caelian hill looked like an abandoned quarry. Twice a week there was a market in the Forum; and animals, as Boswell discovered, also occupied the Colosseum in which the visitor had to pass through a hermitage to reach the crumbling, ivy-clad seats.

Even so, there was still much of interest to be enjoyed by those more conscientious tourists who avoided the charlatans and self-styled antiquarians against whom John Northall warned his readers in his Travels through Italy, and who took the trouble to find a competent guide – preferably Johann Winckelmann.

A Prussian cobbler's son who became Europe's leading authority on classical art, Winckelmann had arrived in Rome in 1755 and had soon afterwards been appointed librarian to the papal Secretary of State and had been given rooms in the Palazzo della Cancelleria. He later became librarian to Cardinal Albani, moving to an apartment in the Palazzo Albani, now the Palazzo del Drago;¹⁸ and he helped his patron with the arrangement of his treasures in the Villa Albani, now Villa Torlonia.¹⁹ In 1763 he was appointed Chief Supervisor of all antiquities in and around Rome. Openly homosexual and infectiously enthralled by his subject, he was, in John Wilkes's opinion, ‘a gentleman of exquisite taste and sound learning’. He was also extremely tactful. When showing Wilkes and his beautiful mistress, Gertrude Corradini, round Rome, Winckelmann pretended not to notice their absence when, overcome by lust, Wilkes and Corradini, a woman who ‘possessed the divine gift of lewdness’, disappeared for a few moments to make love behind a convenient ruin. ‘This was the more obliging,’ Wilkes commented, ‘because he must necessarily pass such an interval with the mother of Corradini who had as little conversation as beauty.’

Even when guided by Winckelman, many young tourists soon lost interest in Rome's ruins and preferred to visit the convent of the Capuchins where visitors were shown a cross made by the Devil, a painting by St Luke, and macabre grottos decorated entirely with knuckles, kneecaps, ribs, grinning skulls and crossbones.²⁰ In each compartment, standing erect against the wall, were – and still are – skeletons in Capuchin habits, the skin dried tight upon the bones, long beards hanging to the girdles, rosaries clutched in spindly fingers. The monks who conducted visitors through these gruesome caverns cheerfully pointed out the skeletons of former friends and the niches where their own bones would shortly be displayed.

A pleasurable frisson was also to be enjoyed in the catacombs which had altered little since the day when John Evelyn had crept into them on his belly from a cornfield, ‘guided by two torches’, and had descended ‘a good depth in the bowells of the Earth, a strange & fearefull passage for divers miles’.

That which renders the passages dreadfull [Evelyn recorded] is the Skeletons & bodies, that are placed on the sides, in degrees one above the other like shelves, whereof some are shut up with a Course flat Stone, & Pro Christo or p & Palmes ingraven on them, which are supposed to have been Martyrs… As I was prying about I found a glass phiole as was conjectured filld with dried blood, as also two lacrymatories. Many of the bodies, or rather bones (for there appeard nothing else) lay so intire, as if placed so by the art of the Chirugion, which being but touch'd fell all to dust. Thus after two or 3 miles wandring in this subterranean Meander we return'd to our Coach almost blind when we came into the day light againe, & even choked with smoake. A French bishop & his retinue adventurring it seemes too farr in these denns, their lights going out, were never heard of more.

Like Rubens and so many other foreign travellers before and after him, Evelyn had been advised to look for accommodation in the neighbourhood of the Piazza di Spagna, so called since the establishment of the Spanish embassy there in the early seventeenth century, and he eventually settled for rooms with a Frenchman who, after bargaining, agreed to accept twenty crowns (just over twenty-five pence) a month. It was in this area, in a room in the Palazzetto Zuccari,²¹ that Winckelmann lodged when he first came to Rome. Salvator Rosa lived nearby in Via Gregoriana; Piranesi in Via Sistina. The early neo-classical painter, Anton Raphael Mengs, was also a near neighbour, so was Carlo Goldoni in Via Condotti in which stood, and still stands, the Caffè Greco,²² frequented in these and later years by Casanova, Goethe, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Bizet and Berlioz, Gogol and Keats (whose rooms are preserved at the foot of the Spanish Steps),²³ Wagner, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Stendhal, Balzac, Byron, Thackeray, Tennyson, Hans Andersen and countless other artists and writers, who came to Rome either to study, like the Scottish architects, Robert Adam and Robert Mylne, or to work, like Fragonard, Vernet, Claude Lorrain, Canova, Houdon and William Kent who had the unique distinction for an Englishman of frescoing the ceiling of a Roman church, S. Giuliano dei Fiamminghi, the national church of the Belgians.²⁴ There were few good hotels apart from the Albergo Londra and the Monte d'Oro where Charles de Brosses did not mind being fleeced because the puddings were so delicious. There were, however, a number of comfortable inns, including the Eagle, the Falcon, the Golden Lion and the Five Moons. Most visitors, in any case, moved into furnished rooms as soon as they found a set that suited them, if possible in the elegant Casa Guarneri. ‘These apartments are generally commodious and well furnished,’ wrote Tobias Smollett who was directed to the ‘open, airy and pleasantly situated’ Piazza di Spagna, known in his day as ‘the English ghetto’, as soon as he arrived in Rome. ‘And the lodgers are well supplied with provisions and all necessaries of life… The vitella mongana… is the most delicate veal I ever tasted… Here are the rich wines of Montepulciano, Montefiascone and Monte di Dragone; but what we commonly drink at meals is that of Orvieto, a small white wine of an agreeable flavour.’

Quick as he was to complain of them elsewhere on the Continent, Smollett had to admit that prices in Rome were very reasonable. For a ‘decent first floor and two bed-chambers on the second’ he paid ‘no more than a scudo [twenty-five pence] per day’ and his landlord plentifully supplied his table at a price which was quite as reasonable. A whole house could be secured for no more than six guineas a month; and Robert Adam enjoyed a pleasant apartment as well as the services of a cook, valet, coachman and footman for little more than £ 4a week. week.

Delighted by the cheapness of their accommodation and of their excellent meals, foreign tourists were predisposed to enjoy themselves in Rome and there were few who did not. In earlier times Protestants had found it advisable to enter Rome in disguise and to leave before Easter to avoid the house-to-house search for non-communicants supervised by the Inquisition. Sir Henry Wotton, who began his travels in 1587, came disguised as a German Catholic with ‘a mighty blue feather’ in his black cap, explaining the reasons for the feather as follows: ‘First, I was by it taken for no English. Secondly, I was reputed as light in my mind as in my apparel (they are not dangerous men that are so). And thirdly, no man could think that I desired to be unknown, who, by wearing of that feather, took a course to make myself famous through Rome in a few days.’

But by the eighteenth century, although Sir Thomas Nugent in his The Grand Tour warned his readers to beware of what they said in front of servants, the Inquisition was no longer a threat to the tourist, provided he did not actually practise black magic. Indeed, the Roman Inquisition, even at its most strict, had never been as uncompromisingly severe as the Spanish or the Languedocian. Admittedly, the philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, Giordano Bruno, had been held for seven years in one of the prisons of the Sant' Ufficio and, declining to recant the heresies of which he was accused, had been taken with his tongue in a gag to be burned alive in February 1600 at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori.²⁵ But after Galileo, whose writings about the laws of the universe were deemed by the Jesuits to be as dangerous to the Church as ‘Luther and Calvin put together’, had been brought to face trial by the Inquisition in Rome, he had been allowed to live in a comfortable apartment. And when the Congregation of the Holy Office had insisted upon sentencing him despite the more sympathetic attitude of the Commissary General, the sentence had been immediately commuted by Pope Urban VIII and Galileo had been allowed to return to his estate at Arcetri near Florence. A hundred or so years after Galileo's death the Inquisition's prison in Castel Sant' Angelo held only four men, and the possibility of a traveller being required to join them was extremely remote. Travellers who kept their heretical views to themselves had little to fear from the authorities even when they loudly expostulated, as some did, at ceremonies in which girls took the veil in convents and had their dresses, ornaments and hair cut off. At one of these ceremonies, so Catharine Wilmot, Lady Mount Cashell's Irish companion, wrote, ‘not only the women, but many of the young Englishmen were in indignant tears’.

One Englishman instinctively layed his hand upon his sword, swearing that such heart-rending superstitious cruelties ought to be extirpated from off the face of the earth [Miss Wilmot continued]. All was in a moment silent as death, and everyone was obliged to see, and everyone obliged to hear, the snapping of the scissors, which separated a hundred glossy braids and curls from [the girl's] head, which fell amongst her bands of Roses at the feet of the Abbess, who continued with unrelenting piety to strip her of every ornament, and then bound her temples with sackcloth and threw over her the black austerities of her holy order, placing a crown of thorns upon her head, a branch of white lilies in her hand, a large crucifix by her side, and all the insignia of a heavenly office.

But, as another Protestant visitor observed, one was not obliged to witness such heart-rending scenes, and the popery of Rome seemed inspiriting rather than oppressive. A Scottish Presbyterian who came to Rome to convert Pope Clement XIV in the 1770s and – by way of preparation for his task – shouted insults at him in St Peter's, calling him a seven-headed beast of nature and mother of harlots, was arrested by the Swiss Guards. But the Pope intervened on the man's behalf, maintaining that he had acted with the best intentions, paying for his return passage to Scotland, and expressing an obligation to him for undertaking such a long journey with a view to doing good.

In Lent it was easy enough to obtain a licence to eat meat; and there were in any case plenty of taverns and butchers’ shops prepared to sell or serve meat without bothering about the licence. Rome, in fact, was an easy, friendly place where the foreigner was soon made to feel at home and where some foreigners felt so much at home that their own countries thereafter seemed somehow strange to them. One of these was Goethe who exclaimed as he entered the city, ‘Only now do I begin to live!’ and who lamented after he had left it, ‘I have not spent an entirely happy day since I crossed the Ponte Molle to come home.’

FOURTEEN NAPOLEONIC INTERLUDE

On the death of Pope Clement XII in 1740, Charles de Brosses went to the pontifical palace where he saw ‘a sad image of human grandeur. All the rooms were open and deserted.’ He passed through them ‘without seeing a cat’ until he came to the chamber of the Pope ‘whose corpse lay on a bed, watched by four Jesuits, who were reciting, or pretending to recite, prayers' The Cardinal Camerlengo, the official who held supreme authority in Rome between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, came at nine o'clock to do his duty which consisted of tapping with a small hammer several blows on the brow of the defunct and calling him by his name, Lorenzo Corsini. Finding that he gave no answer, he said, ‘This is why you are mute,’ and taking off the fisherman's ring, he broke it, according to custom… As the Pope's corpse has to remain a long time exposed in public, the face was shaved and the cheeks rouged to hide the pallor of death. He certainly looked better than when he was alive.

The Pope, who came from a princely Florentine family, had been blind for the last few years of his life, and had struggled in vain to halt the decline in the political role of the papacy which had been shrinking ever since the Peace of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648. Neither he nor his immediate predecessors had been men well chosen to exert with force and conviction the authority of the Holy See. Clement XI had had to face a scandal in the early years of his pontificate when, in 1703, young girls and widows had been offered shelter in the palaces of prelates after an earthquake, and disease had added to the damage and suffering caused by a catastrophic flood that had brought the waters of the Tiber cascading through the streets of the city. It was rumoured that many of the women rendered homeless had received offers of more than shelter, and the Pope had had to order that they be removed to other homes and cared for at the expense of the Roman authorities. The Pope, a good and charitable man, had had thereafter to face a succession of further troubles and difficulties which were said to have reduced him to a state of perpetual tears.

Benedict XIII, Pope from 1724 to 1730, had been equally ill qualified to reassert the authority of the papacy. A Dominican of the most simple tastes, he had left affairs largely in the hands of the grasping Cardinal Niccolò Coscia who had made the most of the opportunities for self-aggrandizement which had been offered him. After the death of Benedict and of his successor Clement XII, it had been hoped for a time that Benedict XIV would provide the Church with the firm leadership his predecessors had failed to give. Benedict XIV was an intelligent, witty, sociable man, noted for his moderation, restraint and engaging manners. Rome was fortunate to have so able an administrator, so sympathetic a pontiff and so liberal a patron. He turned the financial deficit which he found on his accession into a credit balance; he wandered about the streets of the city visiting his parishioners, sometimes incognito, wearing a wig and a tricorne hat; he provided paintings for St Peter's, mosaics for S. Maria Maggiore and manuscripts for the Vatican Library. During his pontificate, for the first time, signs and tablets were fixed to indicate the names of streets. But while the Romans had good cause to be grateful to him, the enemies of the Church had good cause also to be grateful for the elevation of so indulgent an adversary. And just as Benedict XIV found it impossible to counter firmly the argument of the philosophes, so Clement XIII and Clement XIV were unable to protect the Jesuits from the attacks made upon them by the Jansenists and the Roman Catholic powers alike. Clement XIII died suddenly in 1769 – the result of poison, it was inevitably alleged – after having witnessed the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and being faced with international demands, for their total destruction. His successor, Clement XIV, felt obliged to concede the demands and suppress the Society; and, having reluctantly signed the decree of suppression, an act which failed to secure an improvement in the papacy's relations with the European powers, the Pope fell into a decline and died in misery the next year. It was now left to Giannangelo Braschi, who in 1775 became Pope Pius VI, to face the challenge presented to the papacy, now bereft of power and influence, by the coming revolution in France.

In appearance the new Pope seemed ideally suited to his task. Tall, healthy and extremely good-looking, he had a dignified bearing, a commanding presence and an exceptional fluency of speech. Although his hair was white, his fresh complexion and very dark eyes made him appear much younger than he was. One contemporary said of him that he ‘seemed to be a born ruler’. Another, Prince Heinrich of Reuss, wrote, ‘I know of no sovereign with more noble a bearing than Pius VI. He has an impressive manner and in all his gestures there is something noble… His manners captivate everyone.’

The eldest of the eight children of Count Marcantonio Braschi, he was born in the Romagna and had been educated by the Jesuits. Intent upon a legal career, he had studied at the University of Ferrara, and had afterwards advanced rapidly in his profession. Offered a canonry of St Peter's when he was thirty-six, he had at first declined it, as he was engaged to be married. But with the consent of his fiancée who became a nun, he entered the Church in which he received as rapid a preferment as he had done in his lay career. Very conscious of his own qualities, he was also extremely vain of his personal appearance, and ‘in order to heighten its effect’ so Ludwig von Pastor wrote, ‘he paid particular attention to the snow-white hair that framed his countenance. Some went so far as to suggest that he elegantly raised his long robe to one side so as to show his shapely foot. This betokened a serious flaw in his character which fitted ill with his desire for fame. These weaknesses were severely criticized and exaggerated by the satiric Romans.’

The Romans also criticized him for his evident desire to enrich his family in the manner of his predecessors. For one of his nephews he built the vast Palazzo Braschi¹ which still dominates the Piazza S. Pantaleo, the last palace to be built in Rome for the family of a pope. Pius VI was, however, intent not only upon promoting the fortunes of his family and restoring the Holy See to its former reputation, but also upon enhancing the appearance of Rome. From Carlo Marchionni, designer of the Villa Albani, he commissioned a sacristy for St Peter's,² which Alexander VII, Clement XI and Clement XII had all intended and failed to do, laying the foundation stone himself in September 1776 and thereafter frequently visiting the site, where numerous antiquities were unearthed. He presented St Peter's with a huge bell, the Campanone, weighing 28,000 lbs., as well as the two clocks at the ends of the attico of the vestibule. He provided mosaics for twenty-five altars in the basilica, and had the ceiling of the nave regilded, ordering that the arms of Paul V should be replaced by his own. The restoration of the ceiling of the Lateran Basilica was commemorated in the same way.

Pope Pius also built an orphanage and workshops on the Janiculum, and a school for poor boys in the Piazza S. Salvatore in Lauro. He extended the Hospital of S. Spirito; laid out the Giardino della Pigna in the Vatican; enlarged the Vatican Museums and added to their collections;³ decorated the Hall of the Muses in the Museo Pio-Clementino where he built a fine staircase as well as the Gabinetto delle Maschere.⁴ He erected obelisks near Trinità dei Monti,⁵ in the Piazza di Montecitorio⁶ and in the Piazza del Quirinale⁷ beside the colossal statues of the horse-tamers.⁸ And he inaugurated a massive programme of public works in the Pontine marshes where 1,500 acres of land were reclaimed, and the Via Appia, unearthed in the process, was repaired and repaved.

Yet, while a patron and public benefactor of vigour and discernment, Pope Pius was far from being a statesman, and was to show himself quite incapable of dealing effectively with the problems presented to the Roman Church by the Revolution in France. When the French Assembly issued a document known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which required the popular election of both bishops and priests and the severance of those ties that had traditionally bound them to Rome, the French Clergy appealed to the Pope to authorize them to accept the Constitution and thus avoid the schism its rejection would entail. The Pope hesitated before replying to their request. So the Assembly demanded an oath of loyalty to the Constitution by them all. Some complied with the Assembly's demand, others did not; and the French Church was consequently split between constitutionnel priests who were prepared to obey the Assembly and recalcitrant priests who refused to do so. The Pope's eventual condemnation of the Civil Constitution led to violent disturbances in Paris where anti-clericalism was fostered both by political clubs and by the theatres which presented plays about the horrors of the Inquisition, the tribulations and hypocrisy of monastic and convent life, and the alleged greed and dissipation of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Effigies of the Pope were set alight on bonfires, revolutionary slogans were plastered on church doors, convents were invaded and nuns assaulted, and a severed head was hurled through the windows of the Papal Nuncio's carriage. After the King had himself been beheaded, the Pope decided that protests were useless. ‘I see terrible misfortunes coming,’ he said, ‘but I shall have nothing to say. To speak in such times of trouble and disturbance can only make bad worse.’

The Roman people had at first been inclined to regard the French Revolution with either indifference or derision. But as the months went by and the émigrés who remained in the city were less and less hopeful of an early return home, the mood of the Romans became increasingly antagonistic towards the ‘assassins of Paris’. The nationalization of Church property in France, the confiscation of papal territories, the dwindling of contributions and the paucity of tourists and pilgrims all contributed to an exacerbation of this antagonism. When the French Convention, determined to gain international recognition for the Republic, dispatched envoys to Rome, the people turned upon them in fury.

Even those in sympathy with the Revolution, such as the Jacobin students at the French Academy, had to admit that the envoys behaved with excessive provocation. They strode about with tricolour cockades in their hats, supervised the removal of the portraits of popes and cardinals from the walls of the Academy and replaced them with pictures of Republicans; and, on the afternoon of 13 January 1793, having taken down the fleurs-de-lis from the façade of the French Embassy to make room for the Convention's emblems, they appeared in their carriage on the Corso, the very epitome of revolutionary fervour, tricolour badges in their hats, a tricolour flag flying above their heads. Imprecations and insults, then stones and rocks were hurled at the carriage whose driver, in evident fear for his life, whipped his horses into the Piazza Colonna and made at breakneck speed along the Vicolo dello Sdrucciolo for the courtyard of the Palazzo Palombara, the mansion of a French banker. The carriage hurtled through the gates; but, before they could be closed, the mob chased after it. One of the envoys managed to escape but the other received a fatal wound in the stomach from a razor. As he was carried away, the stones still raining down upon his body, a large part of the mob dashed off to smash the windows of houses of people supposed to be Francophiles – including those of Torlonia, the banker – to sack the Palazzo Palombara and the French post office, and to attack the French Academy whose door was set on fire. Throughout the night the streets rang with shouts of ‘Long live the Pope!’, ‘Long live the Catholic religion!’ while carriages were stopped and their occupants invited to join in the cheering. ‘The revolution which was to have started in Rome has misfired,’ the Venetian ambassador reported. ‘There were no supporters of it anywhere.’

