Free Mistress of the Vatican by Eleanor Herman

the Seven Hills were raided for materials to construct new buildings. Trees and vines covered what was left of them. Cows grazed in the formerly splendid Roman Forum, which became known as the Cow Field. The neglected Roman bridges collapsed of their own accord or were swept away in floods, until only two remained. By the twelfth century there were a mere thirty thousand inhabitants.
    In 1309 the popes left Rome for Avignon and through a series of mishaps did not return for good until 1443. By this time wolves prowled the streets, digging up the dead and maiming the living. Those who
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    M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n
    entered the Eternal City in the returning pope’s train were shocked at its utter ruin. The writer Aretino described Rome not by its impressive ancient title of caput mundi —the head of the world—but as coda mundi —the rear end of the world.
    The narrow thoroughfares of Rome were often obstructed by mountainous heaps of ancient buildings collapsed by earthquakes or time. Streets were also choked by man-made obstructions: porticoes, or walkways over the street connecting houses, and balconies jutting out well into the street. Sometimes a road was completely blocked when a home owner, eager for a larger house, built an addition across the entire street.
    Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484) began an ambitious program to clean and widen the roads, a program that succeeding popes would continue. The maestri di strada, or street controllers, arranged for ancient rubble blocking the thoroughfares to be carted away. They tore down all the illegal home additions that had obstructed city roads. They forced citizens to clean up the manure, sewage, and refuse they had thrown into the street, and then imposed a hefty fine. The city hired dust carts to pick up the garbage and dump it where it was supposed to go—into the Tiber River, the main source of water for household consumption.
    Fortunately, Sixtus and the popes who followed him repaired aqueducts, opening up new areas of the city for home building and commerce. Starting in the sixteenth century, cardinals built sumptuous palaces on the hills, enjoying fresh breezes and the cachet of living where Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Cato had lived fifteen hundred years earlier. Artists flocked to Rome from Florence and Venice, highly paid by popes to turn the heap of ruined monuments into a cultural center worthy of its glorious past. The population increased, art flourished, and business thrived.
    But in 1527 Rome was invaded by a new horde of plundering barbarians, the troops of Emperor Charles V, who was angry at Pope Clement VII for siding with France in a political dispute. They murdered tens of thousands of citizens, stole their wealth, and destroyed some thirty thousand houses, or about half the buildings in the city. The German
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    Eleanor Herman
    Lutheran battalions vandalized papal tombs, using one pope’s skull as a football, and massacred five hundred citizens who had gathered for protection around the altar of Saint Peter’s. After the foreign soldiers left Rome, staggering under the weight of their plunder, the city was attacked by typhoid, famine, and flood. Anyone who could afford to leave the city—including the artists, architects, merchants, and bankers— fled, and Rome was once again moribund.
    It took a decade for the city to get over the shock of the Sack and its aftermath. But Rome had, by now, some experience in cleaning up a moldering ruin. Rubble was carted away. The sounds of hammering and the sight of ropes and pulleys were everywhere as new buildings went up. The Roman pontiffs laid out wide roads to ease street congestion because the newfangled invention, the carriage, was choking narrow medieval roads. And every time a road was laid or a foundation dug, builders found the exquisite detritus of the previous civilization— marble columns, gorgeous statues, and mosaic floors. These were hoisted up and sold to the highest