2
DONNA OLIMPIA.
The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia[1] are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted[2] to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.[3] The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple[4] nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age were such that Cancellieri[5] tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’
[1] Donna Olimpia Pamfili, nata Maidalchini, wife of the brother of Innocent X. [↑]
[2] Cancellieri Mercato, § ix. note 7. [↑]
[3] He had not, however, been originally intended for the Church; had been General of the Pontifical forces before he was Cardinal, and was only in Deacon’s orders. [↑]
[4] His simplicity was the subject of many contemporary mots and anecdotes; e.g. at the time of his elevation to the purple the Pasquin statue had been temporarily lost to view by a hoarding put up for the erection of a neighbouring palace; ‘Marforio’ was supposed to express his condolence for the eclipse of his rival in the following distich:
‘Non piangere Pasquino
Chè sarà tuo compagno Maidalchino.’
His want of capacity seems however to have been compensated by his goodness of heart. [↑]
[5] Cancellieri Mercato, § viii. As I have been desirous to put nothing in the text but what has reached myself by verbal tradition, I will add some no less interesting details collected by Cancellieri, in this place.
It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,[6] was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 1641[7] that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himself let down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.[8] He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.
It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) who had married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.
The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,[9] and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’[10] to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscription Agonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed[11] to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, and undertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:
‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:
Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’
and
‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’
To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law[12] was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpia fuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’
Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in her mots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.
There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’[13] but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr. Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’[14] and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.
When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.[15] There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.
Her palace in Piazza Navona became in 1695 the residence of Lord Castlemaine, ambassador of James II. to the Holy See. He had an ox roasted whole before it, and other bounties distributed to the people on occasion of the birth of ‘The Pretender.’ [↑]
[6] A certain Niccolo Caferri was much ridiculed for the spirit of adulation with which he pretended to trace up Innocent X.’s genealogy to Pamphilus, king of Doris, 300 years before the birth of Rome. But the Pope himself was so little ashamed of his origin that Cancellieri tells us he took a piece of cloth for one of his armorial bearings in memory of it. [↑]
[7] This date, however, must be incorrect, as Innocent X. only began to reign in 1644. This grandiose Campanile is described at length, and a plate of it given in Fontana, ‘Descrizione del tempio Vaticano,’ p. 262, et seq. It was 360 ft. in height. [↑]
[8] He does not specify what pope, and the wording used seems to imply Innocent X., but this aqueduct is always ascribed to Paul V., twenty years earlier, and is called the Acqua Paola. [↑]
[9] Described in Cancellieri, ‘Descrizione delle Cappelle Ponteficie,’ cap. x. [↑]
[10] In Melchiorri’s table of Roman moneys he gives the value (in 1758, a hundred years later) of a doppio as 4 scudi 40 bajocchi; and of a doppia at 6 scudi, 42 bajocchi. It appears to be the latter the Pope sent for. [↑]
[11] Dyer says it was the Stadium of Domitian, and Becker, that there is no proof it was ever a circus. [↑]
[12] Cancellieri calls Innocent her cognato, and cognato in common conversation now is used for a cousin. Bazzarini explains it as ‘any relationship by marriage.’ [↑]
[13] MS. life of his successor Alex. VII. by Card. Pallavicini, quoted by Novaes: Storia de’ Sommi Pontefici, x. 61. [↑]
[14] Nothing better than deal, I believe. [↑]
THE MUNIFICENCE OF PRINCE BORGHESE.
[If the Romans remember the vices of their princely families, they are proud of storing up the memory of their virtues too; and the following narrative was told me with great enthusiasm.]
Liberality is a distinguishing characteristic of the Borghese family. It was always a matter of emulation who should get taken into their service, and no one who was once placed there ever let himself be sent away again, it was too good a thing to lose.
There was a man-servant, however, once who gave the Prince, I think it was the father of this one, an insolent answer, and he turned him off.