And so, for the moment, papal Rome was spared. The French Convention, beset by other problems on every side, contented itself with the threats of vengeance and acclaimed its murdered envoy as a martyr of the Republic. But in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte was appointed commander-in-chief of the army in Italy with the unanimous support of the Directory, all of whose members recognized in him a man who would not scruple to replenish the country's empty coffers with treasure looted from his defeated enemies. And, after his brilliant victories over the forces of the King of Sardinia and the Emperor of Austria in Italy, Bonaparte certainly did not hesitate to impose extortionate terms of surrender in obedience to the Directory's orders to carry everything out of the country that could be transported and was of use. From the papacy he took Ferrara, Bologna and the port of Ancona; and when the Austrians showed signs of recovery in northern Italy and the Pope misguidedly refused the peace terms of the Directory, Napoleon received orders to march towards Rome.

‘We are the friends of every nation,’ Bonaparte declared, ‘especially the descendants of Brutus and the Scipios. Our intention is to restore the Capitol, to set up there in honour the statues of the men who won renown, and to free the Roman people from their long slavery.’ In fact, it did not suit him to depose the Pope, as the Directory wanted him to do. For, if Pius were to be deposed, Naples might well then seize central Italy; and Naples, whose neurotic Queen was a sister of Marie Antoinette, would then be a greater threat to France than Rome. So Bonaparte decided to leave the Pope where he was and to impose upon him the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino. ‘My opinion,’ Bonaparte reported to Paris, ‘is that Rome once stripped of Bologna, Ferrara, Romagna and thirty millions can no longer exist. The old machine will fall to pieces by itself.’

As it happened, Rome lost far more than thirty millions. Palaces, galleries and churches were stripped; antique sculptures, Renaissance paintings, tapestries, and precious stones and metals were packed up and loaded on to wagons. The Laocoön, the Belvedere Apollo, and countless other masterpieces were piled up with the works of Raphael, Caravaggio and Bernini. On one day gold and silver bars worth 15,000,000 scudi were carried off; on another 386 diamonds, 333 emeralds, 692 rubies, 208 sapphires and numerous other precious stones and pearls, many of them prized off papal tiaras, were sent to Paris. A few weeks later over 400 valuable manuscripts followed them. A procession of 500 horse-drawn wagons under a strong guard of soldiers took further bundles and cases of plunder along the Via Flaminia. Soon afterwards 1,600 horses were seen being led away to the headquarters of the French army.

As the treasures left Rome, representatives of the French government moved in. Bonaparte's brother, Joseph, arrived as ambassador with a salary of 60,000 francs a year and established himself with a large French household in Palazzo Corsini. French officers came on leave, and French agents, accompanied by Italians from the north sympathetic towards the Revolution, came to encourage the Republican groups that existed in Rome. On the night of 27 December 1797, after a sharp rise in food prices, these groups combined to stage a demonstration on the Pincio in protest against papal rule. On this occasion the demonstrators were dispersed by papal troops who shot and killed two men; but the next day a crowd of Jacobins appeared before Palazzo Corsini, shouting, ‘Long live the Republic! Long live Liberty!’ Joseph Bonaparte received their leaders whom he reproved for causing such a commotion. He was about to go out to address the crowd gathered at the palace gate when there was a discharge of guns from a papal cavalry picket which had entered the embassy precincts. The frightened crowd now swarmed into the courtyard and up the palace stairs, while Bonaparte ordered the cavalry picket to withdraw from French territory. As the papal troops retreated, the mob inside the palace took courage, and ran out towards them. The troops turned to open fire again, wounding several of the demonstrators. In the ensuing mêlée a young French general named Duphot, who had been having lunch with the ambassador and had rushed out upon the papal soldiers with drawn sword, was shot through the neck.

His death afforded the Directory the excuse they needed for sending in their army to occupy Rome. And so on 11 February 1798 General Berthier, who had succeeded Bonaparte as commander-in-chief, marched into Castel Sant' Angelo, billeting his officers in Roman palaces and his soldiers in Roman convents. The Pope's troops were disarmed, and several of his cardinals arrested. Others were expelled or deposed, while the Pope himself was abruptly informed on 17 February that he would have to leave Rome within three days. He was then eighty years old, very frail and mortally ill. He asked if he might be allowed to spend the few remaining days of his life in the city of St Peter, but the officer to whom the request was made, a Swiss Protestant, replied, ‘People die anywhere.’

Pius, soon to be referred to by French officials as ‘Citizen Pope’, entered the travelling carriage that awaited him in the Cortile di San Damaso with two priests and a doctor. The Blessed Sacrament was enclosed in a small case hanging round his neck. His eyes filled with tears as he peered into the darkness through the carriage window towards St Peter's basilica. A detachment of dragoons escorted him to the Ponte Molle where people knelt in the snow to receive his blessing as he left. Five days later he arrived in Siena where he was given a room in the convent of the Hermits of St Augustine. At daybreak on 29 August the following year, the crucifix slipped from his hand as he lay dying on his bed in the French fortress of Valence. He had reigned for twenty-four years, six months and two weeks, the longest pontificate since the twenty-five years ascribed to that of St Peter.

In Rome, so it was reported in France, the establishment of a Roman Republic had been greeted with enthusiasm. Trees of Liberty were planted in the Forum and beside the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, and citizens danced around them with tricolour cockades in their hats. But French observers actually living in Rome noticed no such signs of popular rejoicing. General Berthier, after his ceremonial entry into the city, had gone to the Capitol where the Tree of Liberty had been hoisted. He had made a speech invoking the shades of the ancient heroes of the first Roman Republic, but declared that he had ‘seen nothing but the most profound dismay’. There was ‘no trace of the spirit of liberty at all’.

There were those, of course, who welcomed the change of government or were at least prepared to give the impression of doing so for the sake of peace or profit. The Sforza, Santa Croce and Borghese families entertained the French in their palaces; women of other families were seen with French officers walking in gardens and riding in carriages; certain bankers and merchants increased their wealth by collaborating with the occupying forces; certain cardinals gave up their caps and one even signed himself ‘Citizen Somaglia’.

Some of the measures introduced by the new government, as directed by the Directory's three civil commissioners, were welcomed by the people or at least regarded as just, such as the regulations providing for the lighting of streets at night, when formerly the only lamps to be seen were those small lampioncini that burned before representations of the Madonna. But many of the Republican government's other measures were far less well received: the Romans complained angrily of the renaming of their streets and rioni, of the adoption of the Republican calendar which abolished Sunday and provided for only one day's holiday in ten. They objected to the withdrawal from circulation of familiar coins and their replacement with foreign assignats, resulting in a further rise in the cost of living. At the same time the attempts of the French authorities to foster Republican enthusiasm by the introduction of the carmagnole, a dance popular in revolutionary France, in place of the traditional dances of the Carnival; by the insistence on voi, in imitation of the French vous, instead of lei; by the decoration of ancient statues with revolutionary favours; and by the replacement of religious feast days with such celebrations as the Fête of the Federation, and the Fête of the Perpetuity of the Republic, in which enthusiasts disguised as Roman senators honoured the memory of early martyrs in the cause of liberty, were all alike regarded with derision or contempt.

Other activities of the French were bitterly resented. There were outcries of protest when the bronze angel on the summit of Castel Sant’ Angelo was painted in the colours of the Revolution, provided with a cap of liberty and transformed into ‘the Liberating Genius of France’. The people were also outraged when the authorities refused to allow the revered statue of St Peter⁹ to be decorated with its traditional emblems on the Apostle's feast day. Far more widely resented, however, were the government's depredations: its forcible seizure of Church property, its monetary exactions from families who could afford to pay them, and its use of the money thus acquired not for the relief of the poor but for the extravagance of its own members and for the maintenance of the French army of occupation.

Despite these wholesale appropriations, the Roman Republic was soon close to bankruptcy; and while officials, profiteers and speculators, their wives and hangers-on flaunted their new-found riches in the streets, parading about in the latest Parisian fashions, the men with hair cut à la Titus, the women in those outré and revealing dresses which Madame Tallien wore at Frascati'ss, the poor of Rome went hungry. At first the protests were limited: men joined dogs in urinating against the Trees of Liberty and delighted in seeing them knocked over by donkeys, until guards were mounted over them. But in February 1798 there were riots in Trastevere; and the suppression of these, with the execution of twenty-two of the ringleaders in the Piazza del Popolo, was followed by demonstrations, outbreaks of violence and assassinations elsewhere.

At the end of November help came from an unwelcome deliverer. Taking advantage of the partial withdrawal of French troops for other Napoleonic enterprises, the soldiers of the King of Naples marched into Rome through the Porta S. Giovanni on the south side of the city, while the French, greatly outnumbered, withdrew through the Porta del Popolo on the north, leaving a garrison in Castel Sant' Angelo to fire their cannon on the Neapolitans as they encamped in St Peter's Square. The cannonade soon ceased, however; and during the course of the next few days the Romans grew accustomed to the sight of King Ferdinand riding around the city with an escort of resplendently uniformed dragoons. But the proud liberators did not remain long. Defeated by the French north of Rome, the Neapolitans withdrew from the city, taking with them as much plunder as they could conveniently carry and leaving more awaiting shipment in Roman warehouses. On 11 December King Ferdinand rode hastily after his retreating troops; four days later the French reoccupied Rome.

That winter was a hard one. Despite the severely repressive rule of the French Civil Commissioner, Bertolio, who assumed the powers of a dictator, there were riots in the city as food shortages became acute and the price of fuel rose week by week. Almost every day there was a rattle of gunfire in the Piazza del Popolo as criminals and troublemakers were executed; and gangs of brigands, in virtual control of the countryside around the city, entered the gates with impunity. Although the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated with great pomp in the Forum in July 1799, and officials made promises of better times soon to come, there had been little alleviation of the crime and distress with the advent of the warmer weather. In September the French garrison in Rome, bereft of the support of the rest of their army which had now been largely withdrawn from the peninsula, were obliged to discuss a capitulation. On the last day of the month, after their commander had issued a proclamation exhorting the Romans to maintain their tranquillity, they marched out of the city, while the Neapolitans entered it once more from the south.

But, as before, the Neapolitans were not to remain for long; and when Napoleon's victory over the Austrians at Marengo gave him mastery over Italy again, his troops were ready to return. He now, however, had a different adversary to face, in the person of Gregorio Barnaba Chiaramonti who had been elected Pope in March 1800 at a lengthy conclave held in Venice and who entered Rome as Pope Pius VII in July.

A cultured, sensitive and learned man with a pleasantly ironical sense of humour, Pope Pius was supposed by the more rigidly conservative cardinals to be in sympathy with many of the ideas of the Revolution. As Archbishop of Imola he had agreed to style himself ‘Citizen-Cardinal’ and to have the baldacchino over the throne in the cathedral removed; his writing-paper had borne the superscriptions ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’. Yet those closest to him knew that his desire to reconcile the Revolution with the Church had not prevented him from taking a stand against the authorities when he felt the Church to be threatened. He would prevaricate, feign forgetfulness, ignore an unwelcome order. He came to terms with Napoleon by negotiating, through Cardinal Consalvi, the Concordat of 1801 and he presided over Napoleon's coronation as Emperor in Nôtre Dame in 1804. But when Napoleon decided to destroy the temporal power of the papacy, and ordered General Miollis to occupy Rome once more, the Pope recognized that there could be no further reconciliation.

The French dragoons who rode into Rome through the Porta del Popolo at dawn on 2 February 1808 were supposed at first to be on their way to Naples; but as they took over Castel Sant' Angelo and, one after another, occupied the different rioni, having disarmed most of the papal troops, it was realized that they had come to stay. Indeed, Napoleon, whose favourite bedside books were Plutarch's Lives, dreamed of founding a second Roman Empire; and, determined not to repeat the mistakes that had been made during the previous French occupation of Rome, he saw to it that only the most efficient and scrupulous officials were employed in the administration of the city.

General Miollis himself was a cultivated man, courteous and placatory. At his headquarters in Palazzo Doria he gave superb dinner-parties at which the nobles and prelates of Rome were not only provided with exquisite meals but also persuaded to believe that, while the Emperor had no reason to question the religious authority of the Pope, his role as a secular prince was no longer acceptable in the new Europe. Many of the nobles acquiesced in this view and raised no objection when the rest of the papal troops were disarmed, the papal printing-presses closed down and papal officials brought increasingly under French control. But the clergy were less amenable; and when it became known that the Pope disapproved of the parties at Palazzo Doria, they began to refuse the General's invitations. The Romans in general shared the Pope's distrust of French motives. Angered by the abolition of the lottery, they were further provoked when the French authorities, ignoring the Pope's decision that the annual Carnival ought not to take place while a foreign garrison was in occupation of the city, seized the stage properties and decorations by force and decreed that the celebrations should take place as usual. The shopkeepers and tavern-owners consequently closed their doors and shutters, and the people turned their backs upon the Corso.

As the French hold upon the city tightened, the Pope's resolve hardened. ‘The Pope is not a man whom one may hope to persuade by persistent argument,’ the French chargé d'affaires reported. ‘He is firm and immovable in his attitude. Once he has made up his mind, anything you say will not persuade him to change it. He does not prevent you from speaking, but after you have finished talking yourself he just lowers his head on his breast and allows you to leave in silence.’

In the hope that the Pope might be more pliant if his advisers were removed, Miollis ordered the expulsion from Rome of the Dean of the Sacred College and the Pro-Governor of the city, and sent two officers to arrest Cardinal Bartolommeo Pacca, the uncompromising Pro-Secretary of State. Pacca, however, had been warned of their coming and arranged for the Pope to be with him when they arrived. The Pope upbraided them furiously, so angrily, in fact, that Pacca observed a phenomenon he had believed to be imaginary: a man's hair standing on end His Holiness ordered the officers to tell their General that there must be an immediate end to these outrages, that Cardinal Pacca was under his protection, and that if the French wanted him they would have to break into the innermost chambers of the Quirinal to find him. The Pope then stormed out of the room followed by Pacca; and, as he returned to his own private apartments, the keys were turned in the seventeen doors through which they passed.

Napoleon decided that the time had now come to issue a decree formally annexing the Papal States to the French Empire and creating Rome a ‘free imperial city.’ The decree was read by a mounted herald on the Capitol; then, as trumpets blared, the papal flag was lowered from the summit of Castel Sant’ Angelo and the French tricolour was hoisted in its place. The Pope, watching the scene from a heavily curtained window in the Quirinal, said to Cardinal Pacca, ‘Consummatum est!’ He then walked over to a table on which lay a document he had long threatened to issue, the bull of excommunication. After a prayer and words of encouragement from Pacca, he picked up a pen and signed it. Later that day, copies of the bull and of an order requiring the Romans not to give their support to the new régime were posted on the doors of St Peter's, St John Lateran and S. Maria Maggiore.

General Radet, the young and headstrong chief of the Roman police, now seized his opportunity to come to the attention of the Emperor as an officer of initiative and daring. He asked General Miollis for signed warrants authorizing him to arrest Cardinal Pacca and to abduct the Pope. Miollis readily granted him the warrant for Pacca's arrest, but considered that his instructions from the Emperor did not allow him to take any action against the Pope other than placing a guard upon the Quirinal. But with or without written authority, Radet was determined to act; and in the early hours of the morning of 6 July he led an assault on the Pope's apartments. His plan was to scale the wall of the Quirinal by rope-ladders and, with a party of forty men, to gain access to the papal apartments from the roof, while other parties crept through the gardens and forced windows at the back of the palace. This plan miscarried when a rope-ladder broke and the cries of the falling men alerted the palace guards. But Radet, undeterred by the lights now shining from the palace windows and the tolling of the palace bell, attacked the main door with a hatchet and was raining blows at the lock when it flew open, the bolts withdrawn by the soldiers who had gained access to the hall from the back. Radet rushed for the staircase followed by his men, axes and crowbars in their hands. They disarmed the Swiss Guards who had been ordered not to resist French soldiers, and battering their way through locked doors, at about half-past three they came upon the Pope in the Hall of Audience. He was sitting fully clothed in soutane, stole and mozzetta between two cardinals. At sight of him, Radet, a pious man who composed canticles to the Madonna, came to a sudden halt and ordered his men back. ‘On the roof and mounting the stairs, it all seemed splendid,’ he later confessed. ‘But when I saw the Pope, in that instant, I also saw myself at my first Communion.’

‘Why have you come?’ the Pope asked him.

‘Most Holy Father, to repeat to your Holiness, in the name of the French Government, the proposition that he should renounce his temporal power.’

We cannot yield what does not belong to us. The temporal power belongs to the Church.’

‘Then I am under orders to take you away.’

‘Those orders, my son, will assuredly not bring divine blessings upon you.’

The Pope felt obliged to obey the orders, though. Allowed half an hour to collect what he needed, he asked for his ciborium, breviary and rosary, and then, without money or even a change of clothes, he followed Radet down the staircase and stepped into the coach which was waiting for him in the courtyard. The door was locked behind him and the coach rattled away towards the Porta Salaria.

The Rome from which the Pope was exiled until the fall of his adversary was governed by the occupying power with efficiency rather than with understanding of the character of the Roman people. Among the aristocracy, the French had a number of supporters, several of whom dined regularly in the gilded salons of the Palazzo di Montecitorio with the amusing and scholarly Prefect of Rome Baron de Tournon. But even these Francophiles were disillusioned when their sons were conscripted into the Napoleonic armies. They, like other Roman parents, urged their children not to present themselves for enrolment or, if forced to enrol, to desert. Many did desert and found refuge with the brigands in the nearby mountains, so that the drive for conscripts did as much to strengthen the bands of outlaws around Rome as to increase the imperial levies.

While the brigands outside the city grew in numbers, so did the poor within it. The dissolution of the religious orders by the Napoleonic régime and the sequestration of their property led thousands of monks and nuns, expelled from monasteries and convents, to join those mendicants to whose needs they had formerly ministered. The number of indigents in Rome rose from 12,000 in 1810 to 30,000 in 1812.

As the lands of the Church were expropriated, as taxes were vastly increased to the level of those levied in France, as more and more Romans were deported and confiscations of their property grew more widespread, the French administration of Rome became ever more detested. And, after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzing in October 1813, it also became impracticable. With no hope of further help from France, with the British navy landing raiding-parties along the coast and brigands scouring the countryside beyond the city walls, it was now but a matter of time before the whole structure collapsed. The coup de grâce came, however, in an unexpected way.

