Chapter II: The Nymphæum or “secret Fountain” (4)

Throughout the Middle Ages, all that part of Rome which lies between the Flaminian Gate and the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina on the Corso was almost devoid of human habitation and given over entirely to orchards and gardens. This condition still prevailed when Sixtus IV (1471–1484) demolished the old Flaminian Gate, through which, some five hundred years before, the Saracens had captured Rome. He did this in order to build the modern Porta del Popolo. It was by way of this Porta del Popolo that Charles VIII of France entered the city on New Year’s Day, 1495, with the most imposing and brilliant force of arms which modern Rome had ever beheld. At three o’clock on the winter’s afternoon, the great gates opened to receive them, and it was nine at night before they could close. For six hours the great procession marched down the Corso, and when darkness fell torches and flambeaus were lighted and held aloft by the marching troops. The advance-guard of Swiss and Germans was followed by five thousand Gascons, small of stature and very agile, like the bersaglieri of the present day. Then came the cavalry, twenty-five hundred cuirassiers from the French nobility, all arrayed in silk mantles and golden collars, and each knight followed by his squire and grooms leading three additional horses. Then more cavalry, and finally four hundred archers, of whom one hundred were Scotch. These last formed the body-guard of the King, who rode surrounded by two hundred of the greatest of his nobles; and among these came Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, afterward Pope Julius II, at that time papal legate to France and the most implacable enemy of the Pope whose territory they were invading. “The King,” wrote Brantôme, “was in full armor; lance on thigh as though pricking toward a foe. Riding thus in full and furious order of battle, trumpet sounding, drums a-beating,” the rattle and rumble of the artillery bringing up the rear, Charles made his way to the Palazzo di Venezia, whence he issued his edicts and gave his orders, while his army, with all its network of sentries and pickets, occupied the city as though it were Paris.

Pope Alexander VI fled to the Vatican and, later, to the Castle of St. Angelo. Very little came--or, for the time, very little seemed to come--of all this glitter and commotion. “Charles VIII and his lusty company of young men, among them the youthful Bayard, all of good family,” says the old chronicler, “but little under control,” were making a holiday war. They could not have comprehended the great forces that were at work beneath the noisy agitation of their enterprise. Yet King and nobles fell at once under the spell of Italy. Charles VIII, bred in the fortress castles of Louis XI, wrote home to his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, describing the loveliness of his Neapolitan gardens and the genius of the Italian painters who were to do wonderful ceilings for him when he had carried them back to France. Before he quitted Rome, the army got one day of pillage and the King founded the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. Then after six months more of picturesque soldiering Charles went back to France, planning his return already in his heart, and taking with him over the Alpine passes an army which spread the legend of Italy far and wide through the northern countries. In the fifteenth century there were but two ways for a man to see the world. Either he went on pilgrimage to some far-distant shrine or he had to join an army of invasion! Charles VIII did not return, but he had shown his subjects the way to Rome, having been the first French King to cross the Alps since Charlemagne. Even before the Porta del Popolo was finished and long after the orchards and gardens of this district had been converted into the spacious Piazza del Popolo, Rome and France felt the influence for evil and for good set in motion by this unjustifiable and light-hearted incursion of (as the old Huguenot historian calls him) a “madly adventurous young King.”

Modern methods of travel have deprived men of one of life’s greatest sensations. Lovers of Rome know this. One of them, a schoolboy, spoke for all when he came out of the railway station, exclaiming in bitter disappointment: “So this is ancient Rome! It might as well be modern Chicago!” The Piazza del Popolo is no longer the entrance hall to the Eternal City. It must be sought for, with guide-book or map; but when it is found there is no better way to revive the ghost of that thrill which came spontaneously to those who entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo than to seat oneself upon the edge of one of Valadier’s fountains, preferably the western one, and then--to try to think!

PINCIAN

PINCIAN

Until quite recently the Acqua Felice fed all the fountains on the Pincian Hill, and the altitude of its source is so nearly the same as the top of the hill, where the public gardens are situated, that the only kind of fountain possible there was a sheet of water; so the sculptor of the chief fountain in the Pincian Gardens, Count Brazza, the elder, made a virtue out of necessity and created a fountain in which any kind of _jet d’eau_ would be distinctly out of place. Brazza’s white marble group of the infant Moses and his mother stands, set about with tall aquatic plants, in the centre of a large white marble basin, which is filled with placid yet ever-changing water, and it is so happily suited, both in subject and treatment, to its purpose that the absence of action in the water is never felt. On the contrary, plashing water would be a false note in the quiet and legendary harmony of this composition, and the higher jet produced by the recent change of water is no improvement. The biblical story is portrayed with great naturalness and dignity. The mother of Moses has placed the basket containing her sleeping infant among the rushes, which are represented by the living plants. As she rises to move away, she pauses, on one knee, to implore divine protection for the child whom she must abandon to his fate. The heroic size of the figure enhances the strength and dignity of the artist’s conception. The design is little in sympathy with the gay and crowded life of the Pincian Gardens, during the afternoon, but all through the morning hours this fountain becomes the centre of one of the world’s most tender settings for the comedy of childhood and early youth. The civilization which man has made and kept can show nothing fairer than the Pincian Gardens at that time. The soft Roman sunshine then filters through the ilex branches only upon groups of little children and their nurses, solitary old men who have become as little children, and bands of seminarists or theological students wearing black or scarlet gowns and speaking divers tongues. The little company occupy the benches, or walk demurely in small groups beneath the trees, or play the endless plays of babyhood, in and out of the warm shadows; all of them living in a dreamland as old as life itself, and finding in this quiet garden of the Eternal City a background full of sympathy and significance. Up and down the shaded alleys, linking the present to the great past, stretch the long rows of portrait busts placed there by order of Mazzini during the short-lived Mazzinian Republic of 1849. This is what has been called “The Silent Company of the Pincio.” No happier fate can befall an imaginative child from northern lands than to wander at will through this Roman playground. All unconsciously the classic beauty is woven into his spiritual fibre, and with that strange sensation of coming into his own--peculiar to such children--he finds, in these seemingly endless rows of white marble heads, faces which stimulate his fancy or fit the names of heroes already known to him.

