Chapter II: The Nymphæum or “secret Fountain” (5)

There is about this period of Pius IX’s life, with its visits to the prisons, its charities and public appearances, a strange atmosphere of unreality. A factitious glamour blinded the popular mind, and the Pope lived upon pious and ideal illusions--as Marie Antoinette had played at simplicity and a return to Nature on the eve of the Revolution.

When the golden charm was broken by the outbreak of the Revolution in Palermo and the murder of Pellegrino Rossi in Rome, the frightened pontiff, turning from an angry people, whom in the nature of things he could not possibly satisfy, appealed to the most reactionary of all the Italian powers, the King of Naples, or “Bomba.” Then the Quirinal witnessed the last act which the papacy was to play within its precincts. The Pope and one attendant escaped from the palace by a small side door in the garden wall and fled across the frontier to Gaeta, on Neapolitan territory. He carried with him the pyx which Pius VII had carried when he also had quitted the Quirinal in haste thirty-nine years before; but, unlike Pius VII, Pius IX never returned thither. When he came back to Rome the Vatican received him.

The Quirinal, the third one of the papal palaces, has become a symbol of the actual sovereignty of Rome, and, in 1871, it passed with the temporal power from Pope Pius IX to Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy.

The cardinals’ coaches no longer drive about the fountain of Pius VII. The consistories are held in the Vatican; and on the Monte Cavallo the Bersaglieri have superseded the papal Zouaves. Over the Quirinal the pontifical yellow and white has given way to the green and white and red of United Italy. “Old things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new”--once again in the city of eternal change.