THE GOLDEN DAYS OF ROME

IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE CITY

It is said that when in the year 1377 Pope Gregory XI restored to Rome the seat of the supreme pontificate, of which she had been deprived for the space of seventytwo years, there were not more than seventeen thousand people living in the ruinous waste within the old walls of Aurelian. Whether the figures be exact or not, those few men who held firm and faithful to their native soil deserve the gratitude of mankind. Without them the site of Rome would now be pointed out to the inquiring stranger like those of Fidena, Veii, Ostia, or Tusculum, - places fit only for the exhumation of the records of the past, and doomed forever to silence and solitude.

It is also said that the young Pope1 was so affected by the transition from the gay and refined life of Avignon to the horrors of Rome, that he died of grief on March 27 of the following year, 1378. The Romans, to whom his longing for "le beau pays de France" was not a secret, treated his memory with contempt, and the preserver of their city was buried in the church of Santa Maria Nuova (S. Francesca Romana) in a plain coffin, on the lid of which this simple epitaph was inscribed in Gothic letters,

1 Pierre Rogier de Beaufort, born A. D. 1336, in the Château de Montroux, near Limoges, was elected pope in 1370.

"Here lies the body of the blessed Pope Gregory XI," without any reference to the great deed he had accomplished at the cost of his life.

Things were allowed to remain in this state until the end of the sixteenth century, when the City Council, feeling pangs of remorse, voted the erection of a memorial in the same church, selecting among various schemes the one proposed by Pietro Paolo Olivieri, who had achieved fame as an architect by the erection of the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle, and as a sculptor with his statue of Gregory XIII in the Capitol, and his bas-relief of the Adoration of the Wise Men in the Caetani chapel at Santa Pudentiana.

The central panel of the memorial of Gregory XI represents his triumphal entry by the Porta di San Paolo on the morning of January 17, 1377. The gate is surmounted by the coat of arms of the Counts of Beaufort, which appears also on the flags displayed by the standard-bearers at the head of the cavalcade. Of this glorious coat of arms only one specimen survives in Rome, in the frieze of the canopy or ciborium of St. John the Lateran, on the side facing the apse. It consists of two groups of three rosettes each, divided by a diagonal band.

I have purposely begun this study of a new period in the artistic and historical life of Rome with the mausoleum of Gregory XI, now almost forgotten, because as the column of Phocas marks the end of the ancient and the beginning of the mediæval periods, so the grave of that Pope marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. The transition from one to the other was neither sudden nor noticeable at first, but the simple fact of the head of the Church having taken up again his residence in the city by the Tiber, where hundreds of thousands of

pilgrims were expected to assemble from every part of the globe each quarter of a century, not only saved the city from abandonment or final collapse, but gave it a new lease of life, and helped it towards its moral and material regen

Gregory XI entering the gate of St. Paul on his return from Avignon

eration. In the period of one hundred and fifty-seven years which elapsed between the return of Gregory XI and the election of Paul III, the hero, or one of the heroes, of my present volume, the celebration of the Jubilees played a leading and beneficial part in the life of Rome. The streets were made passable, the bridges repaired, the houses

disinfected, the number and the accommodations of hospitals increased, -the whole city, in short, was made to assume a less forbidding look, and transformed into one vast hostelry. The oldest memorial connected with the Jubilees is the fresco by Giotto, once in the Loggia della Benedizione, and now preserved in one of the aisles of St. John the Lateran, opposite the Torlonia chapel. It represents Pope Boniface VIII between two cardinals, announcing the opening of the "Anno Santo" of 1300, usually called the "Giubileo di Dante" because the divine poet is said to have visited Rome on that occasion, and to have met there Imanuel Ben Salome, from whom he learned the few Hebrew words which appear in the "Divina Commedia."

Giotto's picture is not historically accurate. In the first place, the Lateran was at that time in such a state of ruin and desolation that it could not even be included in the number of the nine churches which the pilgrims were bound to visit. In the second place, the Bull Antiquorum, which Pope Boniface is seen reading from the loggia, did not institute the Jubilees, but only confirmed the institution, being dated February the 23d, 1300, while the opening ceremony had taken place on the preceding Christmas, 1299. Boniface's attempt, however, was not a success. There had been no sufficient organization and no proper advertising, so that the Christians beyond the Alps did not know about the Jubilee until it was too late in the year to undertake the perilous journey to Rome. At all events, the clergy, as well as the lay population, saw at once what enormous advantages, moral and material, could be obtained from the institution, and Pope Clement VI was petitioned to shorten by half the interval of a century which, according to the Bull Antiquorum, must have elapsed between two celebrations. They urged the Pope to consider the fact that, on account of