No one would take that man. Wherever he applied, when they asked him, ‘Where have you lived?’ and he answered, ‘in casa Borghese,’ everyone answered, ‘Oh, if you couldn’t live with Borghese, I’m sure I’ve nothing better to offer you!’ and the door was shut in his face. It wasn’t in one place or two, but everywhere, Borghese’s character is so well known in Rome. As he couldn’t get a place, however, he was reduced to near starvation, and he had a wife and six children, all with nothing to eat. Every article of furniture went to the Monte di Pietà, and almost every article of clothing; and yet hunger stared them in the face.
Then the man got desperate, and he went out one night and waited for Borghese in a lonely street in the dark, with a knife in his hand, and said, ‘Your purse!’
Borghese thought he had a gang behind him, round the corner, and handed him his purse. But the man only took out three pauls and gave it back, and he looked so thin and haggard that Borghese could not but notice it, dark as it was, though he had forgotten his face.
‘That is not a thief, he is some poor fellow who wants relief,’ said Borghese to his servant. ‘Go after him and see what he does, but take care not to be seen,’ and he walked home alone. In less than half an hour the servant came back. He had seen him spend the three pauls in food; had seen him take it home to his family; had seen them scarcely covered with rags; had seen the room denuded of furniture; had heard the man say, as he put the food on the table, ‘Here is wherewith to keep you alive another day, and to-morrow I die in sin, for I had to steal it.’
Then Borghese called up the steward (Maestro di Casa), and told him to go to the house and find out who the man was, and leave them what was wanted for the night.
The steward did as he was told, and left a scudo that the man might get a supper without eating stolen food, but without saying who sent him, for he had learnt by his inquiries that he was the servant whom Borghese had sent away.
The next day Borghese sent and clothed all the family; furnished their place again for them; put the children to schools, and gave the parents ten scudi a month. He wouldn’t take the man back, having once had to send him away—for that was his rule—but he gave him a pension for the rest of his life.
‘POPE JOAN.’
‘You know, of course, that there was once a Papessa? They have put that in the books, I suppose?’
‘I know there is such a story, but learned writers have proved it was a mere invention.’
‘Well, I daresay it isn’t true; but there’s no one in Rome who has not heard of it. And what makes them believe it is this.[1] Outside of St. Peter’s somewhere there’s a statue of her all among the apostles and saints; and they say it’s because a Pope must have a statue, and they didn’t dare to put hers inside the church, so they put it up outside. And if it isn’t a Papessa, what is a woman’s statue doing there, for it wasn’t the Madonna, that’s certain?’
‘Oh! that’s a statue of Religion, or the Church.[2] There never was a woman-pope.’
‘Ah, well! you read books. I dare say you know best; but, anyhow, that’s what they say. And, after all, who knows!’
[1] An argument worthy to take rank beside the famous one of ‘Mrs. Brown’ concerning Noah’s Ark. [↑]
[2] I said this, really thinking at the moment there was such a statue surmounting the apex of the pediment of the façade; but it afterwards came to mind and I have since verified it on the spot, that the statues on the pediment represent the twelve Apostles with Christ in the centre, and there is no female figure there. Among the numerous statues of saints surmounting the colonnade, are a small proportion of female saints, but no one at all prominent. [↑]
GIACINTA MARESCOTTI.
There was a prince Marescotti,[1] who had two daughters, Cecilia and Giacinta. From her childhood Cecilia had always been gentle and pious, and everyone said, ‘When she grows up she will be a nun.’ Giacenta was proud, handsome, and passionate, and everyone said, ‘She will be a leader of society, and woe betide whoso offends her.’
But their father, good man,[2] knew them better, and one day he announced to them the choice of a state of life which he had made for them; for the pious, gentle Cecilia there was a great lord coming from abroad to make her his wife; but the proud, passionate Giacinta was to enter a convent.
The one was as dismayed as the other at the time, though the event showed he had chosen right. Cecilia, who loved quiet and repose, tenderly entreated her father to let her off the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming the head of a great family, while Giacinta made a great noise[3] at the idea of her beauty and talents being laid up hidden in a nun’s cell. Nevertheless, in those days long gone by, girls were used to obey.[4] Cecilia married and proved herself an exemplary wife and mother, and carried respect for religion wherever she went.
