On January 18, the first issue of the new series dedicated to daily life in different historical periods will be presented as a tribute to the newspaper. The Rome of the sculptor Bernini opens
Great beauty developed amidst great dirt. Already in the seventeenth century Rome was living its eternal contradictions: poverty and nobility, baroque volutes and manure on the roads inhabited by … pigs and wild boars. Nothing new under the dome: crazy carriage traffic, robberies and courtesans, prostitutes and eminent cardinals. Only an idea pursued and then abandoned: the head senator of the Capitoline administration must have been a native of a town at least forty miles from the city and must not have any family relationship with any inhabitant.
After the traumas of the Lutheran Reformation and the Sack by the Landsknechts in 1527, the Rome of the seventeenth century, told by Almo Paita in Daily life in Rome at the time of Gian Lorenzo Bernini proposed as a tribute on Tuesday 18 by Corriere della Sera, he was a big town who struggled to recover. The population was cosmopolitan – and this, then, was not considered an advantage – but mainly of wandering monks and shepherds. It occupied a third of the area within the Aurelian walls with still medieval houses, narrow and long, of two or three floors, in Tivoli travertine or peperino. The population lived crammed into the stinking old city, between Piazza del Popolo and the Tiber Island.
Jean-Jacques Bouchard, a French traveler who arrived in Rome in 1631 entering through Porta Cavalleggeri, was dazzled by Michelangelo’s dome, the most beautiful and magnificent thing to be found in Europe today. When he passed Castel Sant’Angelo he was almost taken ill: the city seemed squalid, dirty, with foundlings, cows and pigs everywhere.
To remedy the many damages that pigs do – threatened an edict of the chamberlain cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini of February 1637 – all individuals are ordered and prohibited who for the future do not dare, or presume to keep, or send in any way in the streets pigs, under corporal punishment at our will. Good night. It was forbidden to bring cows and buffaloes into the town without holding them by the halter It is forbidden to slaughter or display the butchered meat in the open, fry fish and cook pasta in the streets and squares. All dead letter.
The streets were muddy and everywhere there was an open space for junk dealers, gardeners, herbivenders, butchers, fishmongers and ragmongers installed their stallsthe. The Congregation of the Streets had ordered in 1662 to remove kiosks, stalls, shacks from the main squares, such as Campo de ‘Fiori, where a flourishing market of grains and fodder had always been held. Impossible.
In the carriage you ended up mired in manure and, at night, prey for travelers. Or in the queue near the Sant’Angelo bridge, rebuilt by Bernini, one of the nerve centers of Roman traffic: here passed processions and papal processions coming from San Pietro, memorable firesides and gruesome performances of executions took place. Dirt was everywhere and in a letter to the Pope we read: Holy Father, remove the poor from the dung. Then there were the barn fires and the flooding of the Tiber – and again hunger and homelessness. It was better, much better, in the suburban villas of the nobility.
After Sixtus V, who had the obelisks raised again on the ground from the Late Middle Ages, Alexander VII was sensitive to urban planning problems among the popes of the seventeenth century; his contemporaries considered him a building enthusiast and said that he suffered from stone sickness: Alessander VII actually suffered from kidney stones.. He tried to transform the open spaces into squares, indeed into open-air theaters and encouraged the great Baroque transformation initiated by Innocenzo X Pamphilj, the one subjected to the artistic dictatorship of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and his opponent, that Francesco Borromini who ended suicide. We owe the beauties of Piazza Navona and its surroundings to the two.
Baroque magnificence conceals backwardness, adorning the city with surprising games, churches, convents, villas, palaces and fountains … A vitalistic Rome, stage of intrigues and sumptuous processions, entrance parties and carnivals, sacred shows, a gym for charlatans, buffoons and preachers with fluvial and convincing speech.
Despite the financial crisis, in this Rome the Capitoline administration did not give up its sumptuous apparatuses. For the possession of Innocent X, on November 23, 1644, the leaders had seventy scudi each to make a crimson robone up to the knee, trousers and a silver woolen jacket with gold embroidery, socks and white silk ties. with gold lace, white shoes with white roses and gold lace, golden sword, embroidered belt and Spanish hat trimmed with a white feather. It feels like today.
As a gift the volume by Almo Paita on the eternal city
On Tuesday 18 January the readers of Corriere della Sera will receive the book by Almo Paita as a gift with our newspaper Daily life in Rome at the time of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This is the first volume of the weekly series Library of History. Lives daily, created in collaboration with Bur Rizzoli, which includes 35 issues (the first twenty in the graph on the right) until 13 September 2022. In her book Paita explains how Rome, which had suffered in the previous century the terrible Sack of the lansquenets sent by emperor Charles V, recovered in the seventeenth century thanks to the contribution of great architects and artists, first of all precisely Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who gave the city a new face. Thus, the author writes, Rome was transformed into a great theater, which had the facades of its new churches, the grandeur of its palaces, the splendor of its villas as its precious backdrops. The Library of History series. Daily Lives continues with the second volume, Daily life in Florence at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent by Pierre Antonetti, which will be released on Tuesday 25 January. Like all the other subsequent books in the series, it will be on sale with Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport at a price of € 7.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. Subsequent releases: Paul Faure, Daily life in the Greek colonies (February 1); Jean-Paul Bertaud, Daily life in France at the time of the Revolution (February 8); Paul Faure, The daily life of the armies of Alexander the Great (February 15); Jean-Paul Crespelle, Daily life in Paris at the time of the Impressionists (February 22).
January 16, 2022 (change January 16, 2022 | 19:24)
© Time.News