F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford - Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
New York: The Macmillan Company
1899
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November,
December, 1898; January, 1899.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

VOLUME II
PAGE
Region VII Regola
Region VIII Sant' Eustachio
Region IX Pigna
Region X Campitelli
Region XI Sant' Angelo
Region XII Ripa
Region XIII Trastevere
Region XIV Borgo
Leo the Thirteenth
The Vatican
Saint Peter's

VOLUME II

Saint Peter's
FACING PAGE
Palazzo Farnese
The Pantheon
The Capitol
General View of the Roman Forum
Theatre of Marcellus
Porta San Sebastiano
The Roman Forum, looking west
The Palatine
Castle of Sant' Angelo
Pope Leo the Thirteenth
Raphael's "Transfiguration"
Michelangelo's "Last Judgment"
Panorama of Rome, from the Orti Farnesiani

PAGE
Region VII Regola, Device of
Portico of Octavia
San Giorgio in Velabro
Region VIII Sant' Eustachio, Device of
Site of Excavations on the Palatine
Church of Sant' Eustachio
Region IX Pigna, Device of
Interior of the Pantheon
The Ripetta
Piazza Minerva
Region X Campitelli, Device of
Church of Aracli
Arch of Septimius Severus
Column of Phocas
Region XI Sant' Angelo, Device of
Piazza Montanara and the Theatre of Marcellus
Site of the Ancient Ghetto
Region XII Ripa, Device of
Church of Saint Nereus and Saint Achilleus
The Ripa Grande and Site of the Sublician Bridge
Region XIII Trastevere, Device of
Ponte Garibaldi
Palazzo Mattei
House built for Raphael by Bramante, now torn down
Monastery of Sant' Onofrio
Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius
Interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli
Palazzo dei Conservatori
Region XIV Borgo, Device of
Hospital of Santo Spirito
The Papal Crest
Library of the Vatican
Fountain of Acqua Felice
Vatican from the Piazza of St. Peter's
Loggie of Raphael in the Vatican
Biga in the Vatican Museum
Belvedere Court of the Vatican
Sixtine Chapel
Saint Peter's
Mamertine Prison
Interior of St. Peter's
Piet of Michelangelo
Tomb of Clement the Thirteenth
Ave atque Vale. Vignette

'Arenula''fine sand''Renula,' 'Regola'such is the derivation of the name of the Seventh Region, which was bounded on one side by the sandy bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto to the island of Saint Bartholomew, and which Gibbon designates as a 'quarter of the city inhabited only by mechanics and Jews.' The mechanics were chiefly tanners, who have always been unquiet and revolutionary folk, but at least one exception to the general statement must be made, since it was here that the Cenci had built themselves a fortified palace on the foundations of a part of the Theatre of Balbus, between the greater Theatre of Marcellus, then held by the Savelli, and the often mentioned Theatre of Pompey. There Francesco Cenci dwelt, there the childhood of Beatrice was passed, and there she lived for many months after the murder of her father, before the accusation was first brought against her. It is a gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy walls, its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; one might guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowing how Francesco died. And he, who cursed his sons and his daughters and laughed for joy when two of them were murdered, rebuilt the little church just opposite, as a burial-place for himself and them; but neither he nor they were laid there. The palace used to face the Ghetto, but that is gone, swept away to the very last stone by the municipality in a fine hygienic frenzy, though, in truth, neither plague nor cholera had ever taken hold there in the pestilences of old days, when the Christian city was choked with the dead it could not bury. There is a great open space there now, where thousands of Jews once lived huddled together, crowding and running over each other like ants in an anthill, in a state that would have killed any other people, persecuted occasionally, but on the whole, fairly well treated; indispensable then as now to the spendthrift Christian; confined within their own quarter, as formerly in many other cities, by gates closed at dusk and opened at sunrise, altogether a busy, filthy, believing, untiring folk that laughed at the short descent and high pretensions of a Roman baron, but cringed and crawled aside as the great robber strode by in steel. And close by the Ghetto, in all that remains of the vast Portico of Octavia, is the little Church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria where the Jews were once compelled to hear Christian sermons on Saturdays.

PORTICO OF OCTAVIA PORTICO OF OCTAVIA
From a print of the last century

Close by that church Rienzi was born, and it is for ever associated with his memory. His name calls up a story often told, yet never clear, of a man who seemed to possess several distinct and contradictory personalities, all strong but by no means all noble, which by a freak of fate were united in one man under one name, to make him by turns a hero, a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan. The Buddhist monks of the far East believe today that a man's individual self is often beset, possessed and dominated by all kinds of fragmentary personalities that altogether hide his real nature, which may in reality be better or worse than they are. The Eastern belief may serve at least as an illustration to explain the sort of mixed character with which Rienzi came into the world, by which he imposed upon it for a certain length of time, and which has always taken such strong hold upon the imagination of poets, and writers of fiction, and historians.

Rienzi, as we call him, was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo' and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems to have belonged to Anagni, he was therefore by birth a retainer of the Colonna, and his wife was a washer-woman. Between them, moreover, they made a business of selling water from the Tiber, through the city, at a time when there were no aqueducts. Nicholas Rienzi's mother was handsome, and from her he inherited the beauty of form and feature for which he was famous in his youth. His gifts of mind were many, varied and full of that exuberant vitality which noble lineage rarely transmits; if he was a man of genius, his genius belonged to that order which is never far removed from madness and always akin to folly. The greatest of his talents was his eloquence, the least of his qualities was judgment, and while he possessed the courage to face danger unflinchingly, and the means of persuading vast multitudes to follow him in the realization of an exalted dream, he had neither the wit to trace a cause to its consequence, nor the common sense to rest when he had done enough. He had no mental perspective, nor sense of proportion, and in the words of Madame de Stal he 'mistook memories for hopes.'