In the centre of the garden stands an obelisk the history of which brings back the memory of a beautiful pagan youth who lived more than eighteen hundred years ago, and of another story of Old Nile, more pitiful, if less important, than the story of Moses. This is the obelisk which the Emperor Hadrian and his Empress Sabina raised to the memory of their beloved Antinous--the most beautiful youth the world has record of--who drowned himself in the Egyptian river, under the impression that his voluntary death would avert calamity from his benefactor the Emperor. After all these eighteen hundred years it is still possible to feel the passion of Hadrian’s grief. His biographer calls it “feminine”! But the gifted Emperor, lover of all things beautiful in art and nature, and a student of men and character, understood the value of his treasure and knew full well the irreparableness of his loss. He brought back to Rome all that was left of that beauty--an urnful of ashes--and placed it in the Emperor’s own tomb, now called the Castle of St. Angelo; and on the _spina_ of the circus by the tomb, Hadrian and Sabina erected this obelisk whose hieroglyphics, only quite recently deciphered, relate the deification of their favorite and give the information concerning his place of burial. The obelisk must have been removed by a later Emperor, probably Heliogabalus, for it was found in 1570, near Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, in the gardens of the Varian family, to which family that Emperor belonged. Bernini, in the century following its discovery, moved it to the Barberini Palace, which he was erecting and beautifying for the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII. Later on, a Princess Barberini presented it to Pope Pius VI, who set it up in the Giardino della Pigna in the Vatican, that temporary resting-place for so many treasures, and finally, in 1822, Pius VII and Valadier erected it where it now stands in full view of Hadrian’s Tomb, they being quite unconscious, however, that there was any connection between it and that great mausoleum.

Not far from the fountain of Moses stand two umbrella-pines, their great boles shooting high up through all the foliage about. A hundred years ago they marked the exit into a side lane from the vineyard where they had been planted, for until that time these Gardens of the Pincio had been for centuries the vineyard belonging to the Augustinian monks of Santa Maria del Popolo, the same order from which, about 1494, young Cardinal Farnese bought the property by the Tiber, on which he built the Farnese Palace.

The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo had been built by the Roman people in the twelfth century, and from that time on it and the Augustinian convent beside it became the first hospice and sanctuary to the pilgrims from beyond the Alps. This was because the church and convent stand close to the Porta del Popolo, the gateway to the Flaminian Road, which is the great highway leading to the north.

With these Augustinian monks stayed young Martin Luther when business connected with that order had brought him to Rome. The German seminarist who threads his way to-day among the Pincian alleys must often cross those vanished paths in the vineyard once trodden by the sandalled feet of his great fellow countryman, since Luther’s northern feeling for nature would surely have carried him at dawn or sunset to the convent’s vineyard. There the voices of the birds and the well-trained vines could soothe a spirit dazed and disquieted by the splendors and vices of Rome. The history of the German Reformation may well have had its earliest beginnings in the thoughts which thronged the mind of that young monk, as he leaned upon the vineyard wall and gazed with eyes that saw and saw not at the papal city, where old St. Peter’s--the church in which Charlemagne had been crowned--was being made over by Bramante into its present form; and beside it the huge pile of the Vatican housed the fighting Pope, Julius II, and a hierarchy of utter worldliness.

The monks retained possession of their Pincian vineyard during the three following centuries, or until 1809, at which time Napoleon annexed the Papal States to his Empire, banished the recalcitrant Pope, Pius VII, and set about making Rome over to suit himself. He found the architect who had worked for Pius VI and Pius VII equally ready to serve him, and it was to this architect, Giuseppe Valadier, that Napoleon intrusted the conversion of the old convent vineyard into the Pincian Gardens of the present day. The work was not begun until 1812, and before it was finished Pius VII was back in Rome, and Napoleon was eating out his heart in St. Helena. In that long dying, when this last of the world’s great conquerors had time to remember even all that he himself had done, Napoleon must have often thought of Rome. The old mother who had always believed in him, yet never looked up to him, still lived there in her sombre palace under the shadow of the Austrian Legation and the Austrian hate. His favorite sister, Pauline, was a princess of one of the greatest of the Roman families; and the little son, who was to grow up as the Austrian Duke of Reichstadt, was still, to his father, the King of Rome. Did he ever think of the instructions he had given to Valadier about a public garden for the Romans? There was time to think of everything as the seasons came and went and the remote seas washed the crags beneath his feet, while his English jailers watched him from a distance with hard, uncomprehending eyes.

