The city maps from earlier in the sixteenth century show its seven pilgrimage churches: San Giovanni in Laterano, San Pietro, San Paolo Fuori le Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Lorenzo, Sant’Agnese, and San Sebastiano. Meandering between them were roads, most of which were mere cattle paths. This messy informality offended the pope’s sense of order. In future, straight streets would join up at focal points, in orderly progressions. For instance, he directed the layout and construction of avenues that linked Santa Maria Maggiore directly to the Lateran Palace, and the Lateran with the Colosseum. A wide, handsome street named the Strada Felice (after the pope’s own name), and later renamed the Via Sistina, was driven three kilometers from Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, on to Santa Maria Maggiore, and so to Santissima Trinità dei Monti. No existing building impeded the clearance of these avenues. If anything was in the way, down it came. The pope had an unquestioned right of eminent domain on secular as well as ecclesiastical buildings, and he exercised it without restraint.
Nor did he have the slightest regard for the classical monuments. Sixtus V was a man of superficial culture, never inhibited by humanistic reverence for the Roman past, or even the memories of the Renaissance. His predecessor, Gregory XIII, had set up ancient statues on the Capitol; Sixtus objected to this, saying that they were no more tolerable than any other pagan idols, and had them carted off. He told one of his courtiers that this gave him particular enjoyment because he had dreamed that Gregory XIII, whom he hated, was suffering in Purgatory. He took pleasure in spending the recorded sum of 5,339 scudi on destroying the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. Without a qualm he demolished the remains of the magnificent façade of the Septizodium of the emperor Septimius Severus (dedicated in 201 C.E.), so admired by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, and had its spolia of precious marble dispersed through the city as part of his own building projects. He wanted to see the four-sided arch of Janus Quadrifrons, in the Forum Boarium, demolished, so that his court architect, Fontana, could use its marble to make a base for the obelisk in front of San Giovanni in Laterano, and gave orders for the destruction of the tomb of Caecilia Metella, even though it was well outside the city limits. He also thought the Colosseum should be turned into a wool factory to increase employment in the city. This latter plan was going forward, but on Sixtus’ death, in 1590, it was dropped. So (luckily) was another and far worse idea of his, which was to tear down a whole section of the Colosseum to make way for a new, straight avenue connecting the Campidoglio to San Giovanni in Laterano.
When the question arose of what to do with the two great antique columns of Rome, those of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, Sixtus went right ahead without regard for the original meanings of these monuments, installing a statue of Saint Peter (cast from the bronze of ancient statues melted down) on top of Trajan’s Column and one of Saint Paul on that of Marcus Aurelius. In dedicating the statue of Peter, His Holiness explained that such a monument as Trajan’s could only become worthy to bear the effigy of Christ’s vicar on earth if it was rededicated in the cause of the Catholic Church—an astonishing piece of casuistry.
The truth was that Sixtus V, like many another man of unbridled power, believed more in the future than in the past, because the future could be shaped but the past could not. At his core he simply did not see why the remains of a defeated paganism should be allowed to impede the progress of a living, triumphant faith. He was in that respect an ideal pope for the Counter-Reformation. Everything that was built, restored, carved, or painted under his papacy had to exemplify the power of the Church Triumphant. If a fountain was to be designed, its subject could no longer be the pagan Neptune surrounded by sea nymphs and Tritons. It would have to be Moses striking the rock, releasing the gushing water of faith.
Water was a prime metaphor of devotional art by now. Much of Fontana’s work depended on his construction of a new aqueduct, which, in homage to the pope’s birth name of Felice Peretti, was known as the Acqua Felice. “Happy Water,” indeed. Until then, new building in Rome had mostly been confined to the low-lying areas along the Tiber. The Acqua Felice entered Rome higher up its hills, finishing at Piazza Santa Susanna, by the Baths of Diocletian, the present site of the Museo delle Terme. This wider distribution of precious water opened up much more of the disabitato, the “abandoned” or “empty” tracts of the city, for development and occupation. Naturally, it was much easier to build on empty land than to “do an Haussmann” and have to demolish and clear every site first.
So there was always work, but the one project by which Fontana is remembered, and which gave him a deserved immortality as an engineer, was moving and re-erecting the obelisk of Saint Peter’s, that huge spike rising from what would become the heart of Christianity.
Sixtus V had a vast liking for obelisks, and Rome had more of them than any other European city—thirteen, to be exact, all except one either broken or lying prone, or mostly both.2 His enthusiasm was satirized by one of the acrid couplets that made the rounds during his papacy:
Noi abbiamo basta di guglie e fontane:
Pane vollemo, pane, pane, pane!
We’ve had it up to here with obelisks and fountains:
It’s bread we want, bread, bread, bread!
These angry rhymes were known as “pasquinades,” because they were traditionally affixed to a worn antique statue named, since time immemorial Pasquino. Rome had a number of such “talking statues,” which served as vents for civic annoyance at a time when Romans had no access to any press. Another was a female bust, now rather battered, known to Romans as Madama Lucrezia, attached to the wall of the Palazzetto Venezia, next to the corner of the Basilica di San Marco, the church of Rome’s Venetian colony. But the most famous pair of talkers were Pasquino and his old friend Marforio. Marforio, an ancient river god, used to be at the entrance of the Mamertine Prison, but then he was moved up to the Capitol and is to be found reclining at the entrance to the Capitoline Museum. Pasquino is in the little piazza named for him, the Piazza di Pasquino, behind Piazza Navona. Marforio would speak (through a placard), and Pasquino would reply (or vice versa), and their dialogue, usually in a dialect incomprehensible to the non-Roman, was one of the great comic acts of Rome.
Pasquino, like Marforio, is ancient: a worn and beaten classical torso of Menelaus from the third century B.C.E. dug up during the repair of an adjacent street. It was installed in its present place by a cardinal in 1501. The name is supposed to have come from a tailor in a nearby shop who was dangerously free with his impertinent criticism of the papal government. But there are so many legends about Pasquino’s origins that it is probably impossible to disentangle the true one.
In any case, one day during the reign of Sixtus V, Pasquino was seen wearing a horribly filthy shirt. Why, Marforio wanted to know, did he wear such a stinking rag? Because Donna Camilla has become a princess, came the answer. Donna Camilla, the pope’s sister, in her humbler days had been a washerwoman, but had just been ennobled by His Holiness.
There was a limit to what great figures would endure from Pasquino, and this crossed the line. It got to the ears of Sixtus V, who let it be known that, if the anonymous satirist owned up to writing it, his life would be spared and he would receive a present of one thousand pistoles in cash. But if anyone else found him out and denounced him, the writer would be hanged. Naturally, the nameless graffitist—for who was going to turn down such a reward?—confessed. Sixtus V gave him the money and spared his life, but unsportingly added, “We have reserved for Ourselves the power of cutting off your hands and boring your tongue through, to prevent your being so witty in the future.” But nothing would shut Pasquino up; he had a hundred tongues and two hundred hands. The very next Sunday Pasquino was seen draped in a still-wet freshly laundered shirt, set to dry in the sun. Marforio wondered why he couldn’t wait until Monday. “There’s no time to lose,” said Pasquino, thinking of His Holiness’s taxation habits. “If I stay until tomorrow perhaps I’ll have to pay for the sunshine.”