Fountains of Papal Rome/Monte Cavallo

THE fountain of the Monte Cavallo is overshadowed both literally and figuratively by the size and importance of the objects which surround it. Without it the obelisk, which forms its background, and the great groups of the Dioscuri, which flank it on either side, would be sufficiently imposing and significant, either separately or together, to form the central decoration of the Piazza of Monte Cavallo, or of any piazza in any city; but the fountain is not entirely superfluous. Its magnificent jet of water, thrown upward between the heads of the rearing horses and swept hither and thither at the will of the wind, binds together the otherwise disjointed and inharmonious group.

This fountain is not the first one to be erected on Monte Cavallo, but the first fountain was as subservient as the present one to the colossal groups which have given the name "Cavaflo" to this entire district. The Dioscuri were once a part of a kind of open-air museum which, during the earliest days of the papacy, existed on the slope of the Quirinal Hill. Gregory XIII had them removed to the Capitol, but when Sixtus V had purchased from the heirs of Cardinal Caraffa the site and the partly erected buildings of the Quirinal, he brought them back again and subjected them to a thorough restoration, using for this purpose the material from the base of one of them.

There has existed a villa on this spot antedating Pope Sixtus V's time by many years. It had been called the Villa d'Este, but it should not be confused with the Villa d'Este, at Tivoli, although it was built by the same Cardinal Ippolito of that family.

Sixtus V was extremely fond of this portion of the city and with Fontana's assistance he created the magnificent palace and surroundings which ever since his day have been associated with sovereign power in Rome. Fontana enlarged the piazza before the palace in order to make it " commodious for consistories/ 9 and he also lowered the grade in order to bring hither the Acqua Felice.

There must have been many discussions between Pope Sixtus V and his architect with regard to the fountain on the Quirinal. Everything that Sixtus V did he did thoroughly and magnificently, and it was quite natural that he should desire a splendid fountain before his own palace, considering that it was he himself who had made it possible, by the introduction of the Acqua Felice, to have a fountain in that place at all. A rare old engraving shows that the fountain, as at first planned, resembled the Fountain of the Moses. In it the Dioscuri occupy the niches as does the Moses in the fountain on the Viminal. This plan was happily abandoned. The great classic figures were erected as they stand to-day in front of the palace, and Fontana placed between the two groups, in the same position as the fountain of the present day, the conventional large basin and central vase which is to be seen in the old engravings of the seventeenth century. It was certainly neither a very original nor a very interesting design and it must have relied for its effect entirely upon the copious supply of water which was described by Evelyn in i644 as "two great rivers."

It is difficult to say when this old fountain of Fontana's disappeared. It was probably removed either at the time when Antinori erected the obelisk for Pius VI or in the following pontificate when the same architect suggested to Pius VII the idea of replacing it by the present granite basin. This basin had stood since i5g4 in the Campo Vaccino, the mediaeval name for the ruins of the Roman Forum. It had been placed there during the pontificate of Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) by the city magistrates on a piece of ground given to them by Cardinal Farnese, near the three columns of Castor and Pollux and the Church of S. Maria Liberatrice. They had provided a high travertine base for it, and it was fed from three jets of the Acqua Felice, which, some eight or nine years previously, had been brought to Rome by Sbrtus V. The basin was used as a watering-trough for cattle, and by the time Pius VII rescued it the travertine base had entirely disappeared under the gradually rising level of the Campo Vaccino that strange composite mass of rubbish, earth, and ruins which, up to the second half of the nineteenth century, covered the old Forum floor to a depth of more than twenty feet. The basin measures twenty-three metres in circumference, and when it was thus sunk in the ground it became a pleasant pool through which the carters walked their horses to refresh them on a warm and dusty day. The removal of this basin was actually accomplished in 1818, when the architect Raphael Stern (who built for Pius VII the Bracchio Nuovo) designed the present fountain of Monte Cavallo. He sank the basin in the pavement between the horse-tamers and erected in the middle of it a second basin which rests upon a travertine base. The water of the fountain rises in a copious jet from the centre of the second basin to a height somewhat below the heads of the horses and, returning on itself, falls in a generous overflow into the lower basin.