It is something of a shock to find Napoleon’s bust in that company of great Italians which Mazzini placed here. In these Pincian Gardens, as elsewhere in the world, he surely belongs in a niche by himself! However, the Roman episode was of small importance in his life, and he would not have grudged the honorable position to Valadier, whose bust stands alone facing the principal promenade of the Pincian. That architect lived to welcome back the exiled Pius VII and to finish for him the gardens begun by order of Napoleon.

One explanation of Rome’s charm may be found in her power of suggestion. Although the things to be seen in the Eternal City are of transcendent interest, the things which are only apprehended have a still stronger hold upon the imagination. The actual loveliness of the Pincian Gardens is forgotten as the archæologists build up from buried marbles and scattered inscriptions the life lived here in centuries gone by. Where now is Valadier’s casino there stood in the second century of our era a great Roman dwelling, the home of a patrician family, Christian in faith, its members holding from generation to generation high offices of state and called by historians “the noblest of the noble.” The grounds about this house of the Acilii included not only the present public gardens but also the precincts of the Villa Medici, the garden and convent of the Sacred Heart, and a part of the Villa Borghese. It would be impossible to find nowadays in any land the exact counterpart of this Roman dwelling. Its comfort, splendor and universal perfection of detail could not be surpassed, perhaps not equalled. Its artificially heated bathrooms, the cool, dark recesses of the wine-cellars, the courts and offices and state apartments, the devices for garden and foundation building, everything which made up this perfect specimen of the highest domestic civilization the world has known, has been discovered on the Pincian Hill. The great buttresses which this private family built to sustain the northwestern boundaries of their terraced garden still support the public gardens of to-day, and were incorporated by the Emperor Aurelian into the great wall with which he surrounded the city. Surely no stories of the Pincian can ever give so good an idea of the power, solidity, and grandeur of Rome as do these archæological discoveries, which show in fullest detail the domestic life of the Roman patrician under the Antonines. Of all this the northwestern buttresses of the Pincian Hill and the immortality of Nature alone remain.

Napoleon was only following in the footsteps of another Emperor, when he created these gardens; for the Emperor Aurelian made the grounds--which had been the estate of the Acilii--into a public park. So whether owned by private individuals or by Emperor, church, or municipality, the Pincian has always been known as the Hill of Gardens; and the water which now feeds its public fountains is once more the Acqua Marcia--the same water which supplied the fountains, baths, and fish-ponds of the great Antonine villa.

FONTANA PAOLA

FONTANA PAOLA

Throughout Roman history the Janiculum has suffered many alternations of peace idyllic and of sanguinary strife, for it is a natural garden, and it is also the key to Rome. Whoever can hold the terraces of San Pietro in Montorio and the heights to the north and south has the city at his mercy. At the present day the Villa Pamphili-Doria and the Villa Garibaldi crown its summit, and stretch downward toward the west, and its southeastern slope, leading toward the Tiber, once contained the gardens of Julius Cæsar--those gardens where he received Cleopatra and which he left by his will to the Roman people. One of the earliest chapters in Roman history tells how Lars Porsena came over the Janiculum to reinstate the Tarquins, and one of the latest recounts the struggle carried on across its heights and terraces in Garibaldi’s defense of the Mazzinian Roman Republic. Like the gardens of Ischia and the vineyards on Vesuvius, which are forever threatened by earthquake or eruption, the Janiculum villas will have, so long as war lasts, a precarious existence; but with villas, gardens, and vineyards, so great is the fertility of the soil and so enchanting the prospect, while the world endures men will take the risk.

The water for this part of the city was brought to Rome by the Emperors Augustus and Trajan. Trajan built the aqueduct bearing his name; and this aqueduct, like that of the Virgo, has, in spite of many vicissitudes continued to supply Rome with a varying quantity of water from that time until the present day. The Emperor brought the water thirty-five miles from Lake Bracciano to the Janiculum. It was almost the last water brought to Rome and entered the city at the level of two hundred and three feet above the sea. The first water (the Appian) had entered Rome fifty feet under ground. Trajan used the water from the springs about Lake Bracciano, not from the lake itself, because the spring-water was much purer and the ancient Romans were fastidious in the water they used. Alsietina water, for instance, brought to Rome by Augustus, was considered fit only for baths and the _naumachiæ_; and Frontinus says that, as a matter of fact, the water was intended for that purpose only and for the irrigation of the gardens across the Tiber. Christian Rome was far from being so particular, and its inhabitants drank Tiber water as late as Michelangelo’s time. During the “Golden days of the Renaissance in Rome” Virgo water, which was to be had intermittently from the Trevi fountain, and a remnant of this Acqua Traiana still flowing in the fountain of Innocent VIII were the only pure waters. Meantime many Romans of that period preferred the Tiber water; and Petrarch coming to Rome gave special instructions to a friend to have a quantity of Tiber water which had stood for a day or two, to settle, ready for his use. Paul III took with him, on his journey to Nice to meet the Emperor Charles V and King Francis I of France, a supply of Tiber water, so that he might not miss his customary beverage! When, therefore, Pope Paul V bethought him of reconstructing the Trajan Aqueduct he had nothing to hinder him from collecting the water from every available source. He used Trajan water from the springs, water from Lake Bracciano, and water from Lake Alsietina as well. By this means the united water now called the Acqua Paola, although not so pure as the former Acqua Traiana, is yet good enough, and it forms a supply of magnificent quantity and force. Paul V’s intention was to surpass the Acqua Felice, brought to Rome some twenty years previously by Sixtus V. No one could forget Sixtus V and the Acqua Felice. Was not the water always before men’s eyes as it gushed out of the great fountain of Moses on the side of the Viminal Hill; and did not every Roman know that Cavaliere Domenico Fontana had brought it there by order of Sixtus V? The Borghese pontiff determined to erect another fountain, across the Tiber, on the Janiculum, which was a still more commanding position, and to build another aqueduct for Rome, so that there should be an Acqua Paola as well as an Acqua Felice, and men should remember Paul V even as they remembered Sixtus V.

