The Church had not always been so tolerant of beggars. In the late seventeenth century, at the height of the Little Ice Age, when harvests were poor, the city became so overwhelmed that an establishment was set up to turn them into useful members of society. San Michele a Ripa still existed in the 1840s: a huge institution, somewhere between a poorhouse, a jail and an academy, that towered above the Tiber in Trastevere. Influenced by seventeenth-century French ideas, in many ways it was ahead of its time and it won much praise from the English prison reformer John Howard when he paid a visit in the 1790s. Entrance requirements were strict. Older residents had to have been residents of Rome for at least five years and to have no family to support them. Younger ones had to be between seven and eleven and had to prove they were fatherless, and that their mothers, if alive, had had at least three children. The restrictions were necessary because places at San Michele were much sought after. Young residents were taught a whole range of skills, from carpentry and shoemaking to printing, tapestry, metalwork, dyeing, medal-making and clothes-making, to architecture and art. Promising young painters were taught by the best artists in Rome. In 1835 San Michele held a public show of its young residents’ work. The institution was so highly regarded that richer parents of non-orphans paid for their children to go there, though they endured the same simple living conditions as the orphans.
If the papacy showed humanity towards the poor, orphans, and even to criminals, it was less kindly to those it regarded as its enemies, or as being outside its world. Until Pius IX released them, the papacy’s political prisoners were kept far from sight in the popes’ gulag, the fortress of Civita Castellana forty miles north of Rome. Females could find themselves badly received if they failed to fit the Church’s ideal of womanhood: modest, sexless baby-makers who spent their days at home. Rape was included in a blurred legal category that included both seduction and adultery, and women who had been sexually attacked often found that instead of winning justice, they were cautioned against misbehaviour while the attacker was let be.
And of course there were Rome’s Jews, who in the 1840s were still locked away in their Ghetto. A visitor from 1527 would be confused. The idea of a ghetto in Rome would have seemed unthinkable in the early sixteenth century, when popes acted to protect Jews from Spanish persecution, and when Michelangelo found models among Rome’s Jewish inhabitants for his Old Testament figures in the Sistine Chapel.
That such a place existed was thanks to Paul IV, the Senator-McCarthy-like pope whom we met at the end of the last chapter. When elected pope in 1555 he quickly set about restricting the lives of Rome’s Jewish inhabitants. Their property was confiscated and they were required to rent properties in their new Ghetto, located in a low-lying area north of the Tiber Island that was vulnerable to flooding. The zone was sealed off from the rest of the city with walls and Jews were only allowed to leave it during the day. Ten synagogues were closed down and worship was permitted in just one. Jews had to wear distinguishing clothes – caps for men, shawls for women – in obedience to humiliating and long-ignored medieval rules. They were banned from employing Christian servants or wet nurses, or from having commercial dealings with Christians, while Jewish doctors – who had included many of the city’s best physicians – could no longer treat Christians. Jews who had owned fine businesses were forced to become rag merchants, who could trade only in second-hand or discarded goods. Soon after Paul IV’s reign all Rome’s Jews were required to attend a weekly sermon in the church of San Gregorio della Divina Pietà, to be lectured on the errors of their religion.
These restrictions were not only mean-minded. They had a clear purpose: to extinguish the city’s Jewish community once and for all. Thanks to a ruling by Gregory I, a thousand years earlier, which prohibited forced conversion, misery was the only means available to the papacy to persuade the Jews to abandon their religion. As an experiment, the Ghetto was a colossal failure. Rome’s Jewish community, which had led European Jewish learning in medieval times, became steadily degraded and by the 1840s, unusually in Western Europe, half its members were illiterate, yet it did not disappear but survived and grew. At a ceremony during the carnival festivities before Lent, the latest Jewish converts were put on parade and in the 1840s tourists were amused to note that there was only one, who had to be shown year after year.
Still, failure proved no discouragement to those who had created the Ghetto. During the two and a half centuries of its existence, popes tightened and loosened regulations but none questioned that Rome’s Jews should lead separate – and more degrading – lives from the city’s Christians. Rome’s Jews had tantalizing glimpses of freedom, when Rome was occupied by French revolutionary and Napoleonic forces, but from 1815 the old restrictions were again enforced. By the 1830s, as Jews gained full civic rights elsewhere in Europe, the existence of Rome’s Ghetto appeared increasingly barbaric, and, in 1836, France, Austria and the Rothschild family all urged that reforms should be made. The railway-hating Gregory XVI reluctantly allowed the Ghetto to be enlarged a little, to include the Palazzo Cenci, but that was all.
