S. Costanzo.
A little lower down the hill is the small church dedicated to S. Costanzo. For some obscure reason this saint, who is purely local, has become the patron saint of lovers, and on his feast day all the lovers of the neighbourhood assemble at the shrine. If the eye of S. Costanzo blinks at the young man or the girl who kneel before his image, they feel a happy certainty that the course of their affection will run smooth, and that the year will end in happy union.
S. Costanzo was converted to the Christian faith by S. Ercolano I., whom he succeeded as bishop of Perugia, and Ciatti gives us a long list of his virtues and his miracles. The blind of the city received their sight from him, we hear, and the lame were made to walk. But all his miracles and his conversions made him an object of hatred to the pagans, and one day he was seized together with his followers, and thrown into prison. They were then put into scalding baths, “but,” says Ciatti, “the Holy Ghost, who filled their souls with fire, tempered the external heat, and they sang hymns to signify their great tranquillity.” Their only discomfort lay in the darkness all around them, but soon “a wonderful brightness appeared unto them from heaven which comforted them exceedingly.” Then the pagans continued their tortures and forced the Saint to walk on burning embers, but as these did him no harm he was stripped and covered with red hot coals; and all the time he went on singing much to the annoyance of his tormentors. Finally he and his followers made their escape and fled to Spello, where fresh conversions, followed by fresh tortures, are recounted. At last, in 154 A.D., he met his death at Spoleto. His body was taken back to Perugia by a certain Serviano da Foligno, who found it “surrounded by a choir of rejoicing angels, and in a shroud of heavenly light. The holy burden was too heavy for Serviano to carry alone, and he called on two men who were passing by to help him. At first they refused and scoffed at the miracles he related, whereupon they were both struck blind, and trembling, they prayed for mercy to the God of the Christians. On touching the body of the Saint they received their sight, whereat they gladly helped to carry it into Perugia. They entered by Porta S. Pietro, and were met by many of the faithful.” The body of S. Costanzo is buried in the little church outside the Porta S. Pietro, rebuilt by the present Pope, and the beautiful byzantine doorway seems a fit entrance to the tomb of this suffering and much tormented martyr of Perugia.
CHAPTER VII
Piazza del Papa, S. Severo, Porta Sole, S. Agostino, and S. Francesco al Monte
THE Piazza del Papa[69] lies a little to the right of the entrance door to the Duomo. In former times the straw market was held in this square, which was then called the Piazza di Paglia, and at that period the statue of Pope Julius occupied a splendid position on the steps of the cathedral. But during the great revolt against the Papacy in 1780 the Pope’s statue was taken away from its prominent place by some wise persons who foresaw its destruction should they allow it to remain there, and it was bundled into the cellar of a tavern in the town, where it remained, not, it must be confessed, entirely incognito, till people’s nerves had calmed a little.[70] Not so very long ago the Pope was once more brought to the light of day and set in his present position.
Pope Julius III. is a great figure in Perugian history. He is in a sense a lay figure, for he never set foot in the city after his student days, and he was worshipped almost in the manner of an unseen deity by the Perugians. Julius succeeded Paul III., and though he by no means did away with the supreme power of the
Church in the city, still he mitigated many of the hardships and the ignominies which that power had entailed in the hands of the great Farnese. When Paul III. died in 1549 his fortress remained as a legacy to the city, with a Castellano to watch over its (Papal) interests. This man proceeded to rule as his master had taught him, and he defended the castle vigilantly against the Pope’s nephew, who made some efforts to gain possession of so rich a prize.
The policy of Julius III. was of a much milder order. “Julius had always loved our city with a peculiar partiality,” says Mariotti, “and he sent his relation Cardinal della Corgna hither, endowing him with full authority, and hardly had the Cardinal arrived than he restored to the city the arms of which she had been deprived so long; and in February of that same year Julius III. sent a brief to the holders of ecclesiastical liberty, which was addressed to the Priori delle Arte (heads of City Guilds), a title which had not been heard of in Perugia since 1539; and to this grace the same Pope added considerable sums of money for the maintenance of those same magistrates....”
It will be easy to anyone who has formed even a dim conception of what the strength of the spirit of liberty was like in the minds of the Perugians to understand the pure sensation of delight which the Pope’s open acknowledgment of their old municipal rule, followed as it was by a message couched in such friendly terms, was likely to produce. Fretting as the citizens had been for many years under the rule of the despotic Paul, they hailed his more temperate successor as a sort of saviour, and they determined to express their sentiments of joy in what Bonazzi fitly terms “a day of political bacchanalia.”[71]
“So on the morning of the first day in May the heads of the principal guilds of the Mercanzia and the Cambio met in the piazza, and there having put aside their black apparel (Paul III. had Insisted on the Priori wearing a form of mourning, in order, and probably with perfect wisdom, to insist on his own authority in Perugia), they reassumed the crimson of the former Priori, and thrusting their heads through the golden chains which the Pope’s Vice-Legate himself insisted upon hanging round them in token of their reinstatement, they took their seats upon the damask benches and listened to the Mass of the Holy Ghost, sung by the Vice-Legate. Then, upon leaving the church, all the religious orders, the Confraternitàs, the guilds, the gentlemen, the troops, and the excited populace seeing the transfigured magistrates, lifted a frenzied cry, and forming into a monstrous procession to the sound of pipes, of drums, of trumpets, bells, and much artillery, the whole crowd followed the Priori to the Church of S. Agostino and there, having heard another musical mass, the new magistrates, followed by an ever increasing and clamorous cortège, went on to take up quarters on the first floor of the Palazzo Pubblico.”
Not satisfied with this demonstration of their delight and loyalty toward the new Pope, the Perugians determined to commemorate the occasion through the medium of art. They commissioned Adone Doni to paint the above described scene of the reinstatement of the magistrates (see the picture in the Palazzo Pubblico), whilst Vincenzo Danti, then a mere boy, was employed to make the big bronze statue of Julius III., which is one of the most remarkable points in the present town.
But to us who know the almost purely democratic, or at least municipal, tendencies of past Perugia, this great bronze figure of a Pope eternally blessing the city always excites a sense of something false and contradictory, and had we been permitted to visit the benevolent Julius in the caverns of the wine shop, we should have felt him in that place to be a truer symbol of the spirit of the town throughout her troubled history.