Domenico Fontana had just died in Naples, rich and honored by the Neapolitans, but there were others at hand of that renowned family of architects. Fontana’s elder brother Giovanni was still alive, and had great skill in hydraulics; and Carlo Maderno, his nephew, was also to be had. So in 1611 Paul V employed these two to build his great fountain on the Janiculum. This fountain is made of travertine, adorned with six Ionic columns of red granite taken from the Temple of Minerva in the Forum Transitorium. Other portions of the same beautiful ruin were sawed into slabs and used in the decoration of the fountain. The design is that of a church façade in the style of the florid and debased Renaissance. It consists of five arches, three colossal ones in the middle, directly under the great inscription which they support, and on each side smaller arches. The three centre cascades fall into a huge semicircular basin, which is sunk into the ground, while the arches on the side have small individual basins in which to receive the water. The inscription, which is a magnificent example of Renaissance caligraphy, gives the history of the Paola Aqueduct and the pontifical dates. A smaller inscription describes the final completion of the fountain under Alexander VIII.

PAVLVS · QVINTVS · PONTIFEX · MAXIMVS
AQVAM · IN · AGRO · BRACCIANENSI
SALVBERRIMIS · E · FONTIBVS · COLLECTAM
VETERIBVS · AQVAE · ALSIETINAE · DVCTIBVS · RESTITVTIS
NOVISQVE · ADDITIS
XXXV · AB · MILLIARIO · DVXIT

ANNO · DOMINI · MDCXII · PONTIFICATVS · SVI · SEPTIMO

ALEXANDER · VIII · OTTHOBONVS · VENETVS · P · M
PAVLI · V · P · PROVIDENTISSIMI · PONT · BENEFICIVM
TVTATVS
REPVRGATO · SPECV · NOVISQVE · FONTIBVS · INDVCTIS
RIVOS · SVIS · QVEMQVE · LABRIS · OLIM · ANGVSTE
CONTENTOS
VNICO · EODEMQVE · PERAMPIO · LACV · EXCITATO · RECEPIT
AREAM · ADVERSVS · LABEM · MONTIS · SVBSTRVXIT
ET · LAPIDEO · MARGINE · TERMINAVIT · ORNAVITQVE
ANNO · SALVTIS · MDCLXXXX · PONTIFICATVS · SVI
SECVND...

_This water, drawn from the purest of springs, in the neighborhood of Bracciano, was conducted by Pope Paul the fifth, thirty-five miles from its source, over ancient channels of the Alsietine aqueduct, which he restored, and new ones, which he added._

_In the year of the Lord 1612, and of Paul’s Pontificate the seventh._

_Pope Alexander the eighth, Ottoboni, of Venice, in protection of the beneficent work of that most far-sighted pontiff, Paul the fifth, recleaned the channel, admitted water from new sources, and constructed a single capacious reservoir for the common reception of the several streams which had formerly been strictly confined each to its own channel. To prevent the wearing away of the hill, he paved the surrounding area, surrounding and beautifying it with a marble coping. In the year of Salvation 1690, and of Alexander’s pontificate the second._

* * * * *

The Borghese griffins and eagles compose the decoration of the mostra, and the whole structure is surmounted by the papal insignia and the arms of Paul V, the escutcheon being guarded by two angels.

