In the year 1778, Jacopo Belzoni, a worthy barber of Padua, and Teresa his wife, were rejoicing at the arrival of a son. They had christened him Giovanni Battista, or “Gianbattista” for short. Had a soothsayer of ancient Egypt appeared by the cradle, and revealed the infant’s destiny, the good tonsore would have surely opened his mouth and dropped his shears. For the soothsayer would have said something like this:
“This child will be a juggler at theatres and village fairs, a scholar, an author, and a traveller. For thirty-seven years, life will toss him about as a juggler tosses a ball in the air, but then his opportunity will come, he will win fame in a strange land, and solve the most romantic of all mysteries.”
The adventurous tale begins, strangely enough, in a monastery. The worthy Jacopo had fathered a brood of fourteen,—something had to be found for each and every one of them, and in the distribution young Giovanni Battista was handed over to the church. He was to find a place in the world for himself as a monk. From the parental dwelling on a by-street in Padua, the boy, still in his teens, walked the ancient highways of Umbria to the house of a monastic order in Rome. Somewhere in the old papal city, behind an encircling wall, his days of boyhood and youth began before the dawn with the clangour of a monastery bell, and ended with the echoing cave of a darkened church, the golden, pin-point flames of altar lamps, and the solemn chanting of the offices.
Years pass, years of quiet and withdrawal from the world. Of a sudden comes alarming news, the pot of the Revolution has boiled over, the French are crossing the frontiers and invading Italy. Presently there are disorders in Rome and a descent of French troops upon the city; the bells are silenced, the monasteries closed or seized for barracks, and the monks harried out into the street.
Among the monks thus compelled to abandon the religious life was Gianbattista Belzoni. The Paduan novice had grown up into a giant, a colossus even, for he now stood six feet seven inches in height, and was broadly and solidly built in the same proportion. And not only did Gianbattista have a giant’s strength, he had also the pride and the sense of decorum which accompany a giant stature. Those who are born of average height little know how huge is the influence of great stature on its possessor’s conduct and character! He who is born a Titan must act the Titan; a frolicsome colossus is an outrage to Nature. Gianbattista, moreover, though of Paduan birth, was of Roman stock, and Romans have to this day an eye for dignity. Brown eyed, and black-brown of hair, with a giant’s mildness, a giant’s decorum, and an Italian’s grace of address, young Gianbattista was a figure for Michelangelo.
Walking with a giant’s disdain through the rabble of soldiers and revolutionists jeering by the monastery gate, the young monk passed forth into the world.
The homeless young Titan, he was only 22, may well have wondered what was now to become of him. At the monastery school he had chanced to make a special study of the science of hydraulics, but that was hardly a knowledge to be peddled about in those uncertain times. Having no choice, therefore, he fell back on his physical strength, and set about earning his living as a juggler and a Hercules of village fairs. From Italy the showman monk made his way through Germany, and then through Holland to the various kingdoms of the British Isles. Finding life pleasant in England, he settled down there, and spent the Napoleonic years amusing his hosts and becoming something of an Englishman.
For the next ten years, his life is that of an Italian mountebank in England. The English knew the huge, serious, well-mannered foreigner as “Signor” Belzoni; they saw him in their pantomimes and at Bartholomew Fair. He had a booth at the fair, and amid the smell of black puddings sizzling on the fire, and the shouts and cries of barrow vendors and showmen, our Signor delighted the London rabble with feats of strength and dexterity. His favorite show was a spectacle called “Samson,” an edifying Biblical affair in whose course Belzoni pulled down the pillars of a stage temple with the most blood-curdling roars, crash, dust and general uproar. At Sadlers Wells Theatre, to quote an old play bill, his performance consisted “in carrying from seven to ten men in a manner never attempted by any but himself. He clasps round him a belt to which are affixed ledges to support the men who cling about him.... When thus encumbered, he moves as easy and as graceful as if about to walk a minuet, and displays a flag in as flippant a manner as a dancer on the rope.” Another visitor became poetic. “Signor Belzoni,” he wrote, “moved about the stage under this enormous pressure with as much steadiness and stateliness as the elephant does when his howdah is full of Indian warriors.”
Ellar the comedian knew him well, and saw him perform; the giant was getting two pounds a week, and Edmund Kean was watching delighted in the stalls.
In England came Romance: there Gianbattista found his Sarah. This resolute spouse was an Englishwoman of a stature almost as magnificent as her lord’s, and with a character and a mind as British as the dome of St. Paul’s. Indomitable Sarah Belzoni! Writing of the Turks, she set down in her journal, “though I may be condemned for my opinion, there is no religion would suit them so well as the Protestant church of England.” She called her husband “Mr. B.,” and accompanied him on his expeditions, never once losing her nerve or her practical grasp of life. The gigantic pair now set about the serious business of earning a living.