To some, the chief interest of this composite group of obelisk, statuary, and fountain centres in this lower basin, for it is none other than the granite tazza into which Marforio once poured the water from his urn, far, far back in the days of Charlemagne, and no one knows for how many years before that.

The obelisk which forms the centre of this group of antiquities now clustered together in the Monte Cavallo is one of a pair which flanked the entrance to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Its mate was erected by Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana near the Church of S. Maria Maggiore.

Pius VI and Pius VII were the two Popes whose pontificates coincide with the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests. Their unhappy stories are bound up with the history of the Quirinal Palace, which fronts upon the Monte Cavallo; and they form a pitiful contrast to the life of that masterful old Pontiff Sixtus V, in whose reign the history of the palace and the modern piazza begins. Sixtus, having destroyed, for no reason now known, the old mediaeval papal palace of the Lateran, decided to rebuild it to suit himself, but found, as the new building progressed, that it was too cold and uncomfortable for a residence. So the Lateran, which had been the papal palace since the seventh century, holding its own against the magnificence and enormous size of the Vatican, was gradually abandoned as a residence, and Sixtus established himself in the QuirinaL

Sixtus V, for all his detestation of classic statuary, must have shared with his people the profound respect and admiration always aroused by the Dioscuri. These colossal groups were among the few rare works of antiquity which were cherished by the semi-barbarous Romans of the Middle Ages, and the web of fable spun about them during those dark years proves the hold they had over the superstitious imagination of the times. "Nothing is beyond question" about them, says Lanciam, except that they once adorned the temple which the Emperor Aurelian built to the sun on his return from the conquest of Palmyra in 272. This most magnificent of all Roman temples, to quote the same great modern authority, became a quarry for building materials, even as early as the sixth century. The Emperor Justinian is said to have taken some porphyry columns from it to adorn the Church of St. Sophia in his new capital of Constantinople. The Dioscuri must have been discovered later in the Baths of Constantine. The relative positions of the horses and their tamers were ascertained from antique coins. Modern authorities are of the opinion that they are Roman copies of Greek originals, and they are counted among the great inheritances from imperial Rome*

It is curious to trace the working of the mediaeval intelligence, groping its way through mysticism and allegory to find some explanation for the undeniable impression made by these heroic figures upon the minds of all who behold them* The attempt to read into them some abstruse ethical meaning was abandoned long ago, and the world of to-day accepts the Dioscuri frankly for what they are, admiring, with a wonder not unmixed with despair, the unreclaimable art of ancient Greece. "Ye too marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo     Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement,      Stand with upstretched arms and tranquil, regardant faces,      Stand as instinct with life, in the might of immutable manhood      Oh, ye mighty and strange ye ancient divine ones of Hellas!" Whatever may have been the lot of the Dioscuri in the unaccounted-for days of the past, since Sixtus V placed them here they have been in the very thick of Roman political life. Around and about them have surged some of the worst mobs of modern Roman history; and under their "tranquil, regardant faces" crowds of peaceful, expectant citizens have gathered from time to time during the last two centuries of papal government Here they have waited during papal elections to watch for the smoke from the chimney of the Quirinal which should indicate to the outride world that no choice had yet been made by the Conclave, since the cardinals were burning the ballots. Here they have received the blessing of the newly elected Pope, which was given from the balcony of the window over the entrance.

Sixtus V died in the Quirinal Palace. His pontificate had lasted but five years, and it remains to this day one of the most memorable periods in the development and power of Rome. Never had Pope done more for his people; yet, when he came to die, the Romans had already forgotten the benefits of his pontificate and remembered only the severities. They recalled the fact that this Sixtus who was dying as the head of Christendom had been born a poor gardener's son. Such dramatic contrasts exercise great sway over the Roman mind superstition and fancy played with the story, and strange rumors drifted about concerning an unholy bargain which Sixtus was said to have made for power. Here, before the palace which he had built, the silent crowds gathered to await his end; and when, as the old pontiff drew his last breath, that terrific thunderstorm broke over the Quirinal, men shuddered and fled, saying and believing that the Prince of Darkness had come in person for the soul of the monk whom he had made Pope. Kindly old Sixtus ! It was well that he could not know how the poor whom he had always remembered would remember him I