In Maggi’s book on the fountains of Rome, printed in 1618, there is an engraving of this fountain. It is represented as having four griffins and two eagles spouting water into the basins as do the lions in Sixtus V’s Fountain of the Moses. This device is not shown in Falda’s engraving a generation later, nor does Piranesi show it. It is probable that this feature existed only on paper in the original design for the fountain. Under the two side niches of the actual fountain the water spouts from lions’ mouths. From the three centre niches it simply pours in three cascades, equal in size, and of really magnificent force and volume. The effect of this water in full sunshine is dazzling in the extreme, and both in sight and sound the fountain must have been as conspicuous as Paul V could have wished it to be. Paul V never saw it completed, for he died in 1621, ten years after the fountain was begun. It was finished by Alexander VIII in 1690, eight pontificates later. It was, therefore, seventy-eight years in building, whereas Domenico Fontana built and unveiled the Fountain of the Moses for Sixtus V within that Pope’s own pontificate, which lasted only five years! The Fontana Paola is--to translate sight into sound--an echo of the Fountain of the Moses. It has the characteristics of an echo--it is magnified and meaningless. Giovanni Fontana and Maderno could not free themselves from the taste and traditions of the greater and more forceful Domenico. They did not mar the effect of their great fountain by an absurd colossus, like the Moses, but they made a mistake of another kind; they left the central niche above the cascade absolutely empty, yet failed to secure an adequate background for the eye to rest upon, so that the structure, for all its size and magnificence, gives a disagreeable sense of vacancy and incompleteness. However, as one studies the Fontanone, as this fountain is commonly called, it becomes apparent that its mostra must be regarded not as a façade, nor as a screen, but as a great water-gate. It is a triumphal arch through which the water of the Pauline Aqueduct makes its formal entry on the Janiculum in the sight of all Rome. It is also built to hold before the eyes of all Rome the inscription which sets forth the history of Pope Paul V and the construction of the aqueduct. The inscription is certainly the most successful part of the mostra. It is adequately supported, its dimensions are noble, and the lettering is remarkably beautiful. The entrance of the water, on the other hand, is not sufficiently imposing. The three streams are not great enough in themselves to justify their right to so pretentious a setting, and they require a background which would augment their importance. Through the huge arches, which were certainly never intended to hold statuary, the eye should see the approach of the water either in a series of cascades or in one broad flood like the serried ranks of a great army. But to produce this effect it would be necessary for the channel of the aqueduct to approach the fountain directly from the rear and to have the castellum or receiving tank immediately behind the mostra. It is noticeable that neither in this fountain nor in the other two great fountains of Rome--the Moses and the Trevi--is this done. In all three the castellum is at the side of the mostra, and the water falls into the basins at a right angle to the direction in which it enters the fountain from the castellum. This position of the castellum was obligatory in the case of Trevi, as that fountain backs against the Poli Palace, but when the Moses and Paola fountains were constructed they stood free from all other buildings on open hillsides, and the castellum in either instance could be located at will. In the Paola fountain the castellum lies to the left of the mostra, as it faces the city, and the aqueduct comes underground down the hill forming the boundary between the gardens now belonging to the Villa Chiaraviglio, which is a part of the American Academy, and a small villa owned by the Torlonia family, so that the stream approaches the fountain obliquely. The ground directly back of the Paola fountain is occupied by a modern villa with a small garden, and the entrance to the house as well as the trees in the garden are clearly seen through the arches of the mostra, which thus has more or less the appearance from the front of a huge screen before a shrine of no signification, while the view of it in profile is too thin. The entire fountain seems to require a solid background such as Giovanni Fontana gave to his truly noble and beautiful fountain of the Ponte Sisto. There the immense niche is placed against a massive wall, and the gloom of the vaulted space is lighted by a gleaming cascade which issues not at the base of the niche but high up in the very spring of the arch. This cascade falls into a projecting vase, also near the roof, and thence descends in heavy spray to the black pool beneath. On either side this pool jets of water spouting from the Borghese griffins cross like flashing rapiers--a natural enough fancy to an artist living in an age when the thrust and parry of the rapier were known to all men. This most artistic of all the Fontana fountains was also erected for Paul V. It used to stand on the other side of the Tiber, opposite the Strada Giulia, but in recent years, when the Tiber embankment was constructed, the fountain was taken down and set up in its present position at the head of the Ponte Sisto. If the waters of the Fontanone had received some such treatment as this, Paul V’s greatest fountain might have indeed rivalled those of ancient Rome.

Paul V (Borghese), surnamed by the friends of the Aldobrandini “the Grand Ingrate,” succeeded to the papacy in 1605. His immediate predecessor had been the Medici pontiff, Leo XI, but Leo died twenty-six days after his election, so that Paul V’s real forerunner was Clement VIII (Aldobrandini).

The Borghese family came originally from Siena. When the Spaniard took that heroic and beautiful city, Philip II handed her over to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and many Sienese families emigrated, rather than submit to the rule of the Medici. Camillo Borghese, the father of Paul V, emigrated to Rome, where his son Camillo, the future pontiff, was born. This was in 1552, Julius III being then Pope. Camillo’s career began in the law, as has been the case with so many of those who have risen to the See of St. Peter. He studied in Perugia and Padua; was sent on a mission to Spain, and, proving successful there, was given the Red Hat in 1596 by Clement VIII, he being at that time forty-four years of age. Living as cardinal, quietly and unobtrusively among his books and documents, he had seemed to Peter Aldobrandini, who was the all-powerful nephew of Clement VIII, the very man to carry on Clement’s steady policy of restoring the French influence at Rome and of keeping his own family in power. The Aldobrandini had left Florence from hatred of the Medici, as the Borghese had left Siena, and Peter felt that in the case of Camillo Borghese he could rely upon feelings similar to his own to back up the coalition of himself and France against Spain. With the premature death of Leo XI all the complicated machinery of the conclave had had to be put in motion once again, and in this second conclave the nephew of Clement VIII was the most powerful of the forces at work. He threw his influence for Cardinal Borghese, and Paul V undoubtedly owed his election to that fact. Peter Aldobrandini had been a very great papal nephew, indeed, and he expected from the Borghese pontiff a proper recognition of his services. Even with the keenest sense of humor in the world, Cardinal Aldobrandini would have found it hard not to feel resentment when he learned that Cardinal Borghese, now Paul V, considered his unsought-for election to the papal chair entirely due to the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, and that in consequence he owed nothing whatever to earthly aid. It was because Paul V carried this idea so far on the one hand, and on the other poured such lavish favors upon his own kin, that he won for himself the name of “the Grand Ingrate.” Looking upon himself as divinely appointed in a marked and special degree, the quiet, unassuming cardinal became the opinionated and inflexible pontiff. He administered the papal power, temporal and spiritual, with the arrogance of a despot, the intolerance of an inquisitor, and the formality of the jurist. During the sixteen years of his pontificate he succeeded in rousing bitter hostility on all sides. The aged Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had lived through nine pontificates and had known both Sixtus V and Clement VIII, complained that this Pope judged of the world as he would of one of the towns belonging to the papal territory where everything was done according to the letter of the law, and went on to say that in this respect there would soon have to be a change. The year before his election the gunpowder plot had fanned England into a white heat of patriotism, and a new oath of allegiance was required by Parliament. Paul V was the Pope who forbade the English Catholics to take it. He also was the Pope who so mishandled the Gallican Church that he forced the States General of 1614 to declare that the King of France held his power from God alone; and, finally, it was Paul V who spent the first two years of his pontificate in such a quarrel with Venice as threatened to involve all Christendom. The Republic so unflinchingly endured excommunication and interdict that the Pope even thought of subduing her by arms. He was brought to his senses only by the fear that Venice in her extremity might call Protestant powers to her aid and thus bring confusion and disaster not only upon Italy but upon all Catholic countries. In this grave crisis France took it upon herself to mediate, and the dispute was finally settled, but with little honor to the papacy. It was a Venetian ambassador who has recorded of Clement VIII that when he found he could not reform Florence without great trouble he reformed his own mind. But Paul V did not, like the wise Clement VIII, “look to his predecessors” when in difficulties. Paul V had certainly no cause to love the Venetians, and it is one of the quaint tricks of history that his magnificent fountain on the Janiculum was at last finished by a Venetian Pope.

