Once Rome had been reintegrated into Italy in 1870, the Vessel was celebrated as the "place of heroes". In 1876, King Victor Emmanuel II conferred on General Giacomo Medici - his first aide-de-camp during the clashes of 1849 - the title of Marchese del Vascello (Marquis of the Vessel). The year after, the general bought the property but did not rebuild a thing; on the contrary, it seems he had what remained of the first and second floors demolished.
In 1897, King Humbert and Queen Margherita came to visit. The Vessel was celebrated as one of the shrines of the Risorgimento, but nothing was done to restore it.
This is even stranger, bearing in mind that, as Benocci points out in her book, the cultural debate on reconstruction had for several decades been an international one and many had contributed to it: from the English critic, essayist and art historian John Ruskin to the architects Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc and Camillo Boito.
That was not all. Just opposite the Vessel, the former French headquarters - the Casino Corsini ai Quattro Vend - were thoroughly restored in 1857-1859. A splendid villa, but far inferior to Benedetti's creations, both in terms of intrinsic value and originality.
In 1897 Medici extended the park of the Vessel by acquiring an adjoining property and even had new service buildings constructed. The money was clearly available, but it was not spent on the seventeenth- century building, which was abandoned and even demolished piecemeal. Was this not the "place of heroes" which had had the honour of housing Garibaldi and Mazzini in person? The soldier and patriot Medici (who had gone so far as to place the ruins of the Vessel on his own coat of arms) really did not seem to give much thought to ail that.
Today, of all the great edifice only part of the ground floor walls has survived, from which an apartment for rent has been built. The owners are the Marchesi Pallavicini Medici del Vascello, the descendants of General Medici.
There must be other explanations for the deliberate and prolonged neglect of the Vessel (despite the fact that it had frescoes of immense value like the Aurora of Pietro da Cortona). "It seems to be a damnatio memoriae," says Signora Benocci. A condemnation to oblivion: now, why should that be? Perhaps because the disquieting fame of the Vessel was as a "place of heterodoxy in the seventeenth century and of Garibaldi's revolutionaries in the nineteenth", and, as the scholar puts it, "even two centuries later, it still frightened people".
Is the Vessel an esoteric place? One wonders whether the theatre of Atto and his friend's adventures might not really be the ideal place for spectres of the past and for images of what might have been and never was. ..
The people who live there might know something about that, but the ground-floor apartment has not been let for some time. Its last occupant, a well-known executive, is dead. It seems to be the Vessel's destiny to remain uninhabited.
The garden has been divided in two. One part still adjoins the ruins. The other, including the original entrance to the villa, belongs to the nineteenth-century house built by General Medici after the destruction of the Vessel. Today it it the seat (is this a coincidence?) of a well-known organisation with a rather complicated name and which is certainly not ignorant of matters esoteric: the Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy - Palazzo Giustiniani - at no. 8 Via san Pancrazio, whom the writers thank for having kindly guided them around the villa and shown them the same view over the Vatican as could once be enjoyed from the Vessel.
Villa Spada
Villa Spada still exists. It too was wrecked during the fighting in 1849, but was subsequently restored. Today, it is the Chancellery of the Irish Embassy to the Holy See (Via G. Medici no. 1). With exquisite kindness, the Ambassador's wife, Mrs Fiamma Davenport, personally guided the writers around the villa and its park for a whole afternoon. The latter is, unfortunately, far smaller today, owing to the unregulated carving up of land which, in the thoughtless sixties, seventies and eighties (and still today, in some countries) has razed to the ground throughout Europe much of what had miraculously survived the bombardments of the Second World War.
Nor has anything been invented in the description of Palazzo Spada in Piazza Capodiferro and its interior (in particular, Borromini's famous perspective gallery and the Room of the Catoptric Meridian). Cardinal Fabrizio Spada really did have restoration work done during the wedding. Today the palace is the headquarters of the Council of State and part of it may be visited.
Virgilio Spada's collection of curios is still kept at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome, hard by the Oratory of the Philippine Fathers. Unfortunately, it was sacked by Napoleonic troops in the nineteenth century: of the original collection, only a very small part, of little value, has remained. What was there originally, we do not know. The inventories disappeared when it was looted.
The nuptials of Clemente Spada and Maria Pulcheria Rocci were in fact celebrated on 9th July 1700. The description of the ephemeral decor and the floral embellishments at Villa Spada, the menus of the banquets, the scenes featuring the wedding, Don Tibaldutio's sermon, everything down to Tranquillo Romauli (grandfather and namesake of the Master Florist of Villa Spada): every detail may be found in many treatises and diaries of the time. One example is: Posterla, E, Memorie istoriche delpresente anno di Giubileo MDCC, Rome 1700-1701.
The diaries and documents of the period confirm the gossip, hearsay and polemics which animated the dinners and picnics at Villa Spada. The cardinals, nobles and ambassadors really were there; their friendships and enmities were as described, as were their physical appearances, their idiosyncrasies, even their little tics. Atto, for example, is not indulging in empty name-dropping when he says he is a friend of Cardinal Delfino, of Cardinal Buonvisi and of the Venetian Ambassador Erizzo.