Five years before, one of Napoleon's most brilliant marshals, Joachim Murat the innkeeper's son who became a dashing cavalry leader, husband of Napoleon's youngest sister, Caroline, and Grand Duke of Berg and Cleves – had been further rewarded with the Kingdom of Naples. A man of limitless ambition and vanity, he had conceived a plan of uniting southern and central Italy into one kingdom under his sway; and, after the disaster of Leipzig, he made up his mind to break with Napoleon and to make common cause with the Allies in order to further his ends. On the pretext of moving his army north for the defence of Italy against Austria, he filled Rome with troops who appeared to be in transit but of whom many had come to stay. By the end of January 1814 the Neapolitans were in virtual possession of the city. It was only on Castel Sant' Angelo that General Miollis, still loyal to Napoleon though his cause was now lost, continued to fly the French flag. It was to fly there for only a few weeks more. On 10 March 1814 the last French troops marched out of Rome, with drums beating and flags flying, past the silent Roman crowds whom they had governed for almost six years.

In April Pope Pius returned, his carriage, drawn by the sons of noble families, passing slowly down the Corso beneath triumphal arches. He re-entered the Quirinal whose rooms the French had filled with Empire furniture and ornaments, and on whose walls they had painted the figures of classical gods and goddesses. Most of the French ornaments were removed to make room for the crucifixes and religious statues which they had replaced, but not all the goddesses were painted over: the Pope observed that those whose dresses were not diaphanous might make very nice Madonnas. Indeed, the Pope decided not to do away with anything merely because it was French. He retained many of the reforms carried out by the Napoleonic administration and adopted the Napoleonic Civil Code. He offered a home to Napoleon's widowed mother, Letizia, who went to live at the Palazzo Falconieri¹⁰ with Cardinal Fesch, whose father had married her as his second wife. Napoleon's brother Lucien, who had been made Prince of Canino, a little town north of Rome, came to live in a palace there. Asylum was also granted to Napoleon's other brother, Joseph Bonaparte, to his sister, Elisa, formerly Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and even to Napoleon's Inspector-General of Gendarmerie, the Duc de Rovigo.

When the Duc died in 1833, the French occupation of Rome had been largely forgotten and little evidence of their rule remained. In their time the Vatican Library and Museums had been reorganized; further areas of the Pontine Marshes had been drained; the first expert excavations of the Trajan Forum had been carried out; and the charming gardens overlooking the Piazza del Popolo from the Pincian hill had been laid out by the Roman landscape architect, Valadier. But more grandiose conceptions, such as an immense imperial palace stretching from the Piazza Colonna to the Colosseum, were never realized, and Rome appeared to foreign visitors much as it had done when Charles de Brosses had arrived a hundred years before. The population still numbered only about 135,000; and Stendhal, writing in 1827, noted that the inhabited area remained bounded on the south by the Capitol, on the west by the Tiber, and on the east by the Pincian and Quirinal hills. Three quarters of the city inside the Aurelian Walls – the Viminal, the Esquiline, the Caelian and the Aventine hills – he described as being silent and solitary. ‘La fièvre y règne,’ he wrote, ‘et on les cultive en vigne.’ He saw an Englishman ride his horse through the Colosseum; and, though he considered the Corso the most beautiful street in the universe, he found, as others had done for centuries past, that it stank of cabbages.

As an English visitor observed, ‘One can walk from one end of the city to the other without seeing a single thing to suggest that you are not still in the eighteenth century or to remind you that the French were once masters here for several years.’ Most of the looted works of art had been returned; and the Papal States, which the Allies had denied to the faithless Murat, had been given back to the Pope. Rome, like the rest of Europe, as one of the diplomats who had attended the Congress of Vienna chose to put it, ‘was as it might have been had the tragedy of the Revolution never occurred’. The old world could not be restored, however: there were more upheavals soon to come.

FIFTEEN THE RISORGIMENTO AND THE ROMAN QUESTION

‘There is storm in the air,’ Pope Gregory XVI said to a friend shortly before his death in 1846. ‘Revolutions will soon break out.’ Revolutions had, indeed, been likely ever since the Congress of Vienna had set about the task of undoing the work of Napoleon and of breaking up Italy into its former small components so that the pieces could be handed back, wherever possible, to their former masters. The watchword of the Congress had been ‘legitimacy’, a doctrine invented by Talleyrand to express the advantages of the Bourbon restoration in France. In pursuit of ‘legitimacy’ in Italy, the Bourbons had been re-established in Naples, the House of Savoy recovered Piedmont and Sardinia, whose territories were extended to include Savoy and Nice as well as the former Republic of Genoa, and the Pope had been returned to power in the Papal States. This fragmentation of Italy suited the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Metternich, very well. To him Italy was ‘ein geographischer Begriff, a mere geographical expression; so long as it remained divided, Austria would be able to maintain her hold over Lombardy and Venetia. At Vienna he succeeded not only in acquiring these two valuable territories for his country, but he also arranged for Tuscany to be accorded to an Austrian archduke and for Parma to be ceded to the daughter of the Austrian Emperor. And in the Kingdom of Naples the wife of the restored monarch, Ferdinand IV, was an Austrian. Austria was thus restored to the dominant position she had enjoyed in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century; and over those large areas which she controlled, the clouds of reaction gathered and darkened. So they also did in most of the rest of Italy where police spies, clerical privileges and press censorship became commonplace.

In the Papal States all the officials who had served the French were dismissed from their posts; the French codes of law were destroyed; education was limited while taxes were increased; and power was concentrated in the hands of the Cardinal Secretary of State and of those other ecclesiastics appointed to direct the various departments of the Government. In the time of Pius VII some reforms had been effected by Cardinal Consalvi, his Secretary of State; but these had been nullified by Pius's successor, Leo XII; while Pope Gregory XVI, an obscurantist of the most extreme persuasion, went so far as to prohibit the building of railways – he called them ‘chemins d'enfer’ – in the Papal States, fearing that they might ‘work harm to religion’ and lead to the arrival in Rome of deputations of malcontents from restless provinces beyond the Appenines. He set his mind firmly against reform. In Cardinal Lambruschini he had an adviser who, though more personally attractive than himself, was no less uncompromising. And in Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, the Roman dialect poet, whose sonnets are a vivid memorial of the lives and conversations of the Romans of the period, he had an adversary who delighted in satirizing his views. ‘I really liked Pope Gregory,’ Belli wrote, ‘because it gave me so much pleasure to speak ill of him.’

In the Papal States, as elsewhere in Italy, there were occasional demonstrations, disturbances and uprisings. But the demands of the rebels, beset by economic pressures and social discontents, were for independence, constitutions and reforms rather than, as yet, for national unity. The main causes of complaint were the failure of the papacy to restore municipal liberties or to allow laymen to play any significant part in government.

There were, however, various secret organizations in the peninsula whose members looked forward to the day when, at some unspecified date and by vaguely suggested means, Italy would attain freedom from foreign domination and achieve the ultimate unity of its separate states. One such secret society was the Carbonari who took their name, symbolically, from carbone (coal) which, black and lifeless, burns brightly when it is kindled, and who used charcoal-burners’ shops as covers for their activities. Another was Young Italy, whose motto, ‘Dio e popolo’, expressed the religious foundation of the national cause, and whose oath required its members to work ‘wholly and for ever to constitute Italy one, free and independent’. Both organizations took heart when, on the death of Pope Gregory XVI, Cardinal Mastai Ferretti, the 54-year-old Bishop of Imola, was elected to succeed him; for the new Pope, who took the name of Pius IX, was a kindly, polite, good-looking man who was believed to have pronounced liberal tendencies. His election certainly distressed the reactionary Cardinal Lambruschini, who had hoped to become Pope himself, and Cardinal Bernetti, Lambruschini's predecessor as Secretary of State, who, when the Bishop of Imola appeared on the point of fainting at the prospect of his likely election, murmured in his neighbour's ear, ‘Well, after the policemen come the ladies.’

In Rome, where he was little known, Pope Pius was greeted at first with some distrust; but by the time his carriage had been driven away from the Quirinal to the Vatican his handsome face, calm expression and gentle gestures had impressed all who saw him. ‘Ah! the women said. ‘Ah! Che bello!’ The reports that subsequently emanated from the Vatican were highly favourable: the new Pope was a charming man, sensitive and generous, simple and devout, with a most endearing self-deprecating humour. He was also evidently not prepared to tolerate his predecessor's regressive policies. He formed a council to watch over all branches of the administration and to investigate proposals for modernization and change. He appointed a commission on railways and on the civil and penal codes; he granted an amnesty for political offences; planned gas lighting in the streets, and the introduction of laymen into the government. Metternich was appalled by these signs that the Pope was prepared to align himself with liberal Europe. ‘We were prepared for everything but a liberal pope,’ he said. ‘And now that we have one, who can tell what may happen?’ It was ‘the greatest misfortune of the age’.

Metternich was also deeply concerned by Pius's evidently genuine feeling for Italy, by his apparent attraction to the idea that the papacy should play a vital role in the regeneration of the nation, and that the Pope should preside over a confederation of Italian states. Yet Pope Pius was not really in sympathy with the motives behind the liberal movement; nor did he in his heart believe that representative government could be reconciled with papal authority. He doubted that he was capable, even if willing, to lead a national movement to fulfilment. They wanted to make a Napoleon out of him, he complained, when he was really nothing but a priest. And it was undoubtedly true that despite his fine voice and commanding presence, he did not have the strength of character to fulfil the hopes and control the enthusiasm of the applauding thousands who followed him through the streets of Rome shouting ‘Evviva!’ and waving the scarves and handkerchieves which were made in his colours. He enjoyed the acclaim, his enemies said, but he was nervous of its consequences, of the repeated cry, ‘Viva Pio Nono, solo! Solo!’ He saw that he was being held up for popular acclaim not so much as a reforming pope but as one who had ‘sided with the revolution against tradition’. His cautious and sensible early reforms were now dismissed as unworthy of the times; he was presented no longer as a saint, but caricatured as a tortoise.

All over Italy there were feelings of hopes unfulfilled, expectations unrealized, opportunities missed; and the desires awakened were surging beyond control. At the beginning of 1848, in fulfilment of Pope Gregory's prophecy, revolutions broke out from Sicily and Naples to Florence, Venice and Milan. News of these uprisings and of the war of liberation against Austria was received in Rome with the greatest excitement. But on 29 April Pope Pius felt it his duty as Pope to deliver an Allocution separating himself once and for all from the nationalists and indeed from the Risorgimento – the campaign for a united Italy itself: ‘We assert clearly and openly that war with Austria is far from our thoughts, since we, however unworthy, are the Vicar of Him who is the author of peace and the lover of concord.’

This unequivocal announcement aroused a storm of protest, and led to the temporary appointment of the liberal Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere as head of the administration which the Pope had been forced to accept under the terms of a constitution granted the previous March. In the middle of September, however, after the resignation of Mamiani followed by that of his liberal successor, Count Eduardo Fabbri, neither of whom felt capable of controlling the political situation or the extreme demands of the revolutionary clubs, the government was placed in the hands of the ex-revolutionary conservative Count Pellegrino Rossi, a tall, pale, thin scholar of strong character and varied gifts. His books were on the Index, he had a Protestant wife and he was intensely disliked in the Curia. Yet the Pope trusted him, for Rossi saw in the papacy ‘the one great thing that was left to Italy’; and he was determined to preserve its temporal power, not by making concessions to the democrats but by wise economic reforms and enlightened administration. But he was a proud, aloof and provocative man who took no trouble to hide his contempt for his opponents, whether Republican or conservative, and made many enemies among them by his cruel sarcasm.

The bitterness of his enemies’ hatred was demonstrated on 15 November when he dismounted from his carriage outside the Palazzo della Cancelleria for the new session of the Council of Deputies. A small crowd shouted insults as he approached the broad stone steps of the palace: ‘Abbasso Rossi! Abbasso Rossi! Morte a Rossi!’ He took no notice. His expression was one of scorn and distaste, emphasized some observers said, by a slight contemptuous smile. Suddenly a man struck him, then another stabbed him in the neck, severing the carotid artery, before escaping into the crowd, his head hidden in the folds of a cloak.

The next day Rome was in uproar. Armed gangs paraded through the streets shouting slogans and singing songs in praise of the assassins. A large crowd of soldiers, policemen and well-known citizens surged about the Quirinal demanding a democratic programme; and, when it seemed that the Pope was unwilling to give way, they attacked the palace, firing through the windows, trying to set fire to the doors and killing the Latin Secretary. Protesting that he did so only under duress, the Pope surrendered to the radicals and agreed to the formation of a cabinet sympathetic towards them. Soon afterwards, virtually a prisoner in his own palace, he left Rome for Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples disguised as an ordinary priest, his features partially concealed behind large spectacles. And from Gaeta, advised by Cardinal Antonelli, an ambitious, clever and devious politician, he demanded the submission of the rebels. He denounced as ‘a monstrous act of unconcealed treason’ the proposal that a constituent assembly be elected in Rome on the basis of universal suffrage, and threatened anyone who so voted with the ‘Greater Excommunication’. His condemnations, however, had little effect. It was impossible now to check the enthusiasm in Rome by so uncompromising a stand. The American Margaret Fuller, a former schoolteacher from Boston, now mistress of the Marchese Ossoli, expressed a common sentiment when she wrote that she thought she could never have heard of a violent death with satisfaction but that Rossi's assassination seemed to her ‘one of terrible justice’.

In spite of papal condemnation, the representatives of a constituent assembly were elected in due course and these, on 9 February, voted the end of the papal state and its replacement by the Roman Republic. This fired the imagination of liberals all over Italy, but it also aroused the anger of Catholic Europe to which the Pope appealed for its suppression. He appealed to King Ferdinand of Naples who lost no time in moving his army up to the frontier; he appealed to the Austrian Emperor whose forces, having defeated those of Piedmont, also marched towards Rome; and, most ominously for Rome, he appealed to France where the nephew of the Emperor Napoleon I, Louis Napoleon – whose election the year before to the French Assembly had been compared by a journalist to the sudden and unexpected appearance of the demon king in a pantomime – had recently been proclaimed President. Although personally sympathetic towards the Italian nationalists, Louis Napoleon had good reasons for responding to the Pope's call: he needed the support of the French clergy to achieve the destiny he already envisaged for himself as creator of the Second Empire. He could not afford to allow the Austrians to extend their influence in Italy, nor did he want to be eclipsed by the King of Naples, the choice of whose kingdom as a place of exile by the Pope had been interpreted as a diplomatic defeat for France. Besides, there was a strong feeling in France that the Pope had been disgracefully ill used, and the mounting of an expedition to restore him would not, therefore, be unpopular. So a French army also advanced upon the Roman Republic which prepared itself to fight for its existence by creating on 29 March a Triumvirate to dictate its policy during the imminent emergency. The members of this Triumvirate were Carlo Armellini, a respected Roman lawyer, Count Aurelio Saffi, the leader of the liberals from the Romagna, and Giuseppe Mazzini, a man whose fame and genius were to ensure that he was to be the inspiration of the Republic's defence.

The son of a doctor from Genoa who had become professor of anatomy at the university, Mazzini had been born in 1805. He had thought of becoming a doctor himself, but after fainting at the sight of his first operation, he had turned to law. He had little taste for this either and, although he did well enough in his examinations, he was a troublesome and argumentative student, restless, impatient, moody, slow to make friends and quick to take offence. He remained a difficult personality throughout his life. When he was well and happy he could be generous, charming and lively, but in the moods of dispirited tiredness which often overcame him he was irritating, exacting and didactic. He dressed always in black and allowed himself no luxuries other than expensive writing-paper and scent. He ate the simplest food and for days on end would exist on a diet largely composed of bread and raisins. He had a beautiful voice and striking features. His eyes were dark and flashing, the only eyes that one man who knew him had ever seen that ‘looked like flames’. His skin was smooth and olive, his hair black and long; he walked quickly with a feline grace, holding his head forward.

The suppression of a revolt in Genoa when he was sixteen had brought the Carbonari to his admiring notice and he had later joined the society. The unification of Italy was a cause which he had thereafter embraced with passionate intensity, and he gave up his whole life to its realization with single-minded stubbornness. ‘Mine is a matter of deep conviction,’ he would say dogmatically. ‘It is impossible for me to modify or alter it.’ And this very refusal to compromise, this blind dedication to an ideal that allowed him to disregard the obstacles in the way of its realization, this intolerance of views other than his own, formed his unique and essential contribution to the birth of his country.

For him there could be no other capital of Italy but Rome, ‘the natural centre of Italian unity’; and Rome became for him, in the words of the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco, ‘a talismanic obsession’.

‘Rome was the dream of my young years, the religion of my soul,’ Mazzini wrote. ‘I entered the city one evening, early in March [1849], with a deep sense of awe, almost of worship… I had journeyed towards the sacred city with a heart sick unto death from the… dismemberment of our Republican party over the whole of Italy. Yet nevertheless, as I passed through the Porta del Popolo, I felt an electric thrill run through me – a spring of new life.’

Inspired by the hope that the liberation of Italy would be accomplished by a pure, spreading fire set off by a spark in Rome, he addressed the Assembly with brilliant eloquence:

There are not five Italies, or four Italies or three Italies. There is only one Italy. God, who, in creating her, smiled upon her land, has awarded her the two most sublime frontiers in Europe, symbols of eternal strength and eternal motion – the Alps and the sea… Rome shall be the holy Ark of your redemption, the temple of your nation… Rome, by the design of Providence, and as the People have divined, is the Eternal City to which is entrusted the mission of disseminating the word that will unite the world…Just as to the Rome of the Caesars, which through action united a great part of Europe, there succeeded the Rome of the Popes, which united Europe and America in the realm of the spirit, so the Rome of the People will succeed them both, to unite Europe, America and every part of the terrestrial globe in a faith that will make thought and action one… The destiny of Rome and Italy is that of the world.

As undisputed leader of the Republic, Mazzini, brooking no arguments nor any rival, made many enemies in Rome. He ‘thinks he is Pope and infallible,’ wrote one of them. Another, Luigi Carlo Farini, was soon to say, ‘He is pontiff, prince, apostle, priest. When the clerics have gone he will be thoroughly at home in Rome… He has the nature of a priest more than a statesman. He wants to tether the world to his own immutable idea.’

To the Romans at large, however, he was an inspiring figure who infected them with his own feverish, almost hysterical enthusiasm. He went to live in a small room in the Quirinal from which he emerged each morning to walk about the streets ‘with the same smile and warm handshake for all’, radiating confidence in the destiny of the Republic, in the unique greatness of the city of its birth in whose air could be felt ‘the pulsations of the immense eternal life of Rome, the immortality stirring beneath those ruins of two epochs, two worlds’. The city might fall if no further help arrived, he had to concede, but even in its fall the people would regain their ‘Religion of Rome’ and from the ashes of its defeat would arise a new spirit, fierce and purified.