Although the Fontanone was built in the seventeenth century, its most interesting associations are connected with modern Rome. It is pre-eminently the fountain of the Risorgimento, for the last stand in Garibaldi’s three months’ defense of the Roman Republic was made upon the terraces surrounding this water, and it was just above here that the worst fighting occurred.

The second stage of the siege consisted of the nine days’ defense of the Aurelian wall, behind which Garibaldi was intrenched.

This bit of wall runs northwest and southeast on the eastern slope of the hill, and within the walls of Pope Urban VIII. At its northern end it is at about an equal distance from the Fontanone and the Porta San Pancrazio. When this defense broke down, the French troops entered the city through a breach in the Urban walls to the southwest of the fountain. The narrow lane leading from this point to Porta San Pancrazio was soon choked with the dead and dying. The Italians and French fought hand to hand in the darkness, along the road in front of the Villa Aurelia, that road which is to-day so quiet and so clean! During the previous eight days bursting shells from the French batteries erected on the walls and near the Villa Corsini and the Convent of San Pancrazio had wrought far-reaching havoc.

The Church of San Pietro in Montorio was used by Garibaldi as a hospital, but its roof had collapsed, and on the slopes above it all the great villas were in ruins. To the northwest of the fountain, just above the Porta San Pancrazio, the Villa Savorelli (now the Villa Aurelia and the present home of the American Academy) stood up against the sky, a mere shell of blackened walls. Outside the porta, the Vascello lay in masses of crumbled masonry, although Medici still held it for Garibaldi. Farther up the hill, over the spot now occupied by the triumphal arch, towered the remains of the magnificent Villa Corsini; before it the body of Masina, still lying where the young lancer had fallen after his last wild charge up the villa steps. Amid the general devastation the Fontanone stood unscathed. Its splendid stream of water flowed unpolluted, and it fulfilled the noblest functions of a fountain during the heat and carnage of that Roman June.

To those who are familiar with the story of the heroic “Defense” a visit to Paul V’s great fountain on the Janiculum is not a bit of sight-seeing--it has become a pilgrimage.

MONTE CAVALLO

MONTE CAVALLO

The fountain of the Monte Cavallo is overshadowed both literally and figuratively by the size and importance of the objects which surround it. Without it the obelisk, which forms its background, and the great groups of the Dioscuri, which flank it on either side, would be sufficiently imposing and significant, either separately or together, to form the central decoration of the Piazza of Monte Cavallo, or of any piazza in any city; but the fountain is not entirely superfluous. Its magnificent jet of water, thrown upward between the heads of the rearing horses and swept hither and thither at the will of the wind, binds together the otherwise disjointed and inharmonious group.

This fountain is not the first one to be erected on Monte Cavallo, but the first fountain was as subservient as the present one to the colossal groups which have given the name “Cavallo” to this entire district. The Dioscuri were once a part of a kind of open-air museum which, during the earliest days of the papacy, existed on the slope of the Quirinal Hill. Gregory XIII had them removed to the Capitol, but when Sixtus V had purchased from the heirs of Cardinal Caraffa the site and the partly erected buildings of the Quirinal, he brought them back again and subjected them to a thorough restoration, using for this purpose the material from the base of one of them.

There has existed a villa on this spot antedating Pope Sixtus V’s time by many years. It had been called the Villa d’Este, but it should not be confused with the Villa d’Este, at Tivoli, although it was built by the same Cardinal Ippolito of that family.

Sixtus V was extremely fond of this portion of the city and with Fontana’s assistance he created the magnificent palace and surroundings which ever since his day have been associated with sovereign power in Rome. Fontana enlarged the piazza before the palace in order to make it “commodious for consistories,” and he also lowered the grade in order to bring hither the Acqua Felice.