In the 1840s the Ghetto was a popular tourist sight and its gloomy lanes and cramped courtyards were a must-see for adventurous tourists. A number of writers left descriptions, which often manage to disparage papal cruelty while also throwing in a little anti-Semitism. Thus William Wetmore Story wrote that the Rome’s long-suffering Jews had a ‘greasy, anointed look’, with their ‘thick peculiar lips, narrow eyes set close together, nose thin at the junction with the eyebrows and bulbous at the end’.31 All were agreed that the Ghetto was dirty and crowded. Dickens said it was ‘a miserable place, densely populated and reeking with bad odours’.32 Story felt the Jews were lucky to live in an area at high risk of flooding as it meant that ‘Old Father Tiber washes out this Augean Stable’.33
Yet life in the Ghetto was not all bad. Cruelty from outside brought its inhabitants closer together, and if their culture had grown rougher and less literate it had also grown stronger. Rome’s Jews developed their own version of Italian, which had an important impact on Roman dialect. Containing a good number of Hebrew words, it was full of richly graphic phrases, such as, ‘A black bargain’ (a bad deal), ‘A real serpent’ (a long queue), ‘A mirror’ (someone whose mood reflects that of the person they are with, and who is cheerful on the street and scowls at home) and ‘Better king of a hovel than a slave in a palace’. They also developed their own food, which included dishes such as salted cod, courgette flowers filled with mozzarella and anchovies, and deep-fried artichokes, all of which became classics of Roman cuisine.
Rather surprisingly, the Ghetto was a relatively healthy place to live in. Thanks to Jewish religious concerns with cleanliness it may have been far less dirty than tourists assumed, and its inhabitants were relatively unaffected by the cholera epidemic that struck Rome in the 1830s. And though it was in a low-lying area right by the Tiber, it was malaria free. The mystery of how such a thing could be perplexed many foreign visitors. Tourists imagined malaria was caused by emanations from the earth, and claimed that visitors put themselves at risk if they moved too quickly from a hot and sunny spot to a cool damp one (which tourists regularly did when visiting a crypt or catacombs on a warm spring day). Consequently, some claimed the Ghetto was malaria free because, as William Wetmore Story observed, it was a place where ‘the air is much beaten by a constant concourse of people’.34 Though wrong, Story was not as wrong as one might think. The Ghetto had no malaria because there was no room for gardens, which meant there were no puddles or pots filled with standing water where mosquitoes could breed.
For all the tourists’ comments, it is doubtful that Christian Romans were any cleaner than their Jewish neighbours. Though Rome in the 1840s had some public bathhouses these were few, and Story thought them poorer than those in any other city he knew. He claimed that ordinary Romans ‘are not a bathing people’, and showed ‘a common horror at the Anglo-Saxon idea of a cold bath each morning’. Even wealthy R
omans, like wealthy Anglo-Saxons half a century earlier, ‘wash themselves but they do not take baths. They use the wash bowl, but the bathing-tub and the shower-bath frighten them.’35
When it came to their health, 1840s Romans had some advantages over their Renaissance ancestors. Surgery techniques had improved and diagnosis had advanced with the development of the stethoscope. Smallpox had been much reduced by campaigns of vaccination (despite Pope Leo XII’s ban) while the city’s improved drains reduced outbreaks of typhoid, and its aqueducts and fountains did the same for waterborne diseases. Though malaria was still a major worry, especially for people who could not leave the city in the summer – and who did not live in the Ghetto – there was now a remedy, at least for those who could afford it. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century rich Romans could take doses of the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree, which helped combat the disease.
In its fundamentals, though, 1840s medicine had advanced remarkably little since the 1520s, or for that matter since the days of the Roman Empire. Doctors still followed the theories of Hippocrates and Galen that claimed sickness resulted from an imbalance in the humours. As with the French Disease in the 1520s, early nineteenth-century physicians failed to comprehend, let alone treat, the new disease of their age, cholera, which they believed was caused by stinking air. That Romans could expect to live longer than their ancestors was largely down to good luck. Since the late seventeenth century Rome and all of Europe had been free of bubonic plague, which had vanished as mysteriously as it had first appeared.