Delfino was Atto's diligent correspondent and a precious source of information for him: in a private Roman collection, there is a cache of letters sent for long years by Cardinal Delfino to Abbot Melani. In Paris, there are traces of the relations between Atto and Delfino in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Correspondance politique, Rome, suppl.10 - Lettres de l'abbe Melani, c.70 sgg. (letter sent by Delfino from Rome on 3rd April 1700, in which he tells of his manoeuvres in relation to Cardinal Ottoboni in favour of France, with a view to the conclave).
Similarly, Atto wrote weekly for forty years to Gerolamo Buonvisi and his nephew Francesco, both cardinals; while the favours which Atto, at Erizzo's request, rendered the Venetian Republic in France, earned him the title of Patrician of Venice, as he himself was to recall.
The games and pastimes organised for the festivities at Villa Spada are to be found in many manuals of the period, as are the fragments of conversation on the use of hounds, on birds' eggs and on falconry. Here is one example, to cover them all: the artifices and hunting entertainments described by the Bolognese Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (La caccia giocosa, Bologna 1684).
The farce by Epifanio Gizzi Amore premio della costanza, performed before the guests at Villa Spada, was printed in Rome in 1699.
The Sacred Ball
These days, the ascent to the top of Saint Peter's could not, for better or worse, take place as in the book. In the final stretch, a metal staircase has been added which takes one over the huge steps in the last part of the cavity between the two walls of the cupola, which were somewhat uncomfortable for those not adept at rock-climbing. Since the 1950s, moreover, access to the Ball has been sealed off: only the sampietrini can get in. This is no great loss for common mortals: in recent times, only high-ranking members of the aristocracy had been allowed to visit the Ball.
One can console oneself by going on foot (forget about the lift, it is well worth the trouble) to the terrace just underneath it: the panorama remains as breathtaking as ever. One can enter the Ball in one's imagination thanks to an article by Rodolfo de Mattei ("Ascesa alia 'palla'", in Ecclesia, no. 3, March 1957, pp. 130-35), which lists the illustrious visitors of the past (including Goethe and Chateaubriand), as well as providing certain details of its construction.
Just ask one of the sampiet
rini and you can still have a description of the great bronze sphere and its four slits at the level of a man's eyes, one for each cardinal point, through which the first rays of dawn enter. The sampietrini do in fact still go up to the Ball; indeed they go far higher. Harnessed with ropes and hooks, and risking their lives, they first climb the sphere and then the great cross set above it, in order from time to time to replace a small iron rod. the true culmination of the whole basilica: the lightning conductor.
Pieces of Music Performed in Secretum
1. Festivities at Villa Spada (p. 10)
Arcangelo Corelli, Concertigrossi op. 6, Concerto no. 7, 1st movement
2. "Quel ch'e tuo saettasti" (p. 68) Sigismondo d'India, madrigal from Il pastorfido
3. Albicastro's Follia (p. 121; passim)
Henrico Albicastro, Sonata for violin and bass continuo, op. 9 no. 12
4. Marais's Folies (p. 124)
Marin Marais, "Couplet de folies"
5. "Se dardo pungente" (p. 146)
Francesco Cavalli, Giasone: "Medea's lament", Act I, Scene 3
6. "Ah, diro mia, pur se mia non sei" (p. 173) George Frideric Handel, 1l pastor fido
I. The Spanish Folia (pp. 174-76, 429-32, 433-34, 589-93) Antonio Martin y Coll, "Diferencias sobre las Folfas"
8. Corelli's Follia (pp. 228-30)
Francesco Geminiani, Concertogrosso from La Follia di Corelli
9. "Passacalli della vita" (p. 253) Anonymous
10. Nozze a villa Spada (p. 285)
Arcangelo Corelli, Concerti grossi op. 6, Concerto no. 8, 3rd movement
II. The game of blind man's buff (p. 415)
Arcangelo Corelli, Concerti grossi op. 6 Concerto no. 10, 2nd movement
12. Ballet des Plaisirs (p. 656)
Jean-Baptiste Lully, Ballet des Plaisirs: Bourree pour les Courtisans
13. Meeting with Lamberg (p. 684)
Georg Muffat, Armonico tributo, Concerto no. 1
14. The War of the Spanish Succession (p. 771)
Henrico Albicastro, 12 Concerti a qiuittro op. 7, Concerto III, 3rd movement
15. Exit Albicastro (p. 776)
Henrico Albicastro, 12 Concerti a quattro op. 7, Concerto IV 3rd movement
A Note on the Authors
RITA MONALDI was born in 1966 and is an expert in the history of religions. Her husband, FRANCESCO SORTI, was born in 1964 and has a background as a musicologist. Both Rita and Francesco have worked as journalists, but in recent years they have collaborated on several historical novels, including Imprimatur and its sequels, Secretum and Veritas. They live with their two young children in Vienna and Rome.
* * *
[1] If a sting-heavy dart / Of a glance brightly sharp / Has made my heart fail, / If in love's travail / My breast pines away / By night and by day. . .
Secretum Page 95