There must have been many discussions between Pope Sixtus V and his architect with regard to the fountain on the Quirinal. Everything that Sixtus V did he did thoroughly and magnificently, and it was quite natural that he should desire a splendid fountain before his own palace, considering that it was he himself who had made it possible, by the introduction of the Acqua Felice, to have a fountain in that place at all. A rare old engraving shows that the fountain, as at first planned, resembled the Fountain of the Moses. In it the Dioscuri occupy the niches as does the Moses in the fountain on the Viminal. This plan was happily abandoned. The great classic figures were erected as they stand to-day in front of the palace, and Fontana placed between the two groups, in the same position as the fountain of the present day, the conventional large basin and central vase which is to be seen in the old engravings of the seventeenth century. It was certainly neither a very original nor a very interesting design and it must have relied for its effect entirely upon the copious supply of water which was described by Evelyn in 1644 as “two great rivers.”

It is difficult to say when this old fountain of Fontana’s disappeared. It was probably removed either at the time when Antinori erected the obelisk for Pius VI or in the following pontificate when the same architect suggested to Pius VII the idea of replacing it by the present granite basin. This basin had stood since 1594 in the Campo Vaccino, the mediæval name for the ruins of the Roman Forum. It had been placed there during the pontificate of Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) by the city magistrates on a piece of ground given to them by Cardinal Farnese, near the three columns of Castor and Pollux and the Church of S. Maria Liberatrice. They had provided a high travertine base for it, and it was fed from three jets of the Acqua Felice, which, some eight or nine years previously, had been brought to Rome by Sixtus V. The basin was used as a watering-trough for cattle, and by the time Pius VII rescued it the travertine base had entirely disappeared under the gradually rising level of the Campo Vaccino--that strange composite mass of rubbish, earth, and ruins which, up to the second half of the nineteenth century, covered the old Forum floor to a depth of more than twenty feet. The basin measures twenty-three metres in circumference, and when it was thus sunk in the ground it became a pleasant pool through which the carters walked their horses to refresh them on a warm and dusty day. The removal of this basin was actually accomplished in 1818, when the architect Raphael Stern (who built for Pius VII the Bracchio Nuovo) designed the present fountain of Monte Cavallo. He sank the basin in the pavement between the horse-tamers and erected in the middle of it a second basin which rests upon a travertine base. The water of the fountain rises in a copious jet from the centre of the second basin to a height somewhat below the heads of the horses and, returning on itself, falls in a generous overflow into the lower basin.

To some, the chief interest of this composite group of obelisk, statuary, and fountain centres in this lower basin, for it is none other than the granite tazza into which Marforio once poured the water from his urn, far, far back in the days of Charlemagne, and no one knows for how many years before that.

The obelisk which forms the centre of this group of antiquities now clustered together in the Monte Cavallo is one of a pair which flanked the entrance to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Its mate was erected by Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana near the Church of S. Maria Maggiore.

Pius VI and Pius VII were the two Popes whose pontificates coincide with the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests. Their unhappy stories are bound up with the history of the Quirinal Palace, which fronts upon the Monte Cavallo; and they form a pitiful contrast to the life of that masterful old Pontiff Sixtus V, in whose reign the history of the palace and the modern piazza begins. Sixtus, having destroyed, for no reason now known, the old mediæval papal palace of the Lateran, decided to rebuild it to suit himself, but found, as the new building progressed, that it was too cold and uncomfortable for a residence. So the Lateran, which had been the papal palace since the seventh century, holding its own against the magnificence and enormous size of the Vatican, was gradually abandoned as a residence, and Sixtus established himself in the Quirinal.

Sixtus V, for all his detestation of classic statuary, must have shared with his people the profound respect and admiration always aroused by the Dioscuri. These colossal groups were among the few rare works of antiquity which were cherished by the semi-barbarous Romans of the Middle Ages, and the web of fable spun about them during those dark years proves the hold they had over the superstitious imagination of the times. “Nothing is beyond question” about them, says Lanciani, except that they once adorned the temple which the Emperor Aurelian built to the sun on his return from the conquest of Palmyra in 272. This most magnificent of all Roman temples, to quote the same great modern authority, became a quarry for building materials, even as early as the sixth century. The Emperor Justinian is said to have taken some porphyry columns from it to adorn the Church of St. Sophia in his new capital of Constantinople. The Dioscuri must have been discovered later in the Baths of Constantine. The relative positions of the horses and their tamers were ascertained from antique coins. Modern authorities are of the opinion that they are Roman copies of Greek originals, and they are counted among the great inheritances from imperial Rome.

It is curious to trace the working of the mediæval intelligence, groping its way through mysticism and allegory to find some explanation for the undeniable impression made by these heroic figures upon the minds of all who behold them. The attempt to read into them some abstruse ethical meaning was abandoned long ago, and the world of to-day accepts the Dioscuri frankly for what they are, admiring, with a wonder not unmixed with despair, the unreclaimable art of ancient Greece.

“Ye too marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo
Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement,
Stand with upstretched arms and tranquil, regardant faces,
Stand as instinct with life, in the might of immutable manhood--
Oh, ye mighty and strange--ye ancient divine ones of Hellas!”