To outsiders its collapse seemed inevitable. A leader in The Times referred dismissively to the ‘degenerate remnant of the Roman people’ preparing to fight in the mistaken belief that they were heroes; and foreign residents in Rome did not disguise their belief that the Triumvirate would soon be dismissed, that the defenders of Rome would run away at the first shot, and that the people were only too anxious for the French to arrive and for the suppression of the Republic. Certainly, the forces which the Triumvirs had been able to assemble for the defence of Rome offered little ground for hope that the French could be kept out. There were only about a thousand men in the National Guard and these were scarcely a match for the well-trained troops of the French army. Admittedly, they had shouted their readiness for war when addressed by Mazzini; but their officers, some timid and many unsure that the Republic's cause was one worth dying for, expressed among themselves far less bellicose sentiments. There were some 2,500 regular papal troops who had declared their readiness to support the new government against the allies of their former master; but most of them were believed to be activated not so much by faith in the Republic as by jealousy of the Swiss Guards who, they believed, had been more favoured than themselves in the past. There was also, however, a strong force of irregular troops, seasoned and fervent, who had entered Rome on 27 April under the leadership of a bearded Messianic-looking figure in a flamboyant black felt hat decorated with a plume of ostrich feathers. He had ridden a white horse, darting keen glances to right and left, his long brown hair falling to his broad shoulders, his deeply set eyes divided by a long, aquiline nose with a very high bridge.

‘I shall never forget that day,’ wrote a young artist who left his studio to fight beside this imposing newcomer. ‘He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour's head in the galleries. Everyone said so. I could not resist him. I went after him. Thousands did the same. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him. We could not help it.’

Giuseppe Garibaldi, then aged forty-two, was a guerilla leader of outstanding gifts. The son of a sailor, he had been born in Nice, which had been taken by Napoleon from the Kingdom of Piedmont, and he had been brought up to speak the Ligurian dialect as his first language and French as his second. Italian did not come easily to him, therefore, and his accent betrayed his frontier origins. Like his father, he had been born to the sea and had become a cabin-boy apprentice before he was seventeen. A year later he had sailed down the coast of the Papal States and then up the Tiber in a small boat drawn by oxen, with a cargo of wine for Rome. ‘The Rome that I then beheld with the eyes of my youthful imagination,’ he wrote, ‘was the Rome of the future – the Rome that I never despaired of even when I was shipwrecked, dying, banished to the farthest depths of the American forests – the dominant thought and inspiration of my whole life.’

He had gone to South America after having been condemned to death in an ill-fated insurrection planned by Young Italy, and while living there he had, as he put it, ‘served the cause of nations’ by fighting in various revolutions. Returning to Italy in 1848 he found that he had arrived by chance in a year of ferment, a year in which his dream of a united Italy, with Rome as its capital, might be realized. The appearance of his followers did not, however, inspire confidence in the Roman people. With their long, unkempt hair, their matted beards and dusty, high-crowned, black-plumed hats, they looked more like bandits than soldiers. Some carried muskets, others lances, all wore daggers in their belts. They did have a kind of uniform: dark blue tunics for the men, and for the officers and orderlies red smocks of the kind that Garibaldi's Italian troops had worn in South America ever since a stock of them had been acquired in Montevideo where they had been awaiting export for use in the slaughterhouses of the Argentine. ‘They rode on American saddles,’ an Italian regular officer recorded disdainfully, ‘and seemed to pride themselves on their contempt for all the observances more strictly enjoined on regular troops.’ They were indeed, a ‘parcel of brigands’, as an English resident in Rome told a visitor; they were not in the least likely to enhance the reputation of the Republic. Yet such was the enthusiasm which their leader aroused that their numbers were soon swelled by hundreds of volunteers, artists and clerks, schoolboys and boatmen, Romans and foreigners Englishmen, Dutchmen, Swiss and Belgians. Students and young lecturers from the University formed a special Students’ Corps. Soon even the most conservative and sceptical observers had to admit that, as excitement mounted, hopes for the Republic increased and that there was little to complain about in its declared programme of ‘no war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property; but a constant endeavour to ameliorate the material condition of the classes least favoured by fortune Church property was to be nationalized; the offices of the Inquisition turned into apartments; ecclesiastical estates partitioned into smallholdings to be let at nominal rents. Yet the government decreed that there was to be no persecution of priests, even of those who preached against its policies. And there was, indeed, very little anti-clerical violence in Rome. The Times correspondent, who was not there at the time, accepted the most lurid reports that came out of the city and wrote of priests who had the courage to appear in the open being cut into pieces and thrown into the Tiber. But, in fact, so friends of Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet, were informed, priests walked about ‘in great comfort’. ‘Be assured,’ Clough continued, ‘the worst thing I have witnessed has been a paper in manuscript put up in two places in the Corso, pointing out seven or eight men for popular resentment. This has been done by night. Before the next evening a proclamation was posted in all the streets, from (I am sure) Mazzini's pen, severely and scornfully castigating such proceedings.’

It was true that rumour of a cell in the dungeons of the Inquisition being found stuffed with bones and human hair had led to a violent riot. It was also undeniable that, after the siege had begun, several priests, some, though not all of whom had fired at soldiers, were all murdered, together with three peasants who had been mistaken for spies; and that in May a furiously anti-clerical terrorist from Forli, who had been placed in charge of a volunteer regiment of provincial customs officers, was responsible for a number of savage crimes in Trastevere. But it was generally agreed that the Pope's claim that Rome had become ‘a den of wild beasts… who infringe the personal liberty of decent people and expose their lives to the daggers of cut-throats’ was quite unjustified, and that the Republic's maxim, ‘Firmness in principles, toleration to individuals’, was being widely observed.

Yet, despite the brief enthusiasm aroused by the arrival of the Garibaldini, there was continued scepticism among the foreign colony in Rome as to the ability of the Republic to withstand the powerful enemies it had raised up against itself. William Wetmore Story, the American sculptor and writer, watched the barricades going up at Porta San Giovanni and ‘voted the workmen too lazy to live’. Another day he went to Porta Cavalleggeri and Porta Angelica

to see the barricades, or rather earth mounds, ramparts, stockades, which the Romans are building in the event of a French attack. They had been working at these some thirty hours and in some places had gone three feet. Bunker Hill ramparts were thicker. Here nothing is right earnest. The labourers were leaning picturesquely on their spades, doing nothing, and everything was going on as leisurely as if the enemy were in France instead of a few hours’ march of the city.

The next day Story heard the commander of the Guardia Civica haranguing his men in the Piazza SS. Apostoli. He asked them if they were prepared to defend Rome with their lives. ‘Si!’ they shouted, ‘Si!’ holding up their caps on their bayonets, ‘making the Piazza ring with huzzas. But the enthusiasm did not seem of the right stuff – it was rather a festa demonstration.’

Emilio Dandolo, who entered Rome with a battalion of bersaglieri from Lombardy on 29 April, formed the same impression. He felt that the applause which greeted his men from the windows on every side might well have been welcoming the last scene of some absurd comedy.

There was the same superabundance of standards, of cockades, of badges of party that had characterized the last few months of Milan's liberty [before the Austrians resumed control], the same clanking of swords along the public streets, and those various and varied uniforms of the officers, not one matching the other but all seeming more suitable for the embellishment of the stage than for military service… This array of warriors in glittering helmets with double-barrelled guns and with belts full of daggers reconciled us but little to the scanty numbers of real, well-drilled soldiers.

Behind the flourish and the bombast, however, work was progressing rapidly upon the defences of Rome, Story's caustic comments notwithstanding. Ramparts were being raised, loopholes made in walls; the trees in the gardens of the Villa Borghese were being cut down for barricades; the covered way from the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo was being demolished. In every rione men were appointed to take command of the citizens when the bells of the Capitol and Montecitorio summoned them to arms; platforms were erected in the squares so that the most accomplished of the Republic's orators could address the people; priests and nuns were asked to pray for victory; pensions were promised to those who might be killed; hospitals were organized by Princess Belgioso who could rely upon the help of nearly six thousand volunteers.

Garibaldi was seen everywhere. It had been decided not to appoint him commander-in-chief, since accusations that the city had been taken over by outsiders were already common enough. But he was regarded by all as the natural military leader and whenever he appeared, accompanied by a gigantic and outlandishly dressed Negro orderly who had followed him from South America, he was greeted with loud cheers. His own men, strengthened by some 1,300 volunteers from Rome and the Papal States and supported by troops of the Papal Army and the National Guard, were given the formidable task by the Republic's Minister of War, General Avezzana, of defending the most dangerous part of the front. This was the high ground of the Janiculan hill, south of St Peter's between the Porta Cavalleggeri and the Porta Portese. It was protected by a line of walls stretching south from Castel Sant’ Angelo which had been either built or extended by Urban VIII after the development of gunpowder had revolutionized the art of siege warfare. They were much more capable both of being used offensively by artillerymen and of resisting bombardment than the ancient walls of Aurelian; but they had a serious disadvantage in that the open ground beyond them was as high as the defences and in one place even higher. It was here that the French were likely to concentrate their batteries so that they could fire upon the fortifications by the Porta San Pancrazio, the gate between the Porta Cavalleggeri and the Porta Portese which led directly into the Trastevere quarter. On the high ground beyond this gate were the gardens of two villas, the Villa Corsini¹ and the Villa Pamphilj.² It was in the exposed Villa Corsini that Garibaldi established his headquarters, while, out of sight, north of the vineyards in the valley, the French army marched through a deserted countryside.

Assured by their commander, General Oudinot, that the Romans considered them as liberators from the papal yoke and that no resistance would be offered them, they marched with confidence in the warm April sun, without siege guns or scaling-ladders, their scouts only a short way in front of the resplendently uniformed columns. Oudinot's intention was to enter Rome either by the Porta Angelica between the Vatican and Castel Sant' Angelo or by the Porta Pertusa which, in fact, had been walled up. As his leading troops in their white coats and heavy shakos approached the Porta Pertusa shots were fired from two cannon on the Leonine Wall. This was taken to be the customary signal for midday. But when further shots were fired, the French were forced to conclude that the Romans were, after all, prepared to offer a token resistance and orders were given to unlimber the artillery and make an assault upon the walls.

The assault, however, was not so easy an undertaking as the more sanguine French officers had supposed. A succession of infantry attacks upon the Vatican and the Borgo were repulsed by heavy artillery and musket fire from the walls, to whose defence men from the poorest quarters of the Trastevere had rushed with guns and knives; and the French troops were sent scurrying for cover behind the mounds and in the dykes that cut across the valley beneath the Vatican hill. Watching these preliminary operations from the terrace of the Villa Corsini, Garibaldi decided that the moment had come for his men to move. Few of the French had yet been engaged, and their initial repulse was a minor set-back rather than a defeat; but if his men were to attack now while the enemy were reorganizing and considering how best to proceed, he would catch them at a serious disadvantage. So, sending forward about three hundred of his young volunteers as an advance guard, he prepared to follow them with his own Garibaldini.

The volunteers went forward down the slope beyond the Pamphilj gardens towards a deeply sunken lane, the Via Aurelia Antica, that led from the Porta San Pancrazio towards the road to Palo. And here, beneath the arches of the Pauline Aqueduct, the volunteers, most of them untrained students, came suddenly upon eight companies of the well-disciplined 20^me de Ligne. The students dashed recklessly forward, firing their muskets, brandishing their bayonets, shouting patriotic slogans, and, to their excited surprise, driving the French regulars back. But the 20^me soon recovered their composure. The students’ headlong charge was halted, the French advance was resumed, and within minutes both the young volunteers and the men of Garibaldi's legion who had come forward to support them were being pushed back towards the walls of the city.

Garibaldi himself then appeared, a commanding figure in a poncho riding his white horse. He had called up reserves of papal troops and bersaglieri from Rome; and with the help of these and the men of his legion who had not yet been engaged, he rallied his forces and rode forward to counter-attack, shouting encouragement. Responding to his call, the Italians rushed across the gardens against the French, cheering wildly as they raced past the fountains and the statues which were already covered by a pall of smoke, stabbing at the enemy in their heavy uniforms, splashing the flowers and the grass with blood, ‘savage as dervishes,’ so one French officer recalled, ‘clawing at us even with their hands.’

Unable to withstand so ferocious an assault for long, the French fell back towards the aqueduct, and then across the vineyards and over the Palo road as far as Castel di Guido, some twenty miles from Rome, leaving behind them about five hundred killed and wounded and almost as many prisoners. And at the news of the wonderful victory, the Romans, ‘all elated and surprised at themselves’, as Story described them, took to the streets in joyful celebration. Far into the night the city was ablaze with lights from the uncurtained windows of the houses and the crowded cafés and restaurants. The streets and piazzas were full of happy people congratulating each other on the bravery of the Romans and their faithful friends. ‘The Italians fought like lions,’ Margaret Fuller said. ‘It is a truly heroic spirit that animates them. They make a stand here for honour and their rights…’

Garibaldi pressed Mazzini to take advantage of this spirit and of the victory of 30 April to pursue the enemy and attack him again. But Mazzini was anxious for a settlement with France and refused to consider any action which might make a rapprochement difficult to achieve. ‘The Republic is not at war with France,’ he insisted, ‘merely in a state of defence.’ French prisoners were to be entertained as guests of the city, provided with meals, wine and cigars before being returned to their army. Their wounded were to be treated with all the care that an Italian officer might hope to receive. Such considerations, however, had little effect upon the French President, Louis Napoleon, who considered the army's repulse a disgrace which could not be tolerated. ‘Our military honour is in peril,’ he told General Oudinot. ‘I will not allow it to be compromised. You can be certain of being reinforced. In the meantime he sent Ferdinand de Lesseps to Rome to enter into negotiations for a settlement so as to gain time for these reinforcements and for General Vaillant, France's greatest military engineer, to join the French army in Italy.

Garibaldi could never forgive Mazzini for what he took to be an appalling error of judgement on what was, and remained, ‘a burning question’ between them. ‘If Mazzini had been willing to understand that I might possibly know something of war… how differently things would have turned out,’ he wrote caustically years later. Mazzini had always had ‘an urge to be a general, but he did not know the first thing about it.’

Garibaldi's own limitations as a general, as well as his consummate skill as a guerilla leader, were shown in operations which the Roman Republics defenders had now to undertake against the Neapolitan army of King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies. The Neapolitans were satisfactorily dealt with near Palestrina; but soon after Garibaldi's return to Rome, the expected French reinforcements also arrived outside the city and there was a far more dangerous enemy to face.

‘My government's orders are positive,’ General Oudinot now informed the Roman Republic. ‘They require me to enter Rome as soon as possible… I have abrogated the verbal armistice which, at the instance of M. de Lesseps, I agreed to grant for the time being. I have warned your outposts that either army has the right to reopen hostilities. Solely to give time for any of our French residents to leave Rome… I am deferring the attack upon the place until Monday morning.’

Taking ‘the place’ to mean not only the city itself but all the outposts, including the Corsini and Pamphilj villas which were essential to its defence, the Roman generals concluded that all their men could relax on Sunday. But by ‘the place’ Oudinot afterwards claimed that he had referred only to the city itself and, having rejected the idea of an assault on the other side of Rome which might involve prolonged street fighting, he prepared to take the two vital villas as a necessary preliminary to an assault from the west. Accordingly, in the early hours of Sunday morning 3 June, the villas were attacked; and, since the defenders were fast asleep in their bivouacs at the time, they were captured without much difficulty, together with another smaller house, the Villa Medici del Vascello,³ at the foot of the slope.

Rome was soon in uproar. All over the city bells were pealing in the campanili, drums beating, crowds collecting in the piazzas. Soldiers ran shouting through the streets to their posts, cab-drivers drove at full tilt through the narrow streets of the Trastevere to help with the wounded who were being carted through the Porta San Pancrazio in wheelbarrows. An orderly burst into the lodgings in Via delle Carrozze near Piazza di Spagna where Garibaldi was ill in bed with rheumatism and a month-old, still festering wound. He leapt out of bed, buckled on his sword-belt and hurried off to the Porta San Pancrazio as the roar of the cannon on the Janiculum thundered in his ears. Outside the gate he looked up towards the ornate, four-storeyed Villa Corsini, strongly occupied now by the French whose sharpshooters, crouching behind a low wall on which were rows of large earthenware pots containing orange trees, covered with their fire the entire slope between the villa and the Porta San Pancrazio. In front of the villa a narrow drive, flanked by high box hedges, led down from the bottom of an outside staircase to a gate in the garden wall. The place might have been designed to repel a frontal attack. And even if it were to be captured, behind it the grounds of the Villa Pamphilj afforded ample space for troops to reform for a counter-attack on a wide front supported by artillery. Yet, having considered the difficulties presented by the ground for an outflanking movement, Garibaldi considered that he had no alternative other than an attack from the front. This would inevitably entail a dreadful loss of life as his men, under constant fire from the well-entrenched enemy, debouched from the narrow Porta San Pancrazio, ran across the open ground to the villa's boundary walls, and closed up again to pass through the garden gate and along the narrow, high-hedged drive beneath the many windows of the villa.

Time and again the attempt was made, and on every occasion it failed. Shouting ‘Long live the Roman Republic!’ soldiers and volunteers charged across from Urban VIII's wall to fall dead or wounded in the sweltering sun. And all the while behind the walls a band played the ‘Marseillaise’ at full blast in the vain hope that this might induce the French, fellow-Republicans after all, to throw down their arms in shame. Once or twice a group of desperate Italians, running through the dust and smoke, reached the steps, gained access to the entrance hall and toppled the defenders from the windows; but always the French counter-attacked successfully before other Italians could reach the villa. One brave assault by some four hundred bersaglieri was described by one of their officers: men fell to the ground around him on every side, yet, rather than turn back, the survivors knelt to fire, as though they had come to a wall which afforded them some protection. Many more had died before the bugler was ordered to sound the retreat. As the rest ran back, so many of them fell that the officer thought ‘they had stumbled in their haste over the roots of the vines. But their motionless bodies soon showed [him] the truth.’

After hours of pounding from the Roman batteries, the Villa Corsini, occasionally bursting into flames, began to collapse into ruins. From the walls of Rome men could see the floors give way and the French defenders clinging to the ends of the shattered beams. Garibaldi, who had spent the morning shouting encouragement as he sent one assault party after another across the open ground, had himself escaped injury, though his poncho and huge hat had been torn in many places by musket balls and scraps of flying metal. He now decided to make one last assault upon the villa and to take part in it himself. The attempt almost succeeded: the ruined villa was captured and the French driven out of its grounds into those of the Villa Pamphilj. Civilian spectators, overcome with excitement, poured out of the Porta San Pancrazio and began to run up the hill to congratulate the victors. But their rejoicing was premature. The French counter-attacked yet again; they retook the villa, and many more Italians fell to join the littered dead.

Among those officers who survived there was much criticism of Garibald's crude handling of the forces at his command. He ‘had shown himself,’ wrote one of them, Emilio Dandolo, ‘to be as utterly incapable as a general of division as he had proved himself an able and efficient leader in the skirmishes against the Neapolitans.’ In Rome that night, however, few voices were raised against him. Men spoke instead of the treacherous conduct of the blackguardly French, of the heroism of the Italian soldiers and volunteers, of the young men who had bravely died in answer to the call ‘Roma o morte!’