Across the Monte Cavallo, to pause before the balcony of the Quirinal, came in i84o that extraordinary funeral cortege which carried the body of Lady Gwendolin Talbot, Princess Borghese, to be laid in the Borghese chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At seven in the evening of October 3o, by torchlight, amid a silence so profound that the low prayers of the priests were distinctly audible, the procession moved slowly along the three-quarters of a league from the Borghese Palace to the church of S. Maria Maggiore. Soldiers with reversed arms, mounted dragoons, mourning carriages, religious societies, priests, prelates, and all the Roman poor, comprised the train. The funeral car was drawn, not by horses but by forty Romans dressed in deep mourning. Flowers were thrown upon the bier from the palaces along the Corso, and when the procession reached Monte CavaJlo and paused before the Quirinal, from the balcony over the entrance Pope Gregory XVI gave his final blessing to the beautiful young princess, dead at twenty-two, and saint if ever there has been one. All the poor of Rome felt that they had lost a friend and benefactress, the like of whom would not come again. Later, when Prince Borghese wished toknow the names of those who had drawn the funeral car, he was only told that they were Romans !

Up the slopes of Monte Cavallo in February, 1798, came with their tricolored cockades the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army. They entered the Quirinal and called upon Pope Pius VI to renounce the temporal power. The eighteenth-century pontiff calmly refused to comply with this preposterous demand. That refusal lost him the tiara and brought about his death eighteen months later in a French fortress.

Rome was metamorphosed into a republic, but this obscuration of the papal power was only temporary. When Pius VI died, at Valence, in August, 1799, the cardinals held their Conclave at Venice, and on March i4, i8o4, elected Pius VII (Chiaramonti, i8o4-i8a3), who returned to Rome the following July. This was the Pope who, after many misgivings, consented to crown Napoleon. Five years later, when the Emperor proceeded to annex the Papal States to his empire, this was the Pope who excommunicated him.

Few of St. Peter's successors have been called upon to suffer and to dare more than the good and gentle Pius VII. His Italian nature comprehended to an unusual degree the strange character of Napoleon, enduring with perfect composure the Emperor's outbursts of histrionic rage, and daring to bring hi back to business by the single word, "comedian." He braved no less calmly Napoleon's genuine anger at the bull of excommunication, and refused to cancel it. Consequently, on the night of July 5, 1809, the Emperor's soldiers broke into the Quirinal and took the Pope prisoner. For a moment, standing under the stars which looked down upon Monte Cavallo, Pius VII blessed his sleeping city, and then was hurried away from Rome to that wandering exile, depicted in the frescoes of the Vatican Library, which was only brought to an end by Napoleon's fall Then the States of the Church were restored to the papacy, and the Quirinal Palace once more received the aged pontiff.

In the quiet sunset of his days, which outlasted by two years the life of the great conqueror, the Pope had time to erect the fountain of Monte Cavallo, and to begin or continue the architectural and archaeological projects connected with his name.

In that brief halcyon period immediately following Pius DCs election to the Holy See, in i846, the Quirinal Palace and the Monte Cavallo were in a state of unwonted and constant activity. Pius played with all his heart the role of the liberal Pope, both he and the Romans mistaking his amiable disposition for liberal political convictions. Day after day the Romans thronged the space before the palace, waiting for their idol, who was sure to appear some time on the balcony over the entrance. Standing there in his white robe, his dark eyes glowing with sympathetic emotion, he would bless the people with uplifted hand and in the most moving and beautiful of voices. If the hour was late, he might add the injunction to go home to bed 1 The attitude of the Pope and people at this time is epitomized in the story of the ragged little boy who one day found himself in the Quirinal Gardens face to face with the Holy Father. Dazed and enraptured, he poured forth the pitiful tale of his hardships to the handsome and compassionate countenance bending over him, and the wonderful voice comforted him with promises of redresspromises which both pontiff and child believed in passionately.

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 thirtynine 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 DC 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.