Yet, outside the malarial season, Rome’s health dangers did not put off the tourists and, for all their grumbling, many adored the city. As well as being fascinated by its ruins and paintings, they found Rome a visual feast. Many commented on the food stalls and shops to be found in streets around the Pantheon, which, at the end of Lent, were filled with highly elaborate displays of all the delicacies Romans would shortly be able to eat again. At dusk on the last day of Lent the city produced one of its great sights, when St Peter’s was illuminated by scores of paper lanterns, acquiring, as Story described it, ‘a dull furnace-glow, as of a monstrous coal fanned by a constant wind, looking not so much lighted from without as reddening from an interior fire’.36 There was the spectacle of Easter pilgrims, many of whom came from the nearby countryside dressed in local costumes, chanting psalms as they passed. In addition there were also more traditional-looking pilgrims dressed in oilcloth, with long staffs, scallop shell badges and rosaries, and whose ‘dirty hands held out constantly for, “una santa elemosina pel povero Pellegrino”.’37 Though, as Story explained, most of these were not real pilgrims at all but Rome’s usual army of beggars trying a different tack.
Visitors found Rome’s street life endlessly fascinating. When they strolled through the city they saw Romans playing the same ball games that they had in classical times. They saw washerwomen beside the city’s fountains passing time by insulting one another, and passers-by, in rhyming verse. Charles Dickens described a strange procession he saw, that was ‘…preceded by a man who bears a large cross; by a torch-bearer; and a priest: the latter chanting as he goes’: it was the dead cart, filled with bodies of the poor, on their way to be thrown into a pit outside the walls.38 Story saw a Roman funeral that looked like it should for a pirate, its black banners ‘gilt with a death’s head and crossbones’, and its group of accompanying friars, ‘shrouded from head to foot in white, with only two holes for their eyes to glare through’.39
Or one could spend an evening at one of the city’s theatres: a popular passion for Romans, who crowded in to see a new play and became so involved that they would cheer the hero and hiss the villain. Though productions could be hard to follow. Until the election of Pius IX, papal censors went through every scene, striking out anything they considered subversive, and some plays were so badly cut they made little sense. Even operas were mauled. Any with a religious or rebellious theme was prohibited, as were any that depicted a wicked pope. Heckling was banned and Lady Morgan described how anyone who hissed was immediately seized by soldiers, ‘with which the theatre is filled, (for the most military government in Europe is the Pope’s) and then taken to Piazza Navona, mounted in a sort of stock and flogged. Then carried back and placed in his seat, to enjoy the rest of the opera, with what appetite he may.’40
And of course there was always the city’s religious spectacle. Experienced tourists became adept at recognizing orders of friars from the colour of their robes. Story’s favourites – and most Romans’ – were the Franciscans and Capuchins, Rome’s other army of beggars, who went from house to house asking for donations. As Story writes, ‘They are very poor, very good-natured and very dirty. They seem to have a hydrophobia.’ Another order, the Saccone, was filled by wealthy men who had chosen to live in poverty and who also begged for alms, going about in pairs, dressed entirely in white. ‘They often amuse themselves by startling foreigners … Many a group of English girls, convoyed by their mother, and staring into some mosaic or cameo shop, is scared into a scream by the sudden jingle of the box, and the apparition of the spectre in white who shakes it.’41
There was always the hope one might catch a glimpse, in a carriage clattering by, of a cardinal in his scarlet robes, or even the pope himself. Yet a visitor from the 1520s would be surprised at how remote and invisible popes had become. Even the tradition under which a newly elected pope rode through the city on horseback, distributing silver and gold, had been watered down: after an accident in 1769, popes now travelled in the safety of a carriage. Popes blessed crowds from the balcony of the Quirinal Palace and they celebrated mass at Christmas, usually in Santa Maria Maggiore, but in the 1840s there was only one papal procession. This was held on the feast of Corpus Domini on the first Sunday of Pentecost and was a huge event. The parade included church scholars, attendees of charity schools and hospitals, the city’s friars – chanting and carrying candles – then the chapters, canons and choirs of Rome’s seven greatest churches, followed by monsignori, bishops and cardinals, and finally the pope himself, carried on a splendid platform. Yet, compared to the marathon processions of medieval times it was very modest, managing just one circuit of St Peter’s Square.
