But the abitato was busy, mostly with Christian expansion. By the fourth century, Church revenues from its holdings in North Africa, Greece, Egypt, and Syria amounted to 3,700 gold solidi, roughly $25 million in modern money, every year, and much of this was funneled directly to Rome for its building plans. Thirty-three churches in the abitato are mentioned prior to 1050, of which twelve still exist today. Many more would come later.
One of the chief parts of the abitato, in the abutment between the Vatican, the Borgo, the Tiber, and the Janiculan Hill, came to be known as Trastevere—the name a compression of trans Tiberim, “across the Tiber.” By the end of the thirteenth century, it had become the only rione (regione or district; it was number XIII) on the far side of the river, and it was united to the Borgo in 1585—an administrative gesture which was supposed to reduce, but in fact did not, the Trasteverini’s persistent habit of seeing and speaking of themselves as the only true and authentic Romans, and of all other Romans as foreigners. This is embedded in the name of Trastevere’s main annual festival, the Festa di Noantri, the “Festival of Us Others.” Local pride has always been a big matter in Trastevere, whose inhabitants traditionally resent any effort to horn in on it. A famous example, undocumented but almost certainly true, is said to have been an attempt by Mussolini to intrude upon the procession that accompanied this festa. Part of its festivity was a row of pasteboard arches spanning the Via di Lungara, which led to the area’s main church, Santa Maria in Trastevere. Advised by his sometimes maladroit propaganda chief, Starace, the Duce was gratified to see that these arches bore patriotic mottoes—“Trastevere, Trastevere, now you shine with a new light/You have the Madonna and Il Duce, watching over you!” But, alas for the dignity of the occasion and its propaganda, some Trasteverino got to the arches the night before with a ladder and a paint pot and scrawled on the back of them another message. “Stanchi di tanta luce…,” it ran: “Sick and tired of all this light, we want to stay in darkness: tell them all to take it up the ass, the Duce, the Madonna, and the King.”
The emblematic figure for Trasteveran dissent and bloody-mindedness was, without rival, the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791–1863). A life-sized stone portrait of him in frock coat and top hat presides over a square in the popular quarter. It was paid for by public subscription—a rare, perhaps unique, indication of a Roman poet’s popularity. His following in Trastevere can perhaps be gauged by the fact that the public kept filching the wooden walking stick with which the sculptor had endowed his effigy. (Eventually it was replaced by an iron one, which looked like ebony but was too heavy to steal and brandish.)
Nobody could question Belli’s supremacy as the dialect bard of the Roman people. Partly because he wrote only in romanesco, the Roman language—a parallel tongue to Italian, but difficult for non-Romans to grasp—he has always been the favorite literary son of the city. (Dante may belong to all Italians, but nobody but a Roman owns Belli.) “Infected with clap? Me?” begins one sonnet of 1832, “The Honest Whore,”
But you amaze me—
I am as clean as an ermine,
Look here, how this linen blouse
Would put a lily to shame with its whiteness!
He wrote with an undeceived pessimism, interlaid with raucous humor, which rose from the lower levels of Roman life. “Faith and hope are beautiful,” says a sonnet on the Carnival of 1834, “but in this wide world there are only two sure things: death and taxes.” But there is another reason for his popularity, too. Belli’s black humor, his spasms of obscenity, his blithely cutting disregard for the proprieties of papal and clerical Rome, all reverberate with the spirit of popular Roman dissent—a spirit in which he alone seemed able to publish. He wrote entirely in terms of Petrarchan fourteen-line sonnets, and produced more than 2,200 of them, which add up collectively to an anti-image of papal Rome—its excesses of wealth and poverty, the decadence of its ecclesiastical rule, its pantomimes of sanctity, the gross superstitions of its faithful. And he came up with burning denunciations of hypocrisy:
Truth is like the shits—
When it gets out of control and it runs
You waste your time, my daughter, clenching your ass,
Twisting and trembling, to hold it in.
In the same way, if the mouth isn’t stopped,
Holy Truth sputters out,
It comes out of your guts,
Even if you vowed silence, like a Trappist monk.
As sometimes happens with those who were radical in their youth, Belli turned conservative later. This master of insult to authority joined the papal government and served it as a political and artistic censor, repressing work by such supposed enemies of religious order as Shakespeare, Verdi, and Rossini. (The official prejudice against Verdi stemmed from the offense taken by some Italian conservatives at the very initials of his name: VERDI could be read, and was, as a disguised form of propaganda for Italian unity under the king rather than the pope—“Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia.”)
In the middle of the river, linked to its Trastevere bank by the Ponte Cestio, and to the other side by an ancient (62 B.C.E.) footbridge, the Ponte Fabricio, is the Tiber Island.
Legend (for which there is no historical basis) claims the island began with the Tarquins’ grain stores, which, around 510 B.C.E., an indignant Roman citizenry dumped in the river; mud and silt accumulated on these, and presently an island formed. A temple to Aesculapius, god of healing, was built on it at the end of the third century B.C.E. But soon Rome was stricken by a plague against which its medical resources were powerless.
The Sibylline Books were consulted. They directed that the fourth-century effigy of Aesculapius should be removed from its cult center at Epidaurus and brought by ship to the Tiber. The boat grounded on the island, and a giant snake, the incarnation of the god himself, was seen to slither overboard and take up a position on dry land. The plague receded. From then on, the Tiber Island was associated with healing, and hospitals for the sick were built there.
However, if there was any single factor in changing the map and layout of ancient Rome, producing a new, medieval shape for the city, it was the combination of Saint Peter’s supposed grave and the Borgo. And added to that were the relics, prime target of faith tourism, which connected to the institution of periodic Jubilees.
The word “jubilee” derives from the Hebrew yobhel, meaning a year of special significance in which the shofar or ram’s-horn trumpet was blown to announce a period of peace and social equality. The Old Testament laid down that Jubilees were to be commemorated every fifty years, but this was not insisted on by the New Testament. Originally, there was a connection between Jubilees (also known as Holy Years) and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, but after the seventh century the Muslim conquest of Palestine made this all but impossible for Christians. So the idea of the Jubilee became focused on Rome, and the first was announced in 1300 by Pope Boniface VIII (reigned 1294–1303). Boniface had meant there to be a Jubilee every hundred years. But in 1350, Pope Clement VI (reigned 1342–52), exiled in Avignon, shortened the gap to fifty years; and in 1390, Boniface IX (reigned 1389–1404) shortened it once more, to thirty-three years, the length of Christ’s life on earth. The humanist Pope Nicholas V brought the interval down again, to twenty-five years. The last Jubilee year celebrated by the Church was 2000. Then there were “extraordinary” Jubilees, outside the normal liturgical calendar. Relics played an important part in all of these, stimulating devotion and strengthening religious fervor.