And of course there was the stink. Despite plaques placed all over the city threatening dire penalties to anyone who deposited rubbish, it was dumped everywhere, along with worse things. All grand tourists concurred that Rome smelt terrible and they disagreed only as to where, if anywhere, smelt even worse. August von Kotzebue thought Naples was worse, James Johnson picked Lisbon and John Ruskin favoured Edinburgh. Lady Morgan claimed Rome had no paragon, while she considered the approach to St Peter’s Rome’s vilest spot, declaring grandly, ‘Here the streets of the filthiest city in Europe are found filthiest.’17 Hawthorne warned anyone passing through the Forum that ‘you must look well to your steps or they will be defiled with unutterable nastiness’.18
Rome’s streets had annoyances other than dirt. Most were unpaved. Some had large elliptical-shaped openings to drains below, through which valuables could easily fall. Though, as Sir George Head recounted, a remedy was usually at hand: ‘Some small lean boy, trained by frequent practice to squeeze his carcass through the aperture is invariably to be found ready to redeem the lost treasure.’19 In hot weather the drains became refuges for colonies of cats, whose faces could be seen peering out of the openings.
Most of all though, thanks to Gregory XVI’s distaste for gas lamps, Rome’s streets were dark, and at night they were far from safe. A common ploy of robbers was to ask for a light for their cigar. When the victim reached out obligingly they would find a dagger pressed to their chest. Odo Russell, the unofficial British representative to the Vatican (no official one being acceptable from a heretic, Protestant country), was told by his Roman servant, ‘to offer no resistance if I am attacked, but to give up my money as he promises he will get it all back from the police the next day. But he says if I resist they will run a long knife into me and then run away.’20
Romans might seem alarming to foreign tourists but they posed little threat to the wider world. A visitor from 1527 would have been disappointed to find how much of a kitten their home town had become on the world stage. In the early sixteenth century, as the headquarters of Europe’s religion, and as the capital of a second-tier, yet significant, military power, Rome was still a city of consequence. By the 1840s it was a fascinating and picturesque oddity. It is hard to think of a moment since Brennus’ Gauls attacked when the city had been more of a backwater. The world had moved on and left it behind, small and provincial. Between 1520 and 1849 its population had not quite doubled, from around 80,000 to 150,000, while during the same period London’s population had grown over forty times and it was now in excess of two million. Hardly a single building of consequence had been constructed in Rome for a century and some things had not changed in a thousand years. Watermills were still moored to the Tiber Island. Rome was in a rut even when it came to art. In the 1840s most of the city’s artists were second-rate foreigners scraping a living by painting portraits of tourists. The nineteenth century’s Michelangelos were in France, Spain, Germany or England but not Rome.
The city’s economy, too, was far sleepier than it had been three centuries earlier. At a time when Europe’s northern cities were powerhouses of industry, the French political economist Jean Charles de Sismondi offered a damning assessment of Rome’s productiveness: ‘In Rome, with the exception of artists, hoteliers, coach drivers and shopkeepers selling trinkets to foreigners, everyone languishes, everyone struggles, every project fails, every industry is regulated into poverty, except that of begging.’21
As the city had declined, so had its aristocracy. By the 1840s there were only a dozen or so families who, like the Pamphili, owned tracts of land, villas, palaces and art collections, and who could look rich northern Europeans in the eye. Far more common were Romans who, though they had a title and a decent-sized house, were rentiers, struggling to make an income from letting out an apartment or two to tourists. John Murray warned his readers that they should be sure to obtain a rental contract, ‘however respectable the landlord may appear.’22
If most of Rome’s aristocrats suffered reduced circumstances, at least they enjoyed a warmer family life than their predecessors. In the past, Italy’s urban nobility lived in large, extended families, but from the late eighteenth century aristocratic newly-weds emulated the bourgeoisie, setting up their own homes. They also became more intimate with one another. Aristocratic mothers brought up their children themselves rather than handing them over to wet nurses, and there was less reserve between husbands and wives and parents and children. Italian family life had reached the elite. Rome’s nobility also enjoyed better food, at least to our taste buds (a visitor from 1527 would have found it a little bland). From the seventeenth century Eastern spices ceased to appeal to Europe’s wealthy, in part because they had become too cheap to give status. Sweet and sour sauces lost their popularity and sugar – which had been added to almost everything – was relegated to desserts. In the 1840s Rome’s wealthy preferred delicate-tasting local foods, such as beans, artichokes, broccoli, pasta, potatoes, and fish or veal in a white sauce. They also enjoyed tomato sauces, whether on pasta or meat. Roman food was finally emerging as the cuisine we know today.
All these dishes were also popular with the poor, though, unsurprisingly, their tomato sauce was poured on to different cuts of meat. Choice parts went to the rich while the poor made do with tripe, liver and other remnants, which were becoming the basis of many classic Roman dishes. Life for Rome’s poor was as tough as in previous ages, if not tougher, and many made their living from odd jobs or busking. The nineteenth century saw a sharp rise in the number of illegitimate births in Italy and more Italians than ever made use of the ruota: the device built into the walls of orphanages that allowed mothers to leave their babies anonymously. The prospects for abandoned newborns were not good. With more foundlings and fewer wet nurses, infant mortality in Italian foundling hospitals was higher in the nineteenth century than it had been in the Middle Ages.