Romans! [Mazzini declared in a proclamation to the people] You have sustained the honour of Rome, the honour of Italy… May God bless you, guardians of the honour of your forefathers, as we, proud of having recognized the greatness within you, bless you in the name of Italy.

Romans! This day is a day of heroes, a page of history. Yesterday we said to you, be great. Today we say to you, you are great… We say with perfect trust… that Rome is inviolable. Watch over her walls this night. Within those walls is the future of the nation… Long live the Republic!

The defenders of Rome responded to these moving words with what appeared to the French to be tireless energy. The guns in the batteries maintained a regular fire; companies of bersaglieri, Garibaldini, papal troops and volunteers rushed out with bayonets whenever the French launched an attack upon an exposed part of the line; men worked bravely under fire to repair emplacements and dig new defences. Arthur Hugh Clough, on a visit to the Monte Cavallo hospital, saw Italian soldiers recovering from their wounds and formed the impression that ‘they would fight it out to the last’. Certainly the civilians, although the explosions were increasing and getting nearer to the heart of the city, were taking it all ‘coolly enough’. In the Trastevere, the most endangered part of Rome, the people seemed wholehearted in their support of Mazzini and, ‘recently so Catholic’, now cursed the Pope and clergy ‘in whose names they saw this carnage and these horrors committed’. ‘Ecco un Pio Nono!’ they would shout when a cannon-ball flew over; and, when one landed among them and did not explode, they would run forward to pick it up and throw it in the river. Even when, towards the end of June, many of them had to abandon their ruined homes, their determination to resist appeared unbroken.

Clough thought, however, that middle-class Romans were less enthusiastic in their defence of the Republic. He fancied they considered it ‘rather useless work’, though they did not ‘feel strongly enough on the matter to make them take active steps against a government which [had] won their respect alike by its moderation and its energy’. As the days passed, the feeling that the cause of the Republic was doomed grew even more widespread. It became increasingly difficult to maintain vigilance and discipline in the fortifications. Gunners in the batteries began to fire shots at random, as though it did not much matter where they landed; and civilians were so reluctant to help with the digging that on one occasion they had to be driven up to the walls at the point of the bayonet.

Remorselessly and skilfully, General Vaillant's engineers advanced their siege-works closer and closer to the city. The French batteries on Monte Verde and in the grounds of the Villa Corsini ceaselessly pounded the defences around Porta San Pancrazio, while night patrols ensured that the defenders could never rest in peace. It was still expected that the attack would come from the west, and Garibaldi insisted that he must have more men to defend the Janiculum. But Pietro Roselli, the Roman professional officer who had been placed in supreme command, could not neglect other parts of Rome's defences, particularly in the south where there were large numbers of French troops around S. Paolo fuori le Mura and in the north where they had captured Ponte Molle. So Garibaldi adopted an even more independent line than usual. He appropriated soldiers who had been allocated to other duties; and when, after a ferocious bombardment, the French threatened to dominate the city from S. Pietro in Montorio, he refused to obey an order to counter-attack on the grounds that it would be better to establish an inner line of defence on the Aurelian Wall and that his men were in no condition to counter-attack anyway.

His disagreements with the Roman High Command exacerbated the uneasiness of Garibaldi's relationship with Mazzini. It had never seemed likely that the two men, both obstinate, self-willed and headstrong, would be able to cooperate without friction. They were, it was often suggested, jealous of each other. Garibaldi, envious of Mazzini's acknowledged intellect, described him as ‘a doctrinaire’ whose followers were ‘learned academics, accustomed to legislate for the world from their studies’. Mazzini, who did not enjoy Garibaldi's influence and standing as a man of action, considered his rival ‘weak beyond expression’, ‘the most easily led of men’. If ‘Garibaldi has to choose between two proposals,’ Mazzini complained, ‘he is sure to choose the one that isn't mine.’ ‘You know the face of a lion?’ he once said to a friend. ‘Is it not a foolish face? Is it not the face of Garibaldi?’

Mazzini considered now that ‘Rome had already fallen’, but that if its fall was to have any significance in the future it must die in great suffering and self-sacrifice so that it should provide an inspiration to Italy. His feeling for Rome was more obsessive than ever and the suggestion that the defenders should abandon it and fight the French outside the walls appalled him. He himself was prepared to die within the city, and he called upon the people, in the last resort, to follow him to the front and throw back the enemy with their bare hands. ‘God grant that they will assault,’ he said, ‘and then we could have a noble defence of the people at the barricades. My mind is overwhelmed with grief that so much bravery, so much heroism should be lost.’

The assault that Mazzini had prayed for came at about one o'clock in the morning on the last night of June. The day before had been celebrated as usual as the Feast of St Peter and St Paul; and, encouraged by the government, who thought that they might serve as a demonstration of the Romans' defiance of their enemies, the people had let off fireworks and rockets into the darkening sky, and coloured lanterns had been hung up in the streets. Before midnight a heavy summer storm had sent rain pouring in torrents upon the city, so that when the bombardment began cascades of mud spattered the ruins. The subsequent fighting under the moonless sky was savage and bitter; but it was also brief. The French attack, carefully planned, was swift and determined. One column stormed through a breach in the wall built by Urban VIII, while another burst upon the Aurelian Wall and then fanned out to the left towards the battery near the Porta San Pancrazio and to the right to surround the Villa Spada where Garibaldi, having withdrawn from the Villa Savorelli, had established his headquarters.

Summoned to an emergency meeting of the Republican Assembly, Garibaldi left for the Capitol convinced that further resistance in Rome was pointless and that the government must now be forced to accept the alternative he had long pressed upon them – a guerilla campaign against the French outside the city walls. His Negro orderly was dead; his chief-of-staff was dying; he had often barely escaped death himself. He entered the Capitol, the sweat pouring from his face, his clothes covered with mud and drying blood, his bent sword sticking out of its scabbard. The members rose to cheer him. He reiterated his belief that the struggle must now be carried on outside the city. ‘Ovunque noi saremo,’ he said, ‘sarà Roma’ – ‘Wherever we go, there will Rome be.’

‘I am going out of Rome,’ he declared later from the saddle of his horse to the crowds collected around the obelisk in St Peter's piazza. ‘Whoever is willing to follow me will be received among my people. I ask nothing of them but a heart filled with love for our country. They will have no pay, no provisions and no rest. I offer hunger, cold, forced marches, battles and death. Whoever is not satisfied with such a life must remain behind. He who has the name of Italy not only on his lips but in his heart, let him follow me.' Those who were prepared to go with him must meet that evening by the Lateran, ready to leave Rome by the Porta San Giovanni.

About four thousand volunteers gathered there at the appointed hour, soldiers and civilians, men and boys, patriots, politicians and several criminals who were leaving Rome in order to escape the law or in the hope of loot. Garibaldi's pregnant wife, a short, dark, masculine, South American woman of mixed Portuguese and Indian descent was also there, having come to Rome to share his dangers with him. They filed out slowly through the gate in their civilian clothes and motley uniforms, followed by a single cannon.

Mazzinini had never considered going with them: never a man to follow anyone happily, to follow Garibaldi would have been intolerable. At the meeting of the Assembly he had resigned his office as Triumvir in protest against its decision to capitulate. Afterwards, he had walked about the streets of Rome in order, so it was alleged, to offer himself to the knife of an assassin and, by surviving, to demonstrate that the Catholic press was lying when it claimed that the Romans wished him dead for having forced a tyranny upon them. ‘In two short months he had grown old,’ wrote Margaret Fuller who saw him that evening. ‘All the vital juices seemed exhausted. He had passed all these nights without sleep; his eyes were all bloodshot; his skin orange. He was painfully thin; his hair was flecked with white; his hand was painful to the touch.’ He was still in Rome on 3 July when the French made their formal entry into the city. Their arrival was described by A. H. Clough:

I stood in the Corso with some thirty of the people and saw them pass. Fine working soldiers, indeed dogged and business-like, but they looked a little awkward while the people screamed and hooted and cried, ‘Viva la Repubblica Romana,’ etc. When they got past, some young simpleton sent a pail after them; four or five raced down with bayonets presented, while my young friend cut away up the Corso double-quick. They went on. At this moment, some Roman bourgeois as I fancy, but perhaps a foreigner, said something either to express his sense of the folly of it, or his sympathy with the invaders. He was surrounded and I saw him buffeted a good deal… I was told he got off. But a priest who walked and talked publicly in the Piazza Colonna with a Frenchman was undoubtedly killed… Poor man, he was quite a liberal ecclesiastic, they tell me; but certainly not a prudent one. To return to my own experience: After this, the column passed back by another street in the Corso, and dispersed the crowd with the bayonet point… An English acquaintance informed me that in passing by the Café Nuovo, where an Italian tricolour hung from the window, Oudinot plucked at it and bid it be removed. The French proceeded to do this but the Romans intervened. Cernuschi, the Barricade Commissioner, took it down and kissed it, and, as I myself saw, carried it in triumph amidst thers to the Piazza. I didn't follow; but on my bolder friend's authority I can state here the French moved up with their bayonets and took it from Cernuschi, stripping him moreover of his tricolour scarf.

P.S. The priest is not dead and perhaps will survive. But another I hear was hewed to pieces for shouting, ‘Viva Pio IX, a basso la repubblica!’… The French soldiers showed excellent temper. At the same time some faces I have seen are far more brutal than the worst Garibaldian and we have hitherto seen nothing so unpleasant in the female kind as the vivandiéres.

The Times correspondent agreed that the occupying forces behaved themselves well, though they were hissed and groaned at as they passed the Caffè Nuovo, ‘one of the strongholds of the Ultra-Liberals’,⁴ and, outside the Caffè delle Belle Arti, assailed with repeated cries of ‘Death to Pio Nono! Death to the priests! Viva the Roman Republic! Death to the Cardinal Oudinot!’ ‘The General's staff, who had borne with the good humour of French soldiers the first part of these insults, became furious on hearing the Commander-in-Chief personally vituperated and without a moment's hesitation they charged the crowd.’

The occupying forces, however, were rarely thus provoked. In the first few days the cafés and restaurants which they patronized were boycotted by the Romans, and some, such as the large Caffè Nuovo where ‘unmistakable disgust was evinced’, were closed down. But generally, as at the Bon Gout in Piazza di Spagna, the French were treated with ‘polite indifference’; and gradually the insults decreased. Search parties were sent out for leaders of the now defunct Republic, but they were conducted with so little thoroughness that they were seen as a matter of mere form. Most of the so-called ‘revolutionaries’ were allowed to escape with the help of sympathetic foreign consuls, the British consul, for example, issuing so many hundreds of diplomatic passes that Lord Palmerston was constrained to reprove him. With the assistance of the American chargé d'affaires, Mazzini got away to Civitavecchia and eventually to England, without interference from the authorities.

Nine months after Mazzini's departure from Rome, Pope Pius returned in state through the Lateran gate, escorted by French troops. He rode to the Vatican, where he had chosen to live instead of at the Quirinal; and from the Vatican he presided over the restoration of his authoritarian and paternalistic papal rule. Soon the hotels and lodging-houses of Rome were again filled with foreign tourists and the workshops of the city were busy once more.

One visitor who had spent three months in Rome almost twenty years before found it ‘scarcely changed at all’: her favourite restaurant had the same owners, the same cooks and the same waiters. The Romans she met were as friends as ever. She felt no sense of that repression which enemies of the régime were later to describe. Nor did Jean-Jacques Ampère, the French historian and philologist, who was in Rome at the same time and who thought that there was more liberty in Rome than anywhere else in Italy – that the priests were quite prepared to abide by a policy of laissez-faire outside the sphere of their special requirements.

In one way, however, Rome had changed: it was no longer the centre of the art world, which was gradually moving to Paris. Jacques-Louis David, who had come to Rome with Comte Joseph-Marie Vien, a pioneer of the neo-classical style, when Vien had been appointed Director of the French Academy, had long since returned to Paris. Antonio Canova, the sculptor whose studio was in Palazzo Venezia and whose monument to the Stuarts in St Peter's⁵ and sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte in the Borghese Gallery⁶ are among several of his works which can be seen in Rome, had gone home to Venice. The Icelandic sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, in whose studio in Rome there were at one time no less than forty assistants, had returned to Denmark in 1838. And the Nazarenes, who were among the first primitives of the nineteenth century and had come from Germany to occupy an abandoned monastery, had begun to break up even before the completion of the frescos for the Casino Massimo.⁷

Yet if Rome was no longer the art centre it had formerly been, interest in its classical monuments and early Christian art was now more intense than ever. For this the archaeologists Luigi Canina and G. B. de Rossi were largely responsible, Canina by his excavations of the Appian Way and his etchings of reconstructions of hundreds of Roman antiquities, de Rossi by his digs in the Colosseum, the Forum and in the early churches of Rome and his discoveries of the catacombs of St Calixtus and St Agnese.

Pope Pius took the greatest interest in de Rossi's work and his eyes filled with tears when the archaeologist took him down to show him the fragments of inscriptions he had found in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacombs of St Calixtus. ‘Are these really,’ he asked in wonderment, ‘the tombs of my predecessors who repose here?’ The Pope was also deeply interested in those modern inventions which in the 1850s and 1860s were beginning to transform life in Rome and the Papal States, in hydraulics and telegraphs, in steam power, machinery and railways, taking particular pride in his own special train with its white and gold painted coaches which included a chapel on bogie wheels. He frequently walked out to watch progress on these wonders of science and to bless them when they were completed. He blessed the first train which left Rome for Frascati in 1860 and which, travelling at thirty miles an hour, arrived there to be welcomed by a band which made puffing, grinding and whistling sounds in imitation of mechanical locomotion. Lord John Manners, Chief Commissioner of Works in the British government, was present when in 1863 the Pope attended the opening of the steel drawbridge across the Tiber near Porta Portese and was embarrassed to be presented to His Holiness, since he was wearing an old straw hat and carrying an umbrella. But he was soon made to feel at ease as the Pope said to him, ‘I am very glad to see you, especially at this moment. You will be able to tell them, when you return to London, that the Roman pontiff is not always at prayer, surrounded with incense and monks. You will be able to tell the Queen that Her Majesty's Minister of Public Works one day surprised the old Pope in the midst of his workmen, attending the opening of a new bridge over the Tiber, and himself explaining pretty well the mechanism of the new invention.’

Yet interested as he was in scientific progress, the Pope closed his mind firmly to proposals for a united Italy of which Rome would be the capital and to which the temporal estates of the Church, held in trust from God and for centuries an instrument for the preservation of the papacy's spiritual independence, would have to be surrendered. But the Risorgimento was gaining a momentum that made the Pope's stand irrelevant. Cavour, the King of Sardinia's brilliant and unscrupulous chief minister, was elaborating those policies which were to enable his master to expand his territories from Piedmont into Lombardy and south across Parma, Modena and into Tuscany. Garibaldi was preparing the forces which would seize Sicily and Naples from the Bourbons. In September 1860 the Piedmontese army invaded the Papal States; and by the end of the year King Victor Emmanuel II, by a series of well-manipulated plebiscites, had gained control of all Italy with the exception of the Veneto and Rome.

On 17 March by a unanimous vote of the Parliament in Turin, Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed King of Italy and ten days later, although it was still in the hands of the Pope, Rome was declared the capital of the new kingdom. At the Vatican the Pope was assured by the French Ambassador, the Duc de Grammont, that France would oppose any aggression on Rome with ‘force of arms’. At first the Pope believed that France would do so, convinced by the protestations of the Ambassador who, in the opinion of his British counterpart, Odo Russell, was ‘an amiable humbug… affecting, like all French diplomatists in Italy, the greatest contempt for Italian aspirations, wishing to hang Cavour and shoot Garibaldi’. And so, advised by his Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, the Pope refused to make any concessions on what had become known as the Roman Question. He told Odo Russell that the crisis would pass, that one day soon the Church would triumph over her enemies; and, in the meantime, there were 6,000 French troops in Rome as well as an international force of volunteers in the pay of the papacy. As though in defiance of his enemies, in 1864, the Pope issued his Syllabus of Errors which stigmatized as an error the view that ‘the Roman pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’; and on 18 December 1869, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he opened the Vatican Council at which the dogma of Papal Infallibility was defined. But then in 1870 France declared war on Prussia, and by the time the battle of Sedan had deprived Louis Napoleon of his empire, nearly all the French soldiers had been withdrawn from Rome in a vain attempt to avert a catastrophic defeat. Immediately King Victor Emmanuel's troops prepared to take their place. On 16 September the Pope went to S. Maria d'Aracoeli to pray before the Santo Bambino, the figure, so revered in Rome, which is said to have been carved out of wood from one of the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. Three days later, for the last time, he crossed Rome in his carriage from the Vatican to St John Lateran to review the troops assembled in the piazza. Slowly, the frail, white-haired old man of seventy-eight climbed the Scala Santa on his knees and at the top, after praying aloud, he stood up to bless the soldiers below him.

In the early hours of the morning of 20 September, the King's cannon opened fire upon the city gates. In the Vatican the windows rattled in their frames. But the Pope had given orders that no more than a token resistance should be offered, a resistance sufficient to demonstrate that he was yielding to the usurpation of Rome by force. Soon the firing died away as a white flag was hoisted from the cupola of St Peter's.

Next year Italy transferred her capital to Rome, the King established his court at the Quirinal and the Pope withdrew into the Vatican, where he died, a self-styled prisoner, in 1878, having reigned for longer than any other pontiff in the history of the papacy. The King also died in 1878. He had never settled contentedly in Rome, seeming happy only at the Villa Ludovisi⁸ which he leased from the Duke of Sora for his morganatic wife, Rosina Vercellina. Homesick for Turin, he much disliked the gloomy Quirinal, where for several years foreign royalty, Catholic and Protestant alike, were unwilling to stay the night for fear of offending the Pope. For many years to come, indeed, the Pope and the new regime were to remain unreconciled; and Roman society was to be torn by conflicting loyalties.

SIXTEEN ROYAL ROME

‘Rome is quite unchanged since you and I were here forty years ago,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had told a friend a few months before the Piedmontese invasion. ‘I said as much to Cardinal Antonelli the other day, and he answered, taking a pinch of snuff, “Yes, thank God.’ The new inventions which had intrigued his master, Pope Pius IX, had scarcely altered at all the essentially pastoral nature of life in the city. There was still no industry and no stock exchange; the main source of wealth was still agriculture. To Edmond About, the French writer and traveller, Rome was like an immense farm in the middle of a great plain of wheat. Each year, before the onset of malaria made the Campagna so perilous, this wheat was brought into store in Rome. It was, even in the 1860s, a common sight to see cows, sheep and goats herded through the streets. As late as 1865 twelve cows were burned to death in a fire in a byre in Via delle Vite, in the very heart of the city.

