Jessica Wärnberg looks at how Rome became a centre and symbol of the Christian faith, attracting pilgrims and tourists over the centuries.
On the eve of Epiphany in 1608, a Congolese prince lay mortally ill in Rome. Emanuele Ne Vunda had travelled for four years to reach the pope. Within days of his arrival he was dead. Of the embassy of 25 who had left Central Africa, just four survived the journey. They lived to tell tales of travels plagued by worldly strife. But Ne Vunda’s tragic demise cast him in a radically different narrative: the story of Christian Rome.
Since the foundation of the Church, ordinary people have become protagonists in the history of salvation through acts of virtue and sacrifice. It was these faithful souls who drove Rome’s somewhat unlikely transformation from a pagan city into a uniquely potent Christian centre and symbol. The metamorphosis was sparked by the death of Saint Peter, a Galilean fisherman, at Nero’s racetrack on the Vatican Hill. The city’s ground was further hallowed by the sacrifice of saints such as Agnes and Lawrence in late antiquity. As persecution waned and Peter’s successors in Rome gained prestige and status as “popes”, the city enshrined the relics of martyrs from all over the world.
Emanuele Ne Vunda was not a saint, as far as we know. Yet his death in Rome imbued his story with some of the city’s unique religious significance. In turn, like so many others whose bodies rest there, he enhanced the story of Christian Rome. Shortly after his death, a letter to Cardinal Alessandro d’Este referred to Ne Vunda as “a new black king … renewing the triumph and the religious offering of the Magi” by visiting Rome. Pope Paul V crystallised the characterisation of Ne Vunda as a figure of biblical stature, ordering his burial alongside the manger scene at Santa Maria Maggiore, the basilica that holds a relic of the crib of Our Lord.
On the streets of 17th-century Rome, the tragic conclusions to other lives were far less edifying than that of the Congolese prince. Beggars stretched out bony hands. Rival ambassadors burst out of carriages in deadly scuffles. At the hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia, the box for unwanted infants was filled time and again. Yet in other corners of the city, heaven itself appeared to come to earth. In churches such as Sant’Ignazio, frescoes resurrected saints who had tended the city’s most abject souls. In others, men of the Apostolic Age were revived in marble sculptures so life-like they looked like they might speak at the next breath.
These stark contrasts of sacred and profane revealed a city that was a victim of its own success. By that time, Rome was the centre of the Christian west and capital of the Papal States, which cut a swathe across the Italian peninsula. Nicknamed the Theatre of the World, it was a hub of administrators, diplomats and hangers-on who required tailors, entertainment and cooks. Keen to profit from these needs, shoe-makers, bakers and apothecaries came from the German Lands. Men and women from Belgium, Spain and the Low Countries set up inns. The demands on the city only burgeoned during years of Holy Jubilee as the population swelled. In 1625, the confraternity of Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini hosted 400,000 visitors in just one year.
For the members of the confraternity, it was all in a day’s work. But men and women living less than a century earlier might have been shocked at the crowds still arriving in Rome. The early 16th century had seen Martin Luther’s protest against indulgences escalate into an attack on papal power. Just over a decade after his death, Roman authority had been rejected in England, Scotland and Scandinavia, as well as parts of the Holy Roman Empire and France. Newly Protestant states would not send out ambassadors to Rome. Meanwhile, controversialist literature redefined the city as a totem of superstition and corruption. Their Rome was not the home of saints but one of “cannibals” who ate Jesus’s body “as men eat oysters” and pot-bellied monks who sold fake relics made from random body parts.
Yet neither polemic nor politics could undermine Rome’s potency as a locus of Christianity. At the turn of the 17th century, the scholar Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici revealed its inherent sanctity in a “hidden city” of relics and catacombs. With this history of the Church, Baronio both illuminated and continued a tradition that had begun with the very first Christians in Rome. Though most Romans would have seen Saint Peter’s death as a shameful end, Christians raised a small canopy so that they could venerate his remains. Early popes shared this confidence in their holy heritage, even those who lived to see emperors give the Church money and worldly prestige. In the late fourth century, Pope Damasus I’s intimacy with patrician patrons earned him the nickname “earpick to great ladies”. Yet it was not their illustrious names that he inscribed on monuments across Rome but the painful ordeals of the city’s saints.
In the wake of the Reformation, popes continued to defy worldly trends, celebrating the miracles and mysteries derided by Protestants. They transformed buildings described as desolate into bold testaments of the Church Triumphant. They urged priests to illuminate them with hundreds of candles for the Forty Hours’ Devotion. The results were dazzling, and could transform hearts and minds. In 1601, the barber, private secretary and cook of the Persian ambassador announced their conversions to Christianity and refused to leave Rome. Ironically, by yoking Rome and Catholicism so energetically, even Protestant diatribes could enhance the allure of both city and faith. When Queen Christina of Sweden renounced the Swedish Lutheran Church along with her crown, only the cradle of Catholicism could offer her a welcome of adequate symbolic weight. And when a tailor in Coventry wanted to learn more about the religion of his Catholic master, he knew precisely where he needed to go.
Others followed in their footsteps, seeking sanctuary and catechesis in Rome. Yet some later visitors greeted the Christian city with disdain. By the 18th century, Grand Tourists such as Charlotte Anne Eaton saw the monuments of the Church as a “debasement” of Rome: decadent accretions on the far nobler city of the Augustan age. Even those who praised religious artworks sought to divorce them from their Christian patronage. On visits to the Sistine Chapel, Wolfgang von Goethe enjoyed a picnic followed by a “siesta on the papal throne” and became irritated when cardinals ruined his enjoyment of the frescoes. He left a papal Mass for All Souls at the Quirinal Palace when he saw Pius VI “merely moving from one side of the altar to the other and muttering just like any ordinary priest”.
In the age of rationalism, the fruits of the faith in Rome were often valued as mere spectacle. Yet even Goethe, who described himself as “decidedly non-Christian”, admitted that there was more to his desire to attend a papal Mass in the city than its potential aesthetic appeal. In Rome, he had been “seized by the cur-ious wish that the Head of the Church would open his golden mouth”. In this compulsion, Goethe revealed a greater affinity with those who characterised Ne Vunda as a biblical magus than he might have cared to admit. For like them Goethe recognised that Rome was a city still shaped by a Christian faith through which mortals like him might transcend the bounds and mundanity of the world.
Jessica Wärnberg is the author of City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, its Popes and its People (Icon/Pegasus).
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