Not many tourists took time off from their cultural tours to see how Rome’s poor lived, but William Wetmore Story did. In classical times Rome’s poorest had lived in the highest part of apartment blocks but now they were in the lowest, right by the noise and stink of the street. Story found them crouching over a little earthenware pot of coals to keep warm, in rooms with cheap brick paving, stains on the walls and shabby, rickety furniture, though there was ‘no place so mean as to be without its tawdry picture of the Madonna, with a little onion-shaped lamp burning below’.23
Rome’s struggling economy was not the people magnet it had been in the past. Immigrants drawn to the city were mostly from rural areas of the Papal States where prospects were even worse. But at least these days a Roman had a better chance of finding a wife. As immigration shrank, so did the city’s gender gap. In 1600 men had outnumbered women by three to two, but by the 1840s the difference was barely one in twenty. It did not take long for arrivals from the country to take on Roman ways and they were soon largely indistinguishable from the rest of the population. As a consequence, tourists usually assumed they were all locally born and – despite the fact that the city had enjoyed eighteen centuries of immigration from all over the Mediterranean – they romanticized them as the direct descendants of the ancient Romans. Many claimed to see a clear resemblance between their faces and those of classical statues. They were particularly fascinated by the Trasteverini whom they found delightfully picturesque. Story described them, ‘going home with their jackets hanging over one shoulder. Women in their rough woolen gowns, stood in the doorways, bare-headed, looking out from windows and balconies, their black hair shining under the lantern.’24
Tourists even romanticized poor Romans’ violence. Knife fights were common, and though they were usually caused by disputes over women and honour they could erupt over the most trivial of things. In one incident in 1866 a street musician was thrown a coin from an upstairs window, which a bystander then covered with his foot. When the musician complained and forcibly tried to move his foot the other man stabbed him in the neck. Tourists l
iked to see such incidents as a debased resurfacing of the fighting spirit of Livy’s republican heroes but their real cause was more prosaic. Romans fought one another not because it was their nature but because they had no faith in papal justice and preferred to take matters into their own hands. Culprits vanished into the crowd and were protected by friends and neighbours. Few were caught.
Then again, the Church authorities were not too concerned by such crimes. They were much more interested in another form of transgression: adultery. Here was a change which would have greatly surprised a visitor from the easy-going days of the early sixteenth century. Rome in the 1840s was a city of intense moral policing. Though its roots lay in the strictures of the Council of Trent, the new approach came fully into effect under the conservative popes who ruled after the French revolutionary era. This was the age when ornate images of Jesus, the Madonna and flying cherubs appeared above every Roman street corner, and the Roman dialect poet, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli wrote that SPQR stood for, ‘Solo Preti Qui Regnano, e Silenzio’ (Only priests rule here, and silence).
Reaction reached a high point under Pope Leo XII, who reintroduced an antique and grisly form of execution – mazzolatura – in which the condemned was struck on the head with a large hammer and had his throat cut. He also banned inoculation on the grounds that it caused a dangerous mixing of the human and the animal, closed Rome’s drinking houses, forbade wine except with meals, and prohibited card-playing, coffee and dancing the waltz. During the Holy Year of 1825 (which drew disappointingly few pilgrims) he ordered daily religious processions and banned all non-sacred music. Leo XII was greatly concerned with extramarital sex and, as well as having his Swiss Guards patrol the streets watching for women in tight-fitting clothes that might excite lustful thoughts, he sometimes took off his papal robes and personally toured the streets as a plain-clothes pope, sniffing for sin.
Inevitably these strictures had quite an effect on Romans’ sex lives which, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been notoriously open, at least for the rich. The French general, Marmont, who visited Rome in 1790, wrote that, ‘The freedom of women passes all belief, and their husbands permit it, speaking cheerfully and without embarrassment of their wives’ lovers.’25 Extramarital affairs had their own traditions, and it was accepted that married women could be attended to by their lovers – termed cicisbei – during the day, so long as they returned home to their husbands at night. As for the husbands, they were said to be happy with the arrangement, as it meant they were free to indulge in daytime affairs of their own.