This aspect of Rome was slow to change, but Cardinal Antonelli could not feel so contented about other differences in the appearance and atmosphere of the city. The papal zouaves had been replaced by regiments of bersaglieri who marched at their rapid pace through the streets in theatrical-looking uniforms and wide-brimmed hats crowned with dark green feathers. Bookstalls were far more numerous and, as well as the familiar Osservatore Romano and Voce della Veritá approved of by the Vatican, passers-by were now offered a variety of other Italian and foreign newspapers and journals. Prelates made far less of a show in the streets, the cardinals’ coaches being painted black and draped as though in mourning; and monks and white-cowled friars, once described as ‘picturesquely poor’ were also far less often to be seen.

These changes were remarked upon and condemned by the Roman-born Augustus Hare whose Walks in Rome was published in 1871.

The absence of Pope, cardinals and monks [Hare wrote]; the shutting up of the convents; the loss of the ceremonies; the misery caused by the terrible taxes and conscription; the voluntary exile of the Borghese and many other noble families; the total destruction of the glorious Villa Negroni¹ and so much else of interest and beauty; the ugly new streets in imitation of Paris and New York, all grate upon one's former Roman associations. And to set against these, there is so very little – a gayer Pincio, a live wolf on the Capitol, a mere scrap of excavation in the Forum, and all is said.

Henry James also remarked upon the changes wrought in Rome since the advent of the men from the north. James, who had paid his first visit to Rome in 1869 and, after his first walk through the city, had then decided, like Goethe, that he was fully alive for the first time in his life, returned in 1872 and was sad to find that the cardinals no longer walked on the Pincio and were only occasionally to be seen around the Lateran where they descended from their dismal-looking coaches to exercise their legs. These limbs now alone still testified to the traditional splendour of the Princes of the Church: ‘For as they advanced, the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings and makes you groan at the victory of civilization over colour.’ The throngs of smartly dressed young men, James thought, scarce offered compensation for the monsignori, treading the streets… followed by solemn servants who returned on their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mouring gear of the cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you'd not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet the King indeed who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some idols.

Visitors might also come across various members of the King's family, as James himself did, without being in the least impressed:

Yesterday Prince Humbert's little primogenito [the future King Victor Emmanuel III] was on the Pincio in an open landau with his governess. He's a sturdy little blond man and the image of the King. They had stopped to listen to the music, and the crowd was planted about the carriage-wheels, staring and criticizing under the child's snub little nose. It appeared bold cynical curiosity without the slightest manifestation of ‘loyalty’ and it gave me a singular sense of the vulgarization of Rome under the new régime. When the Pope drove abroad it was a solemn spectacle; even if you neither kneeled nor uncovered you were irresistibly impressed. But the Pope never stopped to listen to opera turns, and he had no little popelings under the charge of superior nurse-maids whom you might take liberties with.

Yet James conceded that the essence of Rome, ‘this Paradise of exiles,’ as Shelley had described it, remained immutable. He could still enjoy the lovely view from the top of the Lateran and ride from there down the tree-lined lane to the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, or wander through the cork woods on Monte Mario and the fields towards S. Paolo fuori le Mura. Although artists' models had been banished from the Spanish Steps, foreign artists still gathered in the cafés around Piazza di Spagna, in the Via Condotti where the Caffè Greco was more crowded than ever, and in such good cheap restaurants as the Trattoria Lepri where fifteen years before Herman Melville's dinner had cost him fifteen cents. Teams of oxen were still driven through the streets with fruit and casks of wine from the Campagna; pigs still snuffled about for acorns outside the Flaminian Gate; and guides still conducted their groups of tourists around the familiar sights to which were now added the Protestant Cemetery² which Shelley, when his little son was buried here, thought was so beautiful ‘it might make one in love with death’, and the house by the Spanish Steps in which Keats had died in the arms of his friend, Joseph Severn. And everywhere, as George Gissing complained, tips had still to be given, ‘sometimes as much as five in a morning's walk through the rooms’ of the Vatican.

George Gissing had come from Naples by a train in which the ticket collector went ‘along from door to door outside’, while the other passengers in his carriage repeated excitedly to each other throughout the journey, ‘A Roma! A Roma!’ For them Rome had not lost its fascination, as it never did for Gissing. He returned in 1897 and decided that he preferred it to both Naples and Florence: ‘Florence is the city of the Renaissance, but after all the Renaissance was only a shadow of the great times, and like a shadow it has passed away. There is nothing [in Florence] that impressed me like the poorest of Rome's antiquities.’ There was, as there was for the young artist, Phil May, ‘no place like Rome’.

Few visitors could stay in Rome long, however, without being aware of the problems caused by the dissensions among the leading families, the quarrels between those who were prepared to accept the King as their sovereign and those who claimed that their loyalty to the Pope prevented them from doing so. Some of these families were as ancient as the Massimo; others, the Orsini, Colonna and Caetani among them, had come to prominence in the Middle Ages. Yet others, including the Farnese, the Boncompagni, the Borghese, the Barberini and the Doria, were descendants of the relations of popes and prelates of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. A few owed their wealth to more recent good fortune or endeavour, such as the Torlonia, descendants of a travelling salesman, whose riches came from banking. Prince Torlonia, the head of the family in 1870, changed his servants' livery so that they should no longer bear the colours of the King, though he contrived thereafter to maintain a comfortable neutrality. Another Torlonia, Duke Leopold, as Mayor of Rome, called upon Cardinal Parocchi to offer civic congratulations to Pope Leo XIII on reaching the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination and was promptly dismissed from office by the Prime Minister.

Some families were more consistent and open supporters of the new régime. These included the Doria, the Boncompagni-Ludovisi, the Ruspoli and, most prominent among them, the Caetani, whose head, Michelangelo Caetani, the liberal Duke of Sermoneta, was a learned Dante scholar, sculptor and craftsman. Having lost his sight when he insisted that his local doctor instead of a specialist should operate upon his eyes for cataracts, he became a deputy in the new Parliament for the plebeian district of Trastevere. At the Caetani Palace in Rome,³ ministers of the new government were as welcome as artists, writers and distinguished foreigners, though a request to visit the family's house in the Pontine Marshes, Sermoneta Castle, was greeted by a response worthy of a Massimo: ‘Pray go by all means. But I am afraid I cannot offer you luncheon there. Our cook at Sermoneta died towards the end of the sixteenth century.’

Although Michelangelo Caetani was an unequivocal advocate of the new regime, he remained on quite friendly terms with several cardinals. But there were some families among the ‘black’ or ‘Guelph’ nobility who refused to have anything to do with the King's government. The Barberini and Chigi, the Borghese and the Aldobrandini, the Sacchetti and the Salviati all turned their backs upon the House of Savoy, and the Lancellotti refused to open the main gates of their palace once the royal family had taken possession of the Quirinal. It was not until 1896, on the grounds of his great age of eighty-six, that Pope Leo XIII abandoned his practice of granting separate audiences for all the ‘black’ families of Rome; and even then they were compensated for this deprivation by being asked to a grand reception once a year. When Oscar Wilde visited Rome in 1900 the divisions in society were as marked as ever. Having obtained a ticket from the hall porter at the Hôtel de l'Europe to see the Pope on Easter Day, he managed to catch a glimpse of his ‘supernatural ugliness’ as he was carried past on a throne, a wonderful figure, ‘not of flesh and blood but a white soul robed in white’. Wilde had never seen anything ‘like the extraordinary grace of his gestures, as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless – possibly the pilgrims, but certainly me’. But then he saw King Victor Emmanuel II's successor, King Umberto I, drive past the Caffè Nazionale where Wilde was drinking coffee: ‘I at once stood and made a low bow, with hat doffed – to the admiration of some officers at the next table. It was only when the King was passed that I remembered I was Papista and Nerissimo! I was greatly upset. However, I hope the Vatican won't hear about it.’

While a proportion of the rich and ancient families of Rome refused to recognize the new regime, the people as a whole welcomed it. Victor Emmanuel had been cheered upon his arrival in the city; and both King Umberto and Queen Margherita were extremely popular. A plebiscite held by the new government revealed that, of those entitled to vote, 133,681 approved of the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy and only 1,507 disapproved. But invasion by the army was followed by an invasion of bureaucrats and officials; and this the people welcomed no more than did the officials themselves who had been comfortably housed in Italy's temporary capital, Florence.

To meet the needs of these civil servants the government requisitioned several large convents in the centre of Rome, including San Silvestro in Capite,⁴ which was occupied first by the Ministry of the Interior and then by the Central Post Office, and the Minerva which was allocated to the Ministry of Finance. The government also took over various palaces, the Montecitorio for the Chamber of Deputies, the Braschi Palace for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Palazzo Madama⁵ for the Senate. The Villa Madama was allocated for the use of distinguished visitors.

The requisitioning of large buildings, however, provided not nearly enough space for the men from the north. The municipality of Rome was requested to find 40,180 additional rooms for the use of the government; and the city council was able to offer only 500, of which a considerable number were converted haylofts. For, while many churches had been repaired in the long pontificate of Pius IX, very few other buildings had been constructed, apart from the developments around the Ospizio di San Michele in Trastevere⁶ and the Termini railway station.⁷ The Pope's enterprising Minister for War, the Belgian Monsignor François-Xavier de Mérode, had, however, foreseen that the open country between the Termini Station and the Quirinal was a likely development area. He had bought large tracts of it, and subsequently built several large houses on it. Much of the rest he now sold, at a handsome profit, to building speculators. The wide street which passed through it was known as Via Mérode before being renamed Via Nazionale.

The development of this area was soon after followed by that of several others, the first decade after 1870 witnessing a great expansion of housing from the Colosseum up to Via XX Settembre, the next seven years, until 1887, a further expansion from Via XX Settembre up to the Villa Medici. In 1887 overproduction in the building industry and overextension of credit resulted in a spectacularly sudden crash and numerous bankruptcies: the number of apartments under construction in 1888–9 was only a fifteenth of the number being built in 1886–7. But the damage, in the eyes of many foreign observers, had already been done. For them the new houses and offices, the consulates and embassies, the apartment blocks, hotels and lodging-houses had ruined the appearance of Rome. ‘Twelve years of Sardinian rule have done more for the destruction of Rome, with its beauty and interest, than the invasions of the Goths and Vandals,’ Augustus Hare considered. ‘The whole aspect of the city is changed, and the picturesqueness of the old days must now be sought in such obscure corners as have escaped the hand of the spoiler.’

George Gissing agreed with him, as he surveyed the construction work in progress around Castel Sant' Angelo where ‘great ugly barrack-like houses’ were rising thick and fast. ‘Indeed, modern Rome is extremely ugly… its streets are monotonous and wearisome to an incredible degree.’

The crash of 1887 only temporarily disrupted work on public buildings in Rome. The florid and massive Palace of Justice⁸ was started in 1889, soon after the completion of the ministries of War and Finance in Via XX Settembre.⁹ The complex of hospitals called the Policlinico¹⁰ was built in 1887–9; the vast and cumbersome monument to Victor Emmanuel II¹¹ in 1885–1911; and by the time the river embankments had been finished at the turn of the century, the new district of Prati del Castello had begun to fill in the meadows on the right bank of the river in the space between Castel Sant' Angelo and Monte Mario. All this building was carried out without proper planning or control, so that many lovely villas with their surrounding gardens and parks were swallowed up by the remorseless advance of brick, stone and mortar. The Villa Borghese and the Villa Doria were spared; but the Villa Ludovisi, which Henry James thought the most beautiful in Rome, vanished, together with the Villas Giustiniani-Massimo,¹² Montalto,¹³ Albani, Altieri¹⁴ and Negroni.

No proper provision was made, either, for the immense number of peasants who were attracted to Rome by the building boom and who, together with the officials and their families, helped to raise the population of the city from 200,000 in 1870 to over 460,000 by the end of the century. The families of these labourers were to be seen sleeping on the steps of churches, under arches or in makeshift shelters, the beginnings of those shanty towns which were to disgrace many Italian cities in the next century. Their poverty-stricken way of life was rendered all the more pitiable by contrast with that of the relatively affluent bureaucrats and army officers and their wives who enjoyed the ora del vermouth in the cafés of the Via Nazionale and the Corso, who frequented the smart new shops and the trattorie which seemed to spring up like mushrooms overnight, who spent their evenings at the opera in the fine Teatro Costanzi, now the Teatro dell’ Opera,¹⁵ and who mingled with the foreigners who continued to gather in the Piazza di Spagna.

The number of foreigners who flocked to Rome increased year by year: despite the new building which so many tourists condemned, Rome had lost little of its appeal for the visitor as the nineteenth century drew to its close and the twentieth began. There were those, like the young and poor James Joyce, an ill-paid employee of an Austrian bank living in rooms in Via Frattina, who were unhappy in the city, which seemed to him like a man who made a living ‘by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother's corpse’. He longed for someone to talk to about Dublin. But such sentiments were rare. Far more representative were the reactions of Henry James's brother, William, who found Rome ‘just a feast for the eye from the moment you leave your hotel door to the moment you return’, and of Sigmund Freud who went every day to S. Pietro in Vincoli to study Michelangelo's Moses, which he thought was the finest work of art in the world, and who told a friend that Rome had been ‘an overwhelming experience’ for him, ‘one of the summits’ of his life. For Rome, as Hilaire Belloc wrote in 1914 on a return visit to the city to which he had walked years before, Rome goes on, in defiance of building speculators and developers, ‘astonishingly the same’.

SEVENTEEN ROMA FASCISTA

‘Either the government will be given to us or we shall seize it by marching on Rome!’ The challenge was issued at a Fascist congress held in Naples towards the end of 1922, and was greeted by repeated cries of ‘Roma! Roma! Roma!’ from a crowd of delegates and supporters, 40,000 strong. The speaker was Benito Mussolini, a 29-year-old former socialist who, as an influential journalist, had been expelled from the party for strongly advocating Italy's intervention in the Great War. He had fought in the war with the bersaglieri; and, after being wounded, had returned to journalism. As early as February 1918 he had been pressing for the appointment of a dictator in Italy, ‘a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep’. Three months later, in a widely reported speech at Bologna, he hinted that he himself might prove such a man.

His supporters were a strange rag-bag of discontented socialists and syndicalists, republicans and anarchists, unclassifiable revolutionaries, conservative monarchists and restless soldiers many of whom had been arditi (the impetuous commandos of the Italian army) and some of whom were wanted by the police. They formed themselves into what were known as fascii di combattimenti, fighting groups, bound by ties as close as those that secured the fasces of the lictors, the symbols of Roman authority. The Fascists had not at first been successful at the polls: in 1919 as candidates for the Chamber of Deputies they received no more than 4,795 votes. But the failure of successive governments to deal with Italy's social unrest and manifold problems allowed the Fascists to put themselves forward as saviours of their country, the only force by which Bolshevism could be checked and strangled. Protesting that violence could be met only by greater violence, squads of armed Fascists, known as squadristi, attacked socialist workers' organizations, rival parties' and trade union headquarters, newspaper offices and all those whom they deemed Bolshevik sympathizers with a ferocity and regularity that led almost to civil war. Shouting patriotic slogans, singing nationalist songs and wearing the black shirts which the labourers of the Marche and Emilia had adopted as the uniform of the anarchists, the squadristi obtained the support of thousands who were prepared to condone their methods, their violence, their revolting practice of filling their opponents with castor oil, in the belief that only by such means could Bolshevism be wiped out and order restored. So, by the end of 1922, having taken over Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna, and encouraged by the occasional complicity of certain government officials, the frequent help of the police and the probable acquiescence of the House of Savoy which Mussolini had said could still play an important role in the nation's history, the Fascists were ready to seize Rome by force.

In four converging columns, 26,000 strong, they closed in upon the city on 28 October. The government proclaimed its intention of declaring martial law, but the King refused to sign the decree; and, once it was known that he was prepared to accept Mussolini, the army and the police stood aside and the blackshirts approached the capital, by train, by bus or on foot. Mussolini himself, a superb opportunist and flexible agitatore, for the moment remained in Milan. He had already been asked to form a government, so that the March on Rome was, in fact, unnecessary. But the March was required by the myth of Fascism, as were the fictitious 3,000 Fascist martyrs who were supposed to have died in the insurrection that brought Mussolini to power. He arrived in Rome by train at half-past ten on the morning of 30 October.

Once in power, as the youngest prime minister the Italians had ever had, Mussolini showed how shrewd a politician he was. Although from the beginning determined to become a dictator and, in personal control of the police, to have all his leading opponents arrested, he presented to the King a list of ministers calculated to demonstrate that he was a national rather than a party leader. And it was as a national leader that the Italians were prepared, indeed anxious, to welcome him. They were tired of strikes and riots, hungry for the flamboyant techniques, the medieval trappings of Fascism. Thus it was that there were spontaneous demonstrations of support for Fascism after the March on Rome, and thus it was that Mussolini's immense popularity survived the sporadic violence in Rome on the night of the Fascists’ triumphant entry, the undoubtedly fraudulent elections of 1924, and even the murder of the brave and gifted socialist leader, Giacomo Matteotti, in which Mussolini was widely believed to have been implicated.

He had set to work with the most enthusiastic determination, getting up early, performing a variety of violent exercises, then eating a breakfast which a stomach ulcer required should be as sparse as all his other meals, and reading with astonishing speed several Italian and foreign newspapers before arriving in his office at eight o'clock. He had no pleasures, he said, other than his work; and although there was to come a time when he scarcely worked at all, in these early years of power the claim was largely true. He fenced and boxed, he swam, played tennis and rode a horse; but his object was not so much pleasure or relaxation as the banishment of fat from his body and his massive but already slightly sagging jaw, the acquisition and maintenance of a hard strong physique, the proof that years of treatment for a persistent venereal disease had not taken toll of his constitution as his enemies maintained. He did take pleasure in sexual encounters, but these were hurried and impatient. Women who came to his office, or his hotel room, or to the flat he later took in the upper floor of a palazzo in Via Rasella, were ravished, usually on the floor, and then hastily dismissed while he, not having bothered to remove either his trousers or his shoes, returned to his desk. Generally ill dressed, he was frequently unshaved and often unwashed, being accustomed to splashing eau-de-Cologne over himself when he got up in preference to wasting time in a bath. He could not be bothered to tie up shoelaces, so he had elastic laces made with bows. He did not see why he should not wear spats with evening dress if they kept his feet warm, nor a black tie with tails if he could not find a white one, and he often did so, frequently also wearing yellow shoes. He appeared at his office in a morning suit, as the striped trousers and cut-away black coat appealed to him, but he was constantly wriggling his huge neck in the butterfly collar and shaking back the cuffs of his starched shirt.

At first Mussolini occupied offices both in the new Palazzo del Viminale, the Ministry of the Interior,¹ and in the old Palazzo Chigi, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.² But finding these inadequate, in 1929 he moved to Palazzo Venezia where he occupied the biggest of the spacious halls on the first floor. Almost seventy feet long and forty wide, it occupies two storeys of the original building and has two rows of windows, the upper row originally belonging to the floor above. The tall, wide centre window of the lower row opens on to a balcony and from here Mussolini made many of his celebrated speeches, hands on hips, legs splayed apart, jaw thrust out, falling into silence from time to time to gaze down at the crowds below him, to receive the benediction of their frenzied roar, ‘Duce! Duce! Duce!’, his expression as motionless as the symbol of his regime, the axe and the lictors' rods carved in stone on the wall beside him.