Whatever may have been the lot of the Dioscuri in the unaccounted-for days of the past, since Sixtus V placed them here they have been in the very thick of Roman political life. Around and about them have surged some of the worst mobs of modern Roman history; and under their “tranquil, regardant faces” crowds of peaceful, expectant citizens have gathered from time to time during the last two centuries of papal government. Here they have waited during papal elections to watch for the smoke from the chimney of the Quirinal which should indicate to the outside world that no choice had yet been made by the Conclave, since the cardinals were burning the ballots. Here they have received the blessing of the newly elected Pope, which was given from the balcony of the window over the entrance.

Sixtus V died in the Quirinal Palace. His pontificate had lasted but five years, and it remains to this day one of the most memorable periods in the development and power of Rome. Never had Pope done more for his people; yet, when he came to die, the Romans had already forgotten the benefits of his pontificate and remembered only the severities. They recalled the fact that this Sixtus who was dying as the head of Christendom had been born a poor gardener’s son. Such dramatic contrasts exercise great sway over the Roman mind--superstition and fancy played with the story, and strange rumors drifted about concerning an unholy bargain which Sixtus was said to have made for power. Here, before the palace which he had built, the silent crowds gathered to await his end; and when, as the old pontiff drew his last breath, that terrific thunderstorm broke over the Quirinal, men shuddered and fled, saying and believing that the Prince of Darkness had come in person for the soul of the monk whom he had made Pope. Kindly old Sixtus! It was well that he could not know how the poor whom he had always remembered would remember him!

Across the Monte Cavallo, to pause before the balcony of the Quirinal, came in 1840 that extraordinary funeral cortège which carried the body of Lady Gwendolin Talbot, Princess Borghese, to be laid in the Borghese chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At seven in the evening of October 30, by torchlight, amid a silence so profound that the low prayers of the priests were distinctly audible, the procession moved slowly along the three-quarters of a league from the Borghese Palace to the church of S. Maria Maggiore. Soldiers with reversed arms, mounted dragoons, mourning carriages, religious societies, priests, prelates, and all the Roman poor, comprised the train. The funeral car was drawn, not by horses but by forty Romans dressed in deep mourning. Flowers were thrown upon the bier from the palaces along the Corso, and when the procession reached Monte Cavallo and paused before the Quirinal, from the balcony over the entrance Pope Gregory XVI gave his final blessing to the beautiful young princess, dead at twenty-two, and saint if ever there has been one. All the poor of Rome felt that they had lost a friend and benefactress, the like of whom would not come again. Later, when Prince Borghese wished to know the names of those who had drawn the funeral car, he was only told that they were Romans!

Up the slopes of Monte Cavallo in February, 1798, came with their tricolored cockades the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army. They entered the Quirinal and called upon Pope Pius VI to renounce the temporal power. The eighteenth-century pontiff calmly refused to comply with this preposterous demand. That refusal lost him the tiara and brought about his death eighteen months later in a French fortress.

Rome was metamorphosed into a republic, but this obscuration of the papal power was only temporary. When Pius VI died, at Valence, in August, 1799, the cardinals held their Conclave at Venice, and on March 14, 1804, elected Pius VII (Chiaramonti, 1804–1823), who returned to Rome the following July. This was the Pope who, after many misgivings, consented to crown Napoleon. Five years later, when the Emperor proceeded to annex the Papal States to his empire, this was the Pope who excommunicated him.

Few of St. Peter’s successors have been called upon to suffer and to dare more than the good and gentle Pius VII. His Italian nature comprehended to an unusual degree the strange character of Napoleon, enduring with perfect composure the Emperor’s outbursts of histrionic rage, and daring to bring him back to business by the single word, “comedian.” He braved no less calmly Napoleon’s genuine anger at the bull of excommunication, and refused to cancel it. Consequently, on the night of July 5, 1809, the Emperor’s soldiers broke into the Quirinal and took the Pope prisoner. For a moment, standing under the stars which looked down upon Monte Cavallo, Pius VII blessed his sleeping city, and then was hurried away from Rome to that wandering exile, depicted in the frescoes of the Vatican Library, which was only brought to an end by Napoleon’s fall. Then the States of the Church were restored to the papacy, and the Quirinal Palace once more received the aged pontiff.

In the quiet sunset of his days, which outlasted by two years the life of the great conqueror, the Pope had time to erect the fountain of Monte Cavallo, and to begin or continue the architectural and archæological projects connected with his name.

In that brief halcyon period immediately following Pius IX’s election to the Holy See, in 1846, the Quirinal Palace and the Monte Cavallo were in a state of unwonted and constant activity. Pius played with all his heart the rôle of the liberal Pope, both he and the Romans mistaking his amiable disposition for liberal political convictions. Day after day the Romans thronged the space before the palace, waiting for their idol, who was sure to appear some time on the balcony over the entrance. Standing there in his white robe, his dark eyes glowing with sympathetic emotion, he would bless the people with uplifted hand and in the most moving and beautiful of voices. If the hour was late, he might add the injunction to go home to bed! The attitude of the Pope and people at this time is epitomized in the story of the ragged little boy who one day found himself in the Quirinal Gardens face to face with the Holy Father. Dazed and enraptured, he poured forth the pitiful tale of his hardships to the handsome and compassionate countenance bending over him, and the wonderful voice comforted him with promises of redress--promises which both pontiff and child believed in passionately.