Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online Page B

in the Colosseum, which was little more than a dilapidated dunghill.
    Yet despite its dilapidation, the sheer scale of the city overwhelmed the visitor and lent grandeur to ordinary events. Buildings were outsize, monuments huge and imposing, as if built to accommodate giants. The stairways that led up the steep hillsides were wide enough for twenty people to walk abreast. Thousands could crowd into the enormous squares. The vast porticoes of the basilicas alone provided shade and a communal gathering place for hundreds, while the extensive gardens and fields swallowed up hundreds more. Rome was not only grand, it was solemn, the gravity of the ancient ruins compounded by the weighty majesty of the baroque. Across the grand piazzas, tall antique columns faced massive neoclassical façades, heroic statues looked out on monumental domes and scenic balustrades. Over all floated wide skies and, for much of the year, a mercilessly hot sun.
    Part of Rome's drama lay in her climate, the heat, dust and flies of summer alternating with the frigid winter when the marshes froze and the wind swept cruelly down the wide avenues. Mortality from malaria and plague was always high in the hot season, and in the cold, beggars died of exposure and the weak, the very old and the very young succumbed to chills and tuberculosis. Pilgrims avoided the city in the pestilence-ridden summer months, and residents who could afford it left for the countryside until cooler weather set in.
    The ever-present risk of disease was made worse by the filth which was piled up against the houses and then left to rot there in malodorous mounds. Streets were never swept, and the narrow alleys of the poor quarters reeked with the mingled scents of garbage, sewage and garlic. Street vendors who offered fish, chicken and vegetables threw their scraps on the ground wherever they happened to be; housewives and servants too threw every sort of waste into the gutter. Fastidious visitors to Rome were appalled at the casual way the Romans relieved themselves against the venerable arches and columns that adorned their city, and did not hesitate to turn courtyards and hotel porches into public conveniences. It was no wonder, the visitors remarked, that the richer residents avoided going about on foot and used sedan chairs or carriages even when traveling very short distances.
    Such squalor was not unique to Rome among eighteenth-century European cities, but the sharpness of the contrast between rich and poor, grandeur and wretchedness was unusually marked there. Hovels straggled in untidy rows alongside marble palaces. Ragged children howled and held out their dirty hands to beg coins from passing gentlemen in black silk stockings, silken capes and perfectly powdered wigs. Goatherds jostled aristocrats in embroidered waistcoats flashing with diamond buttons. Except in the worst weather the poor gathered, bedraggled and unwashed, in the piazzas, where they enjoyed the spectacle provided by the prosperous riding by in their painted and gilded litters or on their beautifully groomed horses, gleaming with silver bits and harness and gold saddlecloths. Most impressive of all were the carriages of the princes of the Church, carved and ornamented works of art inlaid with jewels.
    If the contrast between wealth and poverty was unusually evident, that between spiritual and sensual was even more so. Rome was a city of clergy, their numbers so great that at times they appeared to form the largest element in the population. Yet in some quarters, streetwalkers and courtesans seemed to be even more numerous, parading aggressively along streets where religious processions were an equally common sight. And the greatest clerics were not infrequently the most worldly, using their vast wealth to subsidize very earthy recreations. The city's shrines to the Virgin and the saints, her chapels and oratories, her magnificent churches all invited the contemplation of divine mysteries. At the same time,