The room from which this commanding figure appeared was known as the Sala del Mappamondo from the old map of the world displayed there. It was unfurnished apart from a large desk placed sixty feet from the door, a lectern and three chairs arranged in front of a huge fireplace decorated, like the wall outside, with the emblem of Fascism. Some visitors whom the Duce wished to intimidate were required to walk across the bare floor towards the fireplace while no notice was taken of them, their feet ringing on the coldly echoing polished marble mosaics, the dark figure beneath the towering candlestick on the table still immersed in his papers. But others found him friendly and courteous, walking towards them quickly, holding out his hand. Even when he gave the impression, as he did to Lord Vansittart, of a man who ‘took such obvious pleasure in his own company’ that he was ‘reminiscent of a boxer in a flashy dressing-gown shaking hands with himself’, he managed to give pleasure to his visitors as well as to himself, although he was quite humourless and essentially misanthropic. He spoke fluently in a low voice, displaying a brilliant flair for unusual yet apt allusions and striking neologisms. ‘When the Duce starts to talk,’ his Foreign Secretary once said of him, ‘he is delightful. I know nobody who uses such rich and original metaphors.’ But he was not a good listener. He found it difficult to keep still in his chair, and would sometimes stand up abruptly to carry on the conversation, distractingly striding up and down the room. As the years passed, he grew increasingly restless during tiresome interviews and in the day-to-day conduct of government. He gave the impression of being always occupied with business, and at night left the light burning in the Sala del Mappamondo to bolster the illusion of ceaseless industry. In fact, he had no taste for organization, no patience with difficult work, such a horror of making decisions that he would write the word ‘approved’ on two conflicting memoranda emanating from two different ministries and then go through the door to his private apartment where his mistress lay waiting for him, or go home to his family in Villa Torlonia,³ the large graceful house in Via Nomentana which Prince Giovanni Torlonia had placed at his disposal for as long as he wanted it for one lira a year.

A skilful journalist and propagandist as well as artful politician, he was much happier when manipulating the masses by the written and the spoken word than when engaged in administration. He envisaged government as a series of dramatic headlines, ‘La Battaglia del Grano’, ‘The Battle to Reclaim the Marshes’, ‘The Demographic Campaign’. And he loved to be seen and photographed conducting these operations, reviewing troops and party members in the choreographic displays of Fascism, speaking to farm-workers at harvest time, his hairy, barrel-shaped chest bare to the sun, acting as host to those delegations which were regularly brought to Rome such as the ninety-three most prolific women in the country. These black-shawled progenitors of over thirteen hundred children were taken on a tour of the city on Christmas Eve 1933, visiting the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where, in the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs, they knelt to kiss the glass case containing the bloodstained handkerchief that the Duce had held to a bullet wound in his nose after an attempted assassination, placing a wreath by the altar in the Fascist Martyrs’ Chapel, receiving medals and scrolls in the offices of the National Organization for the Protection of Mothers and Children, and being presented to the Duce at Palazzo Venezia before attending the closing ceremony in the Augusteum.

The Rome they saw was gradually being transformed under the personal direction of the Duce who could be seen from time to time surveying the progress of the work from the balcony of the Sala del Mappamondo and who sent down occasional messages to encourage the workmen in their labours.

In five years [he told the City Council], Rome must appear wonderful to the whole world, immense, orderly and powerful as she was in the days of the first empire of Augustus. The approaches to the Theatre of Marcellus, the Campidoglio and the Pantheon must be cleared of everything that has grown up round them during the centuries of decadence. Within five years the hill of the Pantheon must be visible through an avenue leading from Piazza Colonna… The third Rome will extend over other hills, along the banks of the sacred river, as far as the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

He envisaged a city vastly increased in size and population, dominated by those huge buildings and skyscrapers which so much appealed to him. It would have, towering above the Forum, an immense Palace of Fascism which would be one of the largest and most impressive structures in the world. And to make way for this new Rome all that was ‘filthy and picturesque’, all that smelled of the Middle Ages would be destroyed.

The threatened wholesale destruction of medieval Rome was never carried into effect, but much of it did vanish, as did fifteen ancient churches, to be replaced by those monuments of Fascist architecture in many, though by no means all, of which the realization of sheer size and ostentation seems to have been the guiding principle of their design. A promised wide thoroughfare linking the Colosseum and the Piazza Venezia did appear as the Via dei Fori Imperiali;⁴ a wide avenue leading from the river to St Peter's Square, the Via della Conciliazone,⁵ was begun to commemorate that real achievement of the Fascist regime, the 1929 agreement with the Vatican known as the Lateran Pact which brought to an end the 80-year-old division between Church and State; and, on the southern outskirts of Rome, the huge complex, known as E.U.R. and built for a proposed Roman exhibition to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome, remains as an example of planning on the grand scale.⁶

But in Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, Fascist achievements never matched Fascist promises and boasts. The success of various land-reclamation schemes could not be denied, and the draining of the huge areas of the Pontine Marshes, the partial eradication of malaria there, the building of canals, new roads, towns and hydroelectric power stations, gave land, homes, work and opportunities to thousands of poor people from all over Italy, while a widespread improvement in working conditions was achieved. Yet despite the boasts of Fascist statisticians that never less than 100,000 labourers were engaged on public works and that between 1922 and 1942 the government spent no less than 33,634 million lire on such enterprises, performance fell far below both intention and claims. Archaeological work in Rome included excavations and reconstructions in Caesar's and Trajan's Forum, in the Piazza Venezia and on the Capitol, the rebuilding of the Curia and the uncovering of temples in the Largo di Torre Argentina dating back to the time of the Roman Republic, and the repair of both the Ara Pacis and the Augusteum which Mussolini intended, so rumour had it, for his own tomb. While much was undoubtedly accomplished, only a fraction of the work planned was actually undertaken. Work begun was often left unfinished, and immense sums of money disappeared on impossibly ambitious schemes or drifted into the pockets of corrupt officials and high-ranking Fascists anxious to make their fortune while they could. A huge Forum of Mussolini, for instance, was planned to cover an immense area between Monte Mario and the Tiber. It was, so the Duce ordered, to dwarf both St Peter's and the Colosseum and to have as its centrepiece a marble obelisk 118 feet high and weighing nearly 800 tons, ‘the largest monolith in the world’. But then it was decided that even this was not impressive enough. Instead, there must be a statue of Hercules 263 feet tall, its right hand raised in a Fascist salute, its features resembling those of Mussolini himself. After 100 tons of metal had been expended, part of a gigantic head and a foot as large as an elephant's had been cast, this project progressed no further.

The Duce himself was rarely blamed for Fascism's shortcomings. There were many anti-Fascists in Rome, but few anti-Mussolinians. He was not only a dictator, he was an idol. Photographs of him were stuck on the walls of countless homes, slogans in praise of him – Duce! Duce! Duce! Il Duce ha sempre ragione – were splashed in white paint everywhere; objects that he had touched were prized as sacred relics. Skilfully presented to the people as Italy's man of destiny, he was accepted as such; and millions fell under the sway of that proudly jutting jaw, those black, wide-open eyes, those wonderfully expressive gestures, that strangely emotive voice. When, on the night of 9 May 1936, he announced from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia that victory had been achieved in Abyssinia and Italy had ‘her empire’, the last words of his speech were lost in a wild torrent of cheers, in the screams of hysterical women, in shouts of adoration and protestations of loyalty until death.

Yet Mussolini was by then already on the road which was to lead to his downfall, set upon a course for a war for which his forces were utterly unprepared. The victim of his own propaganda, convinced of his infallibility, closing his mind to unwelcome evidence, he chose to believe that alliance with Hitler in the Rome-Berlin Axis would ‘bring Italy the true greatness of which Fascism had made her worthy’.

When Hitler came to Rome in May 1938, with the expressed intention, so a secretary at the Italian Embassy in Berlin reported, of flattering the Italians' pride and of demonstrating that the Axis was a living reality, Mussolini was determined that his visitor should be deeply impressed.

The planning had begun six months before; and all along the railway line to Rome houses had been repainted and stations redecorated. The streets of the city itself, through which the parades were to pass, were made splendidly welcoming; and although many shopkeepers refused to display portraits of the Führer, they allowed banners and flags to be flown from their windows. The Italian soldiers who were to take part in the parades and who had been chosen for their height and prepossessing appearance were drilled endlessly, issued with new uniforms and equipped with weapons which they had not yet been trained to use in war. The resultant military pageants were, indeed, magnificent, so Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, said. ‘The Germans, who may have been a little sceptical on this point, will leave with a very different impression.’

Hitler certainly seemed to be impressed. And he himself had a ‘great personal success’, Ciano thought. ‘He has succeeded in melting the ice around him… His personal contacts, too, have won sympathy, particularly among women.’ His reluctant host at the Quirinal, the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III, however, disliked him on sight. He told Mussolini that on his first night in the palace Hitler had asked for a woman. This request caused the utmost commotion in the Royal Household until it was explained that the Führer could not get to sleep until he had seen a woman remake his bed. Was the story really true? Ciano wondered. Or was it malice on the part of the King, who also insinuated that Hitler injected himself with stimulants and narcotics? The whole atmosphere of the palace, Ciano decided, was ‘moth-eaten’.

The antipathy between the King and Hitler was as marked as the cordiality which existed between the two dictators. On first meeting Hitler, Mussolini had decided that the ‘silly little clown’ was ‘quite mad’. But he had now changed his mind about him. At the station when they said good-bye, both of them were moved and Hitler was seen to stare at Mussolini with an almost dog-like devotion. ‘From now on,’ the Duce told him, ‘no force on earth will be able to separate us.’ The Führer's eyes filled with tears.

Neville Chamberlain's eyes also filled with tears when he left Rome the following year to the strains of ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow’, sung rather tunelessly by a group of English residents. Chamberlain's visit had not been a success, and Mussolini had not intended that it should be. ‘These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the British Empire,’ he decided after the Englishmen had gone. ‘They are the tired sons of a long line of rich forefathers.’ But then what could you expect of a people, he asked later in a speech in which his misconceptions of English life were so grotesque as to be appealing, who changed into dinner-jackets for their afternoon tea?

On 10 June 1940, after many hesitations and doubts, Mussolini declared war upon these degenerate people, persuaded by the surrender of the Belgian Army that he could wait no longer. That night in Rome an atmosphere of gloom hung over the dreadfully quiet city. Going home dejectedly to his flat to pack, the correspondent of The Times passed down Corso Umberto and across Piazza di Spagna and saw not a single flag hung out. Italian friends came to wish him farewell, walking past the policeman on watch near his front door and the people muttering anxiously in the doorways, and they shook hands with him with a kind of sad apology. ‘I feel miserable,’ Count Ciano recorded in his diary. ‘The adventure begins. May God help Italy!’

Ciano's fears were well justified. The course of the war proved disastrous for Mussolini; and in Rome, by the summer of 1943, Fascists and non-Fascists alike constantly discussed ways and means of getting rid of him. The King, in almost daily contact with various dissident groups, had been deeply distressed and alarmed by an Allied air raid on Rome on 19 July in which hundreds of people had been killed and the basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura very badly damaged, and he had been persuaded after weeks of hesitation to order the arrest of Mussolini when he called for an audience either at the Quirinal or at the Villa Savoia.⁷ At the same time a group of prominent Fascists had themselves been plotting their leader's overthrow which, it was planned, should be arranged at a meeting at Palazzo Venezia of the Fascist Grand Council, the supreme authority of the state. Informed of this plot, the King was confirmed in his resolve to act, since a vote of no confidence in Mussolini by the Council would give him the constitutional authority he felt he needed to dismiss him. Although forewarned that Count Dino Grandi, a former ambassador in London and one of the most influential members of the Council, was to present a resolution calling for the Duce's resignation, Mussolini strode with his usual confidence into the Sala del Pappagallo where the meeting was to be held, not looking at any of them. He was wearing the greyish-green uniform of the Supreme Commander of the Fascist Militia as though to distinguish himself as a man apart from the others who were all, at his orders, clothed in the black bush-shirt known as the Sahariana. ‘Salute the Duce!’ the Secretary of the Party called out. They all obediently jumped to their feet and gave the traditional response, ‘We salute him!’ Glowering, Mussolini sat down at a table on a dais raised above the level of the table at which the others sat. On their way into the room they had noticed that the courtyard was filled with Fascist militiamen. Other militiamen were patrolling the corridors, stairs and apartments of the palazzo itself. One senior member of the Council had murmured apprehensively to Grandi, ‘This is the end for us.’

The Duce began to speak. He spoke for two hours, rambling on inconclusively, inconsequentially, disingenuously, blaming everyone other than himself for Italy's predicament, remarking in one aside, so outlandish and irrelevant that his listeners wondered if it were some obscure joke, that he had foreseen the English attack at El Alamein on 23 October 1942 because he knew they wanted to spoil the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome during the following week.

For a long time after these extraordinary pronouncements had been drawn to a close, no one spoke. In the uneasy silence they were all conscious of an appalled disillusionment, so the Italian ambassador to Berlin considered. They had never heard Mussolini speak to such ill effect. Twenty years of power were at an end. As other members began to speak, abusing each other, the Germans and the Allies in turn, and as Ciano rose to make an unprecedented attack upon the Duce, Mussolini leant in a cramped position over the table as though he were in pain, occasionally pressing his hands against his stomach or lifting them to shade his eyes from the glaring light of the chandeliers. His pale face was covered with sweat. After six and a half hours, Mussolini adjourned the meeting. When he came back and the debate resumed, he appeared to have recovered. He spoke with calm confidence and it seemed, so Grandi said later, that ‘he had regained at one stroke all that he had lost’. But it was too late. At a quarter-past two in the morning the resolution was put to the vote. Nineteen of the twenty-eight members of the Council voted in its favour. Mussolini gathered his papers together and stood up abruptly. ‘Salute the Duce!’ the Secretary called out once more. But Mussolini cut short the muffled response by snapping, ‘I excuse you from that.’ At the door he paused for a moment and announced accusingly, ‘You have provoked the crisis of the regime.’

The next morning, however, he went to his office as usual and carried on with his work as though nothing unusual had occurred. He brushed aside the advice of close colleagues and members of his family to have the members of the Council who had voted against him arrested. When the Secretary of the Party telephoned to say that some of the nineteen were now having second thoughts, he accepted the news as though he had expected it and had already decided how to deal with the traitors. ‘Too late,’ he answered with one of those enigmatic threats which had once been heard with alarm but had long since ceased to carry any weight.

It was arranged that he would go to see the King that afternoon. He went home to Villa Torlonia to change into the civilian suit which the royal staff had specified for the audience. This seemed ominous to his wife, since he had always worn a tailcoat for official audiences in the past, and she warned him, ‘Don't go. He's not to be trusted.’ But Mussolini had no sense of danger. He conceded to the Chief of Staff of the Fascist Militia that the King might want to take over from him as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces but there would be nothing more important than that. He had had a royal audience once or twice a week for over twenty years; the King had always been solidly with him.

Accompanied by his secretary, he stepped into his car which drove off towards the Via Salaria and the Villa Savoia. It was a quiet Sunday, suffocatingly hot; the streets were almost deserted. The papers that morning had announced the fall of Palermo.

The car stopped outside the portico and the driver was surprised to see the King standing at the entrance to the villa in the uniform of a Chief Marshal of the Empire. He had never seen the King greet the Duce in that way before; nor had he ever seen so many carabinieri as there were in the grounds that day. But the Duce at first remained quite unperturbed, maintaining that the vote of the Grand Council was not legally binding. And even when informed by the nervous King of his dismissal he seemed unable at first to understand what was being said to him. Then he sat down suddenly and heavily and, so it seemed, feeling faint. The King went on talking, but Mussolini interrupted him to murmur, ‘Then it's all over.’

The interview had lasted for a mere twenty minutes. The Duce came out of the villa looking bemused as he walked down the steps to his car which had been moved across to the other side of the drive. As he approached it a captain in the carabinieri came up to him and said, ‘His Majesty has charged me with your protection.’ Mussolini objected, but the captain was insistent. ‘No, Excellency, you must come with me.’ He took him by the elbow and led him to an ambulance the back doors of which were open. Mussolini, followed by his secretary, stepped inside, pulling his rather rumpled brown felt hat over his eyes. The captain, another officer and three carabinieri climbed in after him, as well as three police officers in plain clothes carrying machine-pistols. The doors were loudly slammed shut. It never occurred to him even now that he had been arrested.

No one spoke as the ambulance sped away to the carabinieri's Podgora barracks in Via Quintino Sella, where Mussolini stepped down and stood scowling about him, his jaw thrust out, leaning forward slightly with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, as though he had come on a tour of inspection. He was shown to the officers' mess where he was left alone for about an hour before being taken on in the ambulance across the river to the barracks of the carabinieri cadets in Via Legnano. For the rest of that day and for the whole of the next he was kept here, for most of the time lying on a camp-bed in the commandant's office, looking through the window at the cars driving in and out and at the cadets marching in front of the wall on which, painted in huge white letters were the slogans of his régime: ‘Credere! Obbedire! Combattere!’ On the evening of 27 July he was driven out of the barracks and taken into exile on the island of Ponza.

In the streets of Rome on the night of his arrest, the people had gathered to ask each other what was happening. There were squads of soldiers armed with machine-guns in the squares, but what they had been called out for no one knew. There were rumours of an Allied parachute landing in the south; stories that the Duce had resigned and gone home to the Romagna, that he had flown to Germany, that he had been assassinated. It was known that the Grand Council had met and that the meeting had been prolonged; but its decisions had not been made public. When wireless sets were turned on there were no sounds but hum and crackle. Even the gramophone records which were usually brought into use when programmes did not run to time had not been played. And then at last the announcer had come on to the air with news of the resignation of Cavaliere Benito Mussolini and the nomination as Head of the Government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

The information was greeted with the wildest excitement which even the subsequent announcement that the war would continue failed to dampen. It was believed that this was merely a formula, a meaningless declaration made to give the new government time to negotiate a peace without interference from the Germans. Crowds rushed through the streets shouting that the war was over. They broke into the offices of the Fascist newspaper, Il Messaggero and threw furniture, files, telephones and enormous portraits of the fallen Duce out of the windows. They hurled a bronze bust out of an office into the Corso and dragged it by ropes through the streets. They hacked Fascist emblems off buildings and tore Fascist badges out of the lapels of anyone foolhardy enough to wear them. Few badges, however, were still worn. Almost everyone, it seemed, had suddenly become anti-Fascist. Hooligans looking for victims could find none. The houses of a few known Fascists were broken into, but their owners could not be found. A gang of demonstrators burst into Palazzo Venezia, shouting that they wanted the man who had oppressed them for so long, but they did not attempt to break down the locked door of the Sala del Mappamondo and they contented themselves by waving a red flag.