Naturally such arrangements were no longer possible when Leo XII ruled. Rome’s eternal sex-workers, too, found life increasingly hard. Long gone were the days when elegant, educated courtesans were regular visitors to the papal palace, or one might, at Carnival, find oneself struck by a perfumed egg thrown by one of the city’s many prostitutes. A growing number of restrictions against them were introduced in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth they were banned altogether: Pius IX denounced prostitution as a sin and so a crime. Yet this did not mean it disappeared. In the middle of Pius’ reign, the chief medical officer of the French army in Rome, Dr Jacquot, observed that though prostitutes faced imprisonment, fines, torture and every kind of harassment, Rome remained ‘a notorious centre of European prostitution where women solicit openly in the streets, in dark corners, in brothels, under deserted porticoes and along remote thoroughfares’.26
Then the papacy’s chief moral concern was not prostitutes so much as misbehaving Romans. To prevent them from transgressing, Rome’s streets were patrolled each night by priests, police and sbirri – a kind of papal beagle – who kept a close watch on suspect individuals. Priests drew up maps of parish sinfulness and sent reports to higher church authorities, such as this one, recorded on 23 May 1823:
I took myself during the night to the house of Maria Gertrude Armezzani to see if she was alone and to observe if she was in an enjoined state. I found her with the bolt shut, together with a young man who was dining with her. I once again admonished her and though she sought to give me various excuses, her confusion made it easy enough to see her life.27
The Church was especially concerned with secret adulterers who lived in ‘a state of concubinage as if they are cohabiting legitimately’. Lapses in paperwork were no excuse and priests were told, ‘If you have any doubts address yourself as to where they came from, and if foreigners, require them to give proof of their marriage, treating them with much suspicion …’28 Though Church authorities were kept in the dark over street knifings, they found ample collaborators when it came to rooting out adulterers and prostitutes. Romans enjoyed the sport of spying on their neighbours, and wives were happy to report prostitutes or local seductresses who might tempt their husbands. And yet, despite all the risks, a good number of Romans still flouted the law and lived together outside matrimony. Some did so because they could not afford to marry, others found themselves blocked by paperwork, while some simply did not get round to it, or loathed the Church. Parish priests sought out couples who went to elaborate lengths to appear married, dining together, walking out together, but who were ready to move away if a priest came knocking at their door.
The Church’s zealousness in this area could even affect foreign visitors, though it was rare, as they generally arrived with their own strong sense of keeping to the rules. Odo Russell, the unofficial British representative to the Holy See, had to deal with a young Englishwoman who left her chaperone and moved alone into an apartment on the Corso, where a Roman man paid her regular visits. Russell decided to leave her to the mercies of the Church authorities, and a visit by a squad of papal police scared her so much that she fled back to her chaperone. Foreign trespassers were unlikely to get into real trouble. Then the same was true of Romans, a fact which highlights the strangeness of papal justice, which was run on wholly different principles from justice anywhere else. It was less concerned with just punishment than with the confession of sins and forgiveness. Once an unmarried couple had been caught they were often not punished at all but were forced to marry, frequently in jail. Adulterous couples in which both parties were married to somebody else posed more of a problem, yet they too were treated mildly. They were usually given light sentences, made to confess and then warned never to speak to one another on pain of a much longer spell in jail.
Even condemned murderers were treated with a kind of gentleness. Before being delivered into the hands of Giovanni Bugatti, Rome’s long-lived executioner, who had been dispatching papal subjects since 1796, the condemned spent their last night with two comforters from the Fratelli della Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, who would try to cheer them up with pictures of the Virgin and Jesus on the cross. The next morning, as they were led to the city guillotine – a souvenir of French revolutionary rule – that was set up by the river, close to the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, other comforters would encourage them to have good thoughts. Executions were frequently delayed for hours until the condemned confessed. Luckier murderers escaped execution, spending time in jail or pulling oars on a papal galley, and ended their days working as gardeners in one of the city’s parks. Sir George Head observed a group of them on the Pincio, watched by a soldier, and was struck by how relaxed they were, remarking, ‘no other class of the Pope’s subjects appear more thoughtless and lively than these galley-slaves’, while their guard was ‘on the easiest terms with them, all laughing and conversing’.29
Rome was forgiving to many who were treated harshly elsewhere. Begging was not frowned upon and though competition could be intense, the life of a beggar in Rome was better than in London or Paris. The Church had kept up its responsibility of helping the poor, so Rome’s beggars were fed by the city’s monasteries. If sick they could go to one of the city’s many hospitals. As a result Rome was crowded with vagrants and William Wetmore Story graphically describes how they would brandish their infirmities: ‘every kind of withered arm, distorted leg
and unsightly stump. They glare at you out of horrible eyes that look like cranberries.’ Yet they could also charm, especially foreign females ‘on the cold side of thirty’, addressing them as, ‘bella, illustrissima’ and, ‘principessa’. They particularly targeted foreigners, chanting, ‘Signore, povero stroppiato, datemi qualche cosa per amore di Dio.’ (‘Sir, for God’s love, please give a little something to a poor cripple?’) The only way to be free of them, Story advised, was ‘to be black-haired, to wear a full beard, to smoke in the street … and shake the forefinger of the right hand when besieged for charity’30 – in other words, to be Italian. Though he added that Italians gave more generously than visitors.
Tourists found Rome’s beggars infuriating but also fascinating. Their persistence knew no bounds. Tourists visiting country fairs miles outside Rome found familiar Roman beggars lying in wait for them. One Englishwoman who had removed herself to Tuscany for the malaria season discovered that one had come all the way to Lucca. This was King Beppo, the most famous of all Rome’s beggars, who appears in numerous accounts of the city. Strongly built, aside from his crippled legs, he pushed himself around on a wooden platter and was sometimes found begging from a donkey, which he could mount without help by hauling himself up with a rope. Charming and good-humoured, he ruled all Rome’s beggars like an emperor and was said to be so wealthy that he acted as their moneylender.
Rome Page 26