Giacinta, on the other hand, took all her worldly state into her convent with her; her cell was furnished like the drawing-room of a palace, and she insisted on having her maids to wait on her; the other nuns she scarcely spoke to, and treated as the dust under her feet.
One day the bishop came to visit the convent. ‘What a smell!’[5] he said, as he passed the cell of Giacinta Marescotti.
‘A smell, indeed! In my cell which is not only the sweetest in the convent, but which is the only one fit to go into!’ exclaimed poor Giacinta in deep indignation. ‘What can you possibly mean by “a smell!”’
‘A smell of sin!’ responded the bishop; and it was observed that for a wonder Giacinta made no retort.
‘A smell of sin,’ said Giacinta to herself, as she sat alone in her elegant and luxurious cell that night. The words had touched her soul and awakened a train of thoughts latent and undisturbed till then. Always hitherto she had ambitioned the loftiest, most refined objects of research, and thought she knew the secret of attaining them. The bishop’s words spoke to her of there being ‘a more excellent way’ yet. They cast a light upon a higher path than that which she was treading, and revealed to her that those who walked along it, lowly as they might seem, could afford to look down upon hers.
She saw that those who despised distinctions were grander than those who courted them, to become, in the end, their slaves; that those who aspired to celestial joys were nobler than those who surrounded themselves with the most exquisite luxuries of earth.[6]
From that day, little by little,[7] Giacinta’s cell grew nearer and nearer to the pattern of the House of Nazareth. The mirror, the cosmetics, and the easy couch made way for the crucifix, the discipline, and the penitential chain.[8] From having been shunned as a type of worldliness, she became to her whole order a model of humility and mortification.[9]
[1] The Marescotti were a noble family of Bologna, the second city of the Pontifical Dominions; there were two cardinals of the name. [↑]
[2] ‘Il buon uomo di loro padre.’ [↑]
[3] ‘Faceva il diavolo,’ lit. ‘raised the devil.’ [↑]
[4] ‘In quei tempi antichi ubbedirono le figlie, capisce.’ ‘Capisce,’ lit. ‘understand,’ equivalent to ‘you see.’ [↑]
[5] ‘Puzza—puzza di peccato!’ Lit. ‘It stinks—it stinks of sin.’ (See n. 5, p. 13.) [↑]
[6] I give the story, as near as possible, in the words which the pious faith of the narrator prompted her to use. The success of the final results of a measure may prove that what seemed tyranny was really prudent foresight; the contemporary views of parental responsibility must also be taken into account. But it is impossible for the modern English mind to sympathise readily with so violent an interference with natural instincts. [↑]
[8] ‘Catenella,’ lit. ‘little chain,’ an instrument of penance worn by some persons on the arm or waist. [↑]
[9] The following are briefly the authentic particulars of her life from Moroni, xxx. 194. She was daughter of Marc Antonio Mariscotti and Ottavia Orsini, born in 1535, and baptised by the name of Clarice. Although brought up in the fear of God and led to appreciate holiness, her youth was passed in worldliness and vanity. Her younger sister having been asked in marriage before her, she was so much vexed and annoyed that she became insupportable at home, on which account her father proposed to her to become a nun in the convent of S. Bernardino at Viterbo, where she had been educated, and she adapted herself to his counsel, though without any personal inclination for it. At the end of her noviciate she made her father arrange that she should have a room of her own magnificently furnished. Sister Giacinta lived ten years thus a religious in name but not in mind. Nevertheless she was not without virtue, for she was always obedient to her superior as she had been to her parents; and her modesty, purity, and respect for holy things was observed by all. A serious illness was to her the call of grace; having given up to the abbess of the convent all the things that had been brought in for her use by special privilege, she devoted herself to severe penance and continual meditation. On occasion of a contagious disease with which Viterbo was afflicted, she gave abundant proof of her charity towards her neighbour, for she founded two societies, the object of one of which was to collect assistance for the convalescent and those who had fallen into reduced circumstances; the other to support a hospital built to receive the sick. These two societies, which she called ‘Oblates of Mary,’ still continue (the date of Moroni’s work is 1845) in full activity. [↑]