Elsewhere there was little violence. The mood in the city was one of gaiety rather than revenge. People ran to the Quirinal to cheer the King and to Via XX Settembre to cheer Badoglio. In Via del Tritone, Piazza Colonna, Via Nazionale and Piazza del Popolo they sang and danced as at a festa. ‘Fascism is dead,’ they called happily to one another. It was true. Not a single man died that night in an effort to defend it, though one, the head of the Stefani News Agency, committed suicide. Fascism had collapsed in Rome without a struggle. Even Mussolini's own newspaper, Popolo d' Italia, quietly recognized his dismissal and where his photograph had previously appeared inserted one of Badoglio instead.

Most Romans remained at home. They had heard the announcer on the wireless say, ‘The war goes on.’ And they rightly feared that it might continue for a long time yet. The British and Americans and their allies had overrun Sicily and were now ready to invade the mainland. But the Germans were far from being beaten; and they would surely take steps to protect themselves from the consequences of an armistice signed by the Italians without their knowledge.

After a month of furtive negotiations, on 3 September, in an army tent near Syracuse in Sicily the Italian surrender was signed. On the same day Badoglio assured the German ambassador in Rome that Italy would fight alongside ‘her ally Germany to the end’. On the evening of 5 September, the Allies having landed at Salerno, the armistice was revealed. Immediately the German High Command ordered its troops in the neighbourhood of Rome to close in upon the capital. After a brief, bravely conducted but badly commanded resistance, the Italian defences of Rome crumbled. The King and the General Staff of the Armed Services fled to southern Italy, and the Nazi occupation of Rome began.

Rome was declared an open city, not to be defended even if attacked, and was allowed to have an Italian commander, subordinate to Field Marshal Kesselring, the German commander-in-chief. The administration of Rome was, however, kept strictly under the control of the Germans who watched even more closely over the activities of the various government departments than they did over those of the new Fascist government in northern Italy which had been set up at Salò on Lake Garda under the presidency of Mussolini after his rescue by the Germans from his Italian captors. The activities of the Fascist Party, which had been allowed to reopen its General Headquarters in Palazzo Wedekind,⁸ were also carefully watched, as were those of the Roman branch of the Party, the Fascio Romano, in Palazzo Braschi. The German forces stationed in Rome were placed under the command of General Stahel, an officer whose tight lips and glinting spectacles lent him a far more intimidating aspect than General Kurt Maeltzer who was soon to succeed him. Yet Maeltzer's ready smile, his roistering habits and buffoonery belied a harsh and callous nature.

It was, indeed, immediately made clear to the Romans that the Germans intended to rule their city with a firm, relentless hand. A proclamation was issued by Rome radio, which had of course been taken over by the occupying forces, ordering all Italians to surrender their arms on pain of being executed. A curfew was established; and it was eventually decreed that anyone seen on the streets after five o'clock in the afternoon would be shot on sight. A series of man-hunts resulted in the arrest of numerous men whose presence in Rome was considered a threat to the new regime. And to the fears of house arrest were added those of being rounded up in a cordoned-off street and pushed into a lorry for shipment to a German factory, farm or mine, or to those defence lines which were to prove so formidable an obstacle to the Allied advance and which were already being constructed. At the same time men of military age were in danger of being called up by the Fascist authorities. Hundreds of young Romans consequently disappeared from their homes every day. It has been calculated that of a total wartime population of 1,500,000 in Rome, some 200,000 were being hidden by the rest, many of them in churches and religious houses, others in the Vatican, yet others in such warren-like structures as Palazzo Orsini where the partly English and outspokenly pro-Allied Duchess of Sermoneta managed to disappear when the Germans came to arrest her.

Jews were naturally at particular risk. Granted full rights as Roman citizens in 1870, they had not since been persecuted with anything like the cruelty practised in Nazi-occupied Europe. In speeches and conversation Mussolini had often ranted against them and under German influence had endorsed a programme of racial legislation which was, however, never very rigorously enforced. Several Jews had thought it as well to go abroad; others had been expelled. But most of their faith had continued until now to live contentedly in Rome without undue interference from the authorities. On 26 September, however, Colonel Kappler, the head of the Gestapo in Rome, suddenly demanded fifty kilos of gold from the Jewish community. This was followed by an attack on the synagogue by Gestapo agents and by threats of attacks on shops run by Jews and houses occupied by them. About 8,000 found refuge in Catholic convents and institutes which held extraterritorial status; but over 2,000 were arrested in raids and deported to Germany in conditions of terrible brutality. Many others, given due warning, were able to escape from Rome, like the half-Jewish writer, Alberto Moravia, who fled to a peasant's cottage at Fondi.

Escaped prisoners of war, many of whom had converged upon Rome hoping to find sanctuary in the neutral Vatican, were also hounded by the Gestapo and the Fascist police. Thousands of them managed to get back to their units, however, many of them through an organization and escape line formed by one of their number, Major S. I. Derry, who was assisted by a resourceful and intrepid Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Risking their lives, numerous Romans broke the curfew and evaded the nightly patrols to bring food and money, clothes and medical help to the large number of apartments all over the city where escapers were hidden while waiting to be moved on. Several Italian helpers in the escape line were caught and shot; but a fugitive was hardly ever refused assistance, even though helping him might well result in a visit to one of the Gestapo interrogation centres in Via Tasso or to the Pensione Jaccarino in Via Romagna where Pietro Koch, a former wine-merchant and officer in the Italian regiment of the Granatieri, was, with the assistance of his two Italian mistresses, employed as a freelance interrogator by Colonel Kappler. In these notorious places, captured Resistance fighters were forced to undergo such fearful tortures that some died, while others broke down and revealed what secrets they knew.

Clandestine resistance in Rome had begun a week after the announcement of Badoglio's surrender when, on 9 September, a group of politicians representing the Socialist, Christian Democrat, Communist and Action Parties had met under the chairmanship of the former Prime Minister, Ivanoe Bonomi, and had founded the first Committee of National Liberation in Italy. Subsequently, numerous other committees and groups were established to form an Italian Resistance movement which, by the end of the war, had endured losses greater than those suffered by the Allied Fifth Army during the entire Italian campaign. In Rome there were military groups, formed by Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo from members of the Italian armed services, which provided an excellent network of communications with army contacts all over Italy and which proved extremely useful to Allied Intelligence. And there were groups, formed out of adherents to one or other of the political parties, which also maintained intermittent communication with Allied Force Headquarters through secret wireless stations established by Allied agents in Rome and which, in the case of the Socialist and Communist groups, organized acts of sabotage, attacks on German troops and assassinations of SS and Fascist police.

The most celebrated of these exploits was the attack by a Communist group on a detachment of soldiers from a German police regiment on their way to mount guard at the Ministry of the Interior. As they marched up Via Rasella a large bomb concealed in a rubbish cart exploded, killing thirty-two Germans and wounding many more, as well as a child and several other civilians. All the partisans involved got away, but the Germans took terrible reprisals. When Hitler heard of the killings he demanded that thirty or even fifty Italians should be shot for each German killed. And after Field Marshal Kesselring had managed to have the ratio reduced to ten to one, the main prison of Regina Coeli⁹ and other detention centres for partisans were ransacked for victims, five more than were required being produced because of some miscalculation after a further ten had been added to the list by Kappler when another victim had died in hospital. Among them were anti-Fascist officers of the Italian army and the carabinieri, activists from the political parties, a few Allied prisoners of war, seventy-five Jews, a priest and a diplomat. They were all shot in the caves along the old Ardeatine Way.

A surge of hope had swept through the people of Rome when news had come through that the Allies had landed north of the city at Anzio on 20 January 1944. But this was followed by a mood of despair as it became clear that the invasion had not been a success and that, pinned down in their bridgehead, the Allies were in danger of being forced back. Conditions in Rome began to deteriorate fast. Water, like gas and electricity, was frequently cut off; water-sellers appeared in the streets, as in the days of the Middle Ages; and a bottle of clear water became a precious possession. Prices soared as food became scarce; the black market flourished; people offered their possessions in the streets – books, gramophone records, clothes – in order to get money for bits of beef or packets of salt or extra bread. The poor verged upon starvation, despite the charitable work of the Vatican which, according to Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the British Minister to the Holy See, was eventually supplying 100,000 meals a day at one lira a head. In the parks, trees were cut down and benches chopped up for firewood. Men walked about in constant apprehension of arrest or deportation; and one day a pregnant woman, the mother of five children, was shot in the face and killed as she ran screaming towards her husband who had been rounded up for forced labour. Thereafter women had their heads shaved for sleeping with Germans.

Yet the graffiti scrawled on the walls did not attack the Germans alone. The papacy, fearful of exacerbating the plight of the Romans in general and the Jews in particular, was blamed for its refusal to condemn outright the excesses of the occupying force. The Allies, as careless in observing Rome's status as an open city as were her enemies, were attacked for their negligent air raids on the city which, while directed at such targets as railway lines, frequently damaged buildings and killed people in the surrounding areas. One raid in the Testaccio district left many dead; another on the Castro Pretorio barracks cost nearly a hundred civilian lives as well as those of several patients in the nearby Policlinico hospital.

Then, at last, at the end of May, as the roar of heavy guns could be heard in the distance, reports that the Germans were preparing to withdraw from Rome spread throughout the city: the luggage of their officers was seen being carried into the street from the big hotels on the Via Veneto. Yet even now there were fears that the Germans would defend the city as Mussolini wanted them to do. Remembering only too well how the Romans had greeted his downfall the year before, he insisted that there must be a battle for Rome, that the city must be fought for, street by street. On 2 June, however, the Pope issued a warning: ‘Whoever raises a hand against Rome will be guilty of matricide to the whole civilized world, and in the eternal judgement of God.’ And, on that same day Kesselring sought permission from Hitler to evacuate the city. Hitler, describing Rome as ‘a place of culture’ which must ‘not be the scene of combat operations’, granted it, ignoring Mussolini's protests.

So the German evacuation began. For fear lest it might lead to a Roman uprising, it was set in motion as discreetly as possible. Kesselring told General Maeltzer to attend a performance the following evening, 3 June, by Gigli in Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera. Soon after the curtain fell, however, the general exodus started; and by dawn German troops could be seen streaming out of the city, on foot, in vehicles, on bicycles, their artillery drawn by horses, their baggage piled up on Rome's horse-drawn cabs which they had commandeered. The Romans watched them depart with relief but without rancour: some of the troops in the bedraggled, dejected columns were offered drinks and cigarettes. ‘Continuous files of German soldiers, tired, sweaty but armed to the teeth, passed along the Lungotevere, between people standing in rows, people in shirt-sleeves, dirty and silent,’ recorded Mario Praz. ‘They don't laugh, they don't jeer, they don't show pity. The ancient Roman crowd, among the ancient monuments, sees once more an army in retreat, understands and is silent.’

On the outskirts of the city, German rearguards, shelled and dive-bombed, fought to delay the enemy advance; but by the middle of the afternoon Allied troops had passed beneath the walls of S. Paolo fuori le Mura and were advancing towards Porta S. Paolo, while American tanks were soon grinding their way slowly through Porta S. Giovanni. Families came out on to balconies and into the streets, cheering and clapping their hands, holding up flowers and jugs of wine; and, as the tanks and trucks continued to rumble through the streets in the gathering darkness, they lit candles in their windows in celebration of the end of their long trial.

EPILOGUE: THE ETERNAL CITY

As bells rang in the campanili on the morning of 5 June 1944, the American commander of the victorious Fifth Army, Mark Clark, climbed the steps of Michelangelo's cordonata towards the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline hill. Here, where Brutus, ‘still hot and eager’ from Caesar's murder, had come to address the people, where Augustus had made sacrificial offerings in the lovely Temple of Jupiter, where Greek monks had prayed in the church of S. Maria d’ Aracoeli in the Dark Ages, where Petrarch had received the poet's laurel crown, where Cola di Rienzo had fled down the stairway to his death, and where Gibbon had been inspired to write his great history, the leader of the men who had delivered Rome from the last of her foreign masters looked down upon the city which the Allies were now to control.

The tasks facing them were daunting. They had to feed a population swollen by a mass of refugees to almost 2,500,000; they had to restore electric lighting and repair the water supply; above all they had the problem of keeping order while introducing democratic freedoms to a people quite unused to them. Given the difficulties, they succeeded well enough. Although rationed except for use by the army and the hospitals, electric lighting was restored on 6 June. The telephone service began to operate again the next day. Before the end of the month the bread ration had been doubled to 200 grams a day, and banks, schools, the university, some libraries and even a few theatres had reopened. The postal services returned to normal on 1 July. Three months later the water supply, gravely disrupted by German sabotage of the main aqueducts, had been fully restored. Law and order were maintained with the help of the carabinieri and Finance Guards who had entered Rome with the Allies, and the offices of the new administration on the Capitol were handed over to the new mayor, the popular and consistently anti-Fascist Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj.

Nevertheless, there were widespread complaints in Rome that repairs and reforms were not being carried out quickly enough, that the Allies were not living up to their promises to end the people's hardships as soon as the Germans were driven north. A popular song of the time was directed against the head of the Allied administration of the city, Colonel Poletti, an American of Italian extraction, who gave radio talks on current problems:

Charlie Poletti, Charlie Poletti,

Meno ciarla e più spaghetti.

[Less of the talk and more spaghetti]

Certainly the people, particularly the old and the pensioners, had grounds for complaint. The black market, which had flourished under the Germans, continued to prosper; yet the innumerable regulations and restrictions concerning food which were so irksome to the poor were continually extended. Buildings and vehicles were requisitioned without apparent necessity; Allied officials were often found to be intransigent or dismissive, while Allied soldiers were compared unfavourably with German troops who had usually been better behaved. Yet unprejudiced Romans had to admit that they enjoyed far greater freedom both of expression and of movement under the Allied occupation than they had done under the Germans, that the fear and oppression which had formerly overshadowed Rome had been lifted, and that the occupying forces seemed genuinely anxious to hand back the government of the city and the country to Italians as soon as possible. A more broadly based Italian government, replacing Badoglio's and deriving its authority from Crown Prince Umberto following the retirement of King Victor Emmanuel, had been formed immediately after the liberation of Rome; and on 15 August the city and its surrounding provinces were handed over to this government for direct administration under the supervision of the Allied Control Commission.

So, slowly Rome became the city of the Romans once more. Past wrongs were gradually forgotten, and the people recovered their natural good humour. While tribunals dismissed some Fascists from their posts and detained others responsible for serious crimes, while a few notorious figures of the former regime, like the deputy governor of the Regina Coeli gaol, had been lynched by the mob, and while the windows of some shops owned by Fascists had been stoned and smashed, there was an evident desire to look to the future rather than to resent the past. By a referendum in June 1946 the country voted for a Republic instead of the discredited monarchy. Parliament reopened in May 1948 after elections which returned the Christian Democrats with an absolute majority; and so, under the inspiring leadership of Alcide De Gasperi, and with Allied economic aid, Italy was able within a short time to take its respected place among the nations of the West, and Rome was soon to give her name to the treaty which inaugurated the union that binds so many of them together.

Six and a half centuries after Pope Boniface VIII had declared that 1300 would be the first of the Holy Years of the Church, Pope Pius XII presided over another Holy Year in Rome, pronouncing his blessing over the crowds as his predecessor had blessed the crowds in which Dante had stood. The Church's great traditions continued from century to century, yet the Church was gradually changing. In 1962 Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, and over two thousand mitred bishops gathered in the huge central nave of St Peter's to take part in the deliberations which were to give authority to the Church's renewal.

In these years the appearance of Rome and the life of the city were being transformed too. An economic boom in Italy, which was to lead to the production of one and a half million motor vehicles in 1967, ensured that the traffic in Rome's streets became more congested and frequently more chaotic than ever. Outside the city walls new suburbs sprawled to the south down the left bank of the Tiber, to the north along the old road to Florence, east and south-east towards the Sabine and Alban hills and westward on either side of the Via Aurelia. The population, which had reached two million by the early 1960s, had grown to 2,830,569 by 1983.

It was an increasingly cosmopolitan city. The establishment of the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome in 1950 was followed by that of several other international bodies; by an increase in the two diplomatic corps, one accredited to the Republic, the other to the Pope; by an influx of students to the several academies maintained by most of the European nations and by America; by the construction of large new hotels; by the expansion of the film industry, centred upon Cinecitt๠and the consequent arrival of numerous technicians, writers, actors and actresses – pursued by intrusive paparazzi – to swell the number of artists and musicians who had found Rome so congenial in the past.

In politics the former authority of the Christian Democrats as a unified party had crumbled. During the economic depression which followed the affluence of the 1960s, while allegations of corruption against ministers caused a crisis in public confidence, the Communist Party, which had gained ground under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti, made further advances. And in 1976, for the first time in its history, Rome had a Communist mayor. Many Communists, however, remained devout Roman Catholics. When Togliatti died, thousands of the mourners who lined the route between the Piazza Venezia to St John Lateran made the sign of the cross as the cortège passed, several of them after having first saluted it with a clenched fist. But to the left of the Communists and far to the right were such organizations as the Red Brigade and the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. These were responsible in the late 1960s and 1970s for a succession of outrages in Rome, one of the most notorious of which was the murder of the Christian Democratic leader and former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, whose body was found in the boot of an abandoned car not far from his party's headquarters on 9 May 1978.

Yet the subsequent reign of terror which some newspapers predicted never occurred. Rome was once again, in Belloc's phrase, ‘astonishingly the same’; and the city was seen to retain the lustre and the fascination which had held men and women in thrall for so many centuries. Throughout those ages poets and patriots, artists and historians, philosophers and statesmen have fallen under the spell of Rome, ‘mother of kingdoms, the world's capital, the mirror of cities’. To Virgil she seemed the beauty of the world, the natural ruler of the nations. To the twelfth-century Englishman, Master Gregory, the first visitor from his country to provide a detailed account of the city, she appeared ‘most wonderful’. Nothing could equal the beauty of Rome, ‘Rome even in ruins’. For Hildebert of Blois also, Rome was incomparable: ‘No other city can be compared to you, O Rome, even though you are almost a total ruin: in your destruction you teach us how great you were when you were whole.’ Dante called Rome life-giving and the Romans the people of God. For Milton she was the Queen of the Earth. Emperors considered her the preordained centre of authority. The Czars (Caesars) of Russia spoke of their capital as the third Rome, just as the ancient emperors had made of Constantinople the second Rome. Byron was repeating an ancient belief when he wrote:

While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;

When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fade;

And when Rome falls – the World.

Napoleon was obsessed by its spell and dreamed of Rome as the capital of his empire, creating his young son King of Rome. Mazzini too was obsessed by Rome. Garibaldi's cry of ‘Roma o morte!’ became one of the inspirational sentiments of the Risorgimento. Cavour could not envisage the Italian Kingdom without Rome as its capital. Mussolini sought to revive the Roman Empire. And his adversary, Churchill, in pressing for the capture of Rome by Allied forces declared, ‘He who holds Rome holds the title-deeds of Italy.’

In a far distant age Rutilius Namatianus wrote a moving panegyric of the city in which he claimed that Rome ‘has united all peoples into one nation and made all the world one city’. It is this universal element in the history of Rome which is the secret of its perennial vitality, which made it Shakespeare's ‘high and palmy state’ and which makes it still today the Eternal City.