tumes, they were compelled to run for the pallio, driven on by the yells and insults of the heartless crowd; and whenever they slackened speed from sheer fatigue, or in protest against the persecution, they were hurried on by mounted soldiers galloping behind them. In the following years the original institution of Paul II degenerated into license and cruelty. The track was lengthened from one thousand to thirteen hundred yards, and the unfortunate champions of the Ghetto were forced to take a copious repast before racing, and, incredible as it may appear to the reader, it was decided to shorten the blouse which the runners wore for the Christians, as much as was strictly consistent with decency; for the Jews, without any reference to it. We hear also of competitions between hunchbacks and lame men. Montaigne witnessed in 1580 a race of absolutely nude competitors, "On fait courir à l'envi tantôt quatre ou cinq enfants, tantôt des Juifs, tantôt des vieillards tout nus." The Carnival festivities were generally attended by the cudgelling of minor offenders in the Piazze Colonna, di Sciarra, or di Venezia, and by the execution of criminals in the Piazza del Popolo, the hangman and his assistants donning the costume of harlequins and punchinellos. The minor offenders were mostly vulgar women, who had infringed police regulations, but the victims of the hangman were selected with greater care among the nobility and the clergy. It is enough to quote the names of Count Soderini, executed on Shrove Tuesday, 1650, of the Abbé Volpini, hanged in the Carnival of 1720, and of Count Trivelli, who perished in that of 1737. These cruel amusements were not those, surely, which Paul II, the gentle Venetian, had thought to offer to the Romans. However, when institutions like the Carnival are transferred from one country to another, they can survive only by shaping and adapting themselves to the nature and requirements of the new soil. The Grecian athletes, once transplanted to Rome, became gladiators. The Via del Corso, in which the Carnival has been celebrated from the time of Paul II to our own days, then followed only approximately the straight line of the Via Flaminia, and its level was most irregular. It did not start The Piazza Colonna in the time of Paul III, from a rare engraving by from the Piazza di Venezia, which was opened in 1536, but from the tomb of C. Poplicius Bibulus at the foot of the Tarpeian Rock,' seven hundred feet more to the south. The pilgrim, advancing northwards, in the direction of the Porta del Popolo, must have been struck by the number and magnitude of the ruins of classic edifices which lined the road, leaving but little space for habitations. The lofty 1 The name Tarpeian Rock, contrary to the received notion and to popular belief in Rome, belongs to the cliff of the Capitoline hill, facing the north, under the walls of the Arx or citadel. Epigraphic records of it have been found in situ in the foundations of the monument to Victor Emmanuel at the side of the Via della Pedacchia. double capacity of "maestro delle strade" and of "commissario delle antichita," with the help of the two Alessandro Farnese, uncle and nephew, one Pope, one the head of the Sacred College, can only be appreciated by comparing the state of the city at the beginning of the century with its condition at the death of Paul III. Let us choose as a point of vantage the western summit of the Capitoline hill, from which Poggio Bracciolini and his friend Antonio Lusco used to gaze over the city at the time of Nicholas V, and where the famous description inserted in the book "De Varietate Fortunae was probably written in 1447.' Here, also, Martin Heemskerk sat day after day in 1536 while drawing the beautiful panoramic view, now preserved in the department of prints and drawings of the Berlin Museum. What would have struck more forcibly the observer in those days was the smallness of the inhabited space in comparison with that enclosed by the walls of Aurelian, perhaps not more than one tenth. The population was congested in the narrow belt of lowlands bordered by the Corso on the east, by the Capitoline hill on the south, and by the Tiber on the west; while on the opposite bank of the river two suburbs, the Borgo and the Trastevere, clustered round the churches of St. Peter and Santa Cecilia respectively. This restricted area was by no means overcrowded, each monastery being provided with a garden, each church with a cemetery, each palace with a fortified enclosure, in which the retinue of "bravi" and outlaws found shelter and protection from the feeble hands of the law. The limits of the inhabited section towards 1 The "descriptio urbis " of Poggio forms part of his book De Varietate Fortunae, edited for the first time by Domenico Giorgi in 1723 from the original MSS. then in the possession of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. 2 Published and illustrated by De Rossi in the Antike Denkmaeler of the German Archæological Institute, vol. ii, plate 12. |