If Rome’s religious processions were a little dull these days, the city was justly famous for its popular holidays. The October Festival held on Monte Testaccio – the last remnant of Romans’ medieval holiday – included dancing and games, for which poor Roman girls would dress up in their best finery and hire a carriage, as many as fourteen of them cramming inside, all ‘shouting, screeching and playing the tambourine, like a party of wild Indians’.42 Before Christmas the city filled with Pifferari: musicians from the mountains of Abruzzo, one of whom played a pipe while another played the bagpipes. On Christmas Day, after celebrating mass, Romans would walk through the city eating quantities of torone and pangiallo: a cake made with plums, lemon and almonds. At the beginning of January the area around the church of Sant’Eustachio became crammed with stalls selling noisy toys, and children – and their parents – would enjoy making a huge din with whistles, tambourines and trumpets.
But the greatest festival of all – greater even than Holy Week – was Carnival. Held during the last two weeks before Lent, it was a mix of colour, chaos and nineteenth-century animal cruelty, at which Romans showed their capacity for letting themselves go, and normally strait-laced northern visitors enthusiastically joined them. It took place on the Corso, which by mid-morning would already be crowded with carriages and pedestrians. People wore elaborate costumes. Small boys dressed and walked like old men, and Romans with bushy beards strode about in white dresses and straw bonnets. Sir George Head describes a man who claimed to be a professor of music who had taught cats to sing. On his shoulders he carried a large wooden box containing six cats and from time to time he would launch into a song, pulling the cats’ tails until they squealed.
Some costumes were elegant, though they did not stay so for long. All around
the Corso portable stalls sold nosegays – bunches of wild flowers held together with string – and comfits: pea-sized pellets made from lime or plaster of Paris. The Corso became a battleground as nosegays were hurled and comfits burst on people’s clothes, powdering them white. Attacks were launched from all directions: by pedestrians, by people in carriages and others on balconies. Some carriages were like wooden fortresses, filled with young Romans who kept up a steady fire on all around them, while if they passed another gang a huge fight ensued. Occasionally disaster struck, as when a young English girl on a balcony threw a handful of comfits at a papal policeman. The carabiniere, furious, marched up to the balcony – from which the girl had already fled – though fortunately he ‘was a good natured fellow and consented very willingly to drink the Pope’s health with a glass of rosolio’.43
Each day of Carnival culminated in a race. Fourteen unfortunate horses were brought to the Piazza del Popolo, decorated with coloured ribbons and large flapping pieces of tinfoil. Each horse had four large patches of pitch stuck to its flanks from which hung four heavy pear-shaped spurs, covered in half-inch spikes. When released, the horses, which were riderless and terrified by the roar of the crowd and the jabbing of the spikes, hurtled down the Corso, the crowd opening and closing around them as they went, as everybody wanted to see (occasionally someone wrongly assumed all the horses had passed and was run down), till they reached the Piazza Venezia, where they were forced down a side street and collided with a barrier of blankets.
Finally, on the last evening of Carnival there was the festival of tapers. The Corso became thronged with people holding tiny candles, all joining in a game of trying to extinguish everyone else’s while keeping their own lit. Anyone who doused another’s candle would shout in triumph, ‘senza moccolo!’ (without light). Some tried to improve their chances by tying bunches of candles together or bringing torches. Struggles grew intense. Pedestrians leapt on to carriages to try and put out their occupants’ lights. Battles broke out between upper and lower balconies, as people hurled sopping handkerchiefs or tried to behead candles with wire loops on long sticks. Ladies’ bonnets were crushed in the melee, and strange sights were witnessed, as when Sir George Head saw, together on one balcony, an Italian priest, an English clergyman and a princess from the House of Brunswick, all fighting furiously and ‘engaged like children at blind man’s buff’.44 All the while, for anyone able to stand back and watch, the Corso was an extraordinary sight of constantly twinkling lights, from which the cries of senza moccolo produced, ‘a sound indescribable – an earthly moaning, which can be compared to nothing better than the howling of the wind in a ship’s shrouds in a hurricane’.45
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