People of Rome: Cola di Rienzo
People of Rome: Cola di Rienzo
From MORTON H.V. A Traveller in Rome, Methuen & Co Ltd, London, 1966, 53-59.
§2
It was the age of Petrarch. The Renaissance was dawning over Italy, and it may be that Rienzo was present when Petrarch was crowned with laurel on the Capitol. So began that odd alliance of art and literature with murder, arson, rape and pillage, which became so characteristic of a later time. How strange to think of the savage lords of Rome gathering on the Capitol to pay homage to the first modern scholar.
At the age of thirty Rienzo was sent on a mission to Avignon, to congratulate Pope Clement VI on his election and to beg him, on behalf of the innkeepers, who formed a great part of the Roman population, to return to Rome. The Pope liked this eloquent visitor so well that he detained him for a year. Upon returning to Rome, Rienzo saw his way clear. He had supreme faith in his star. The nobles laughed at him, and it became the fashion to ask him to dinner to hear him rant, declaim and threaten: but all the time he was organizing the citizens in secret, and bidding them work for the day when the power of the nobles should be overthrown and a 'new deal' established, the Buono Stato, as he called it, in which law, order and peace would rule. He looked even further, to a united Italy, a dream that was not realized until 1870.
On the morning of May 20, 1347, the bell on the Capitol rang a stormo and the citizens went running there as they had been told to do. Rienzo and his followers had spent the night in a neighbouring church and now marched out, Rienzo in full armour, his head bare, and the banners of Liberty and Justice carried before him. He had chosen his moment well: the Colonna and the other nobles were not in Rome. In a scene of great enthusiasm his golden voice rang out, announcing the rules of the New Deal: murderers should be executed; all law cases should be heard within fifteen days; no house should be destroyed except by the authorities; every district of Rome should have its own home guard; a ship should be kept on the coast for the protection of merchants; bridges, castles, gates and fortresses should be held, not by barons, but by the people; the roads should be made safe and robbers put down; and many more such excellent rules. Without a hand raised against him, Rienzo was given supreme power and took the title of Tribune and Liberator of the Holy Roman Republic.
, Those who remember Mussolini's march on Rome, and the years that followed, will recollect that nothing impressed the world more than the way he made the trains run to time and tidied up the streets. Rienzo's reforms had much the same effect on his contemporaries. Within a month he was writing to a surprised Pontiff to say that the roads were safe and that life in Rome was quiet at last. A contemporary wrote that 'the woods rejoiced, for there were no longer robbers in them. The oxen began to plough. The pilgrims began again to make their circuits of the Sanctuaries, the merchants come and go, to pursue their business. Fear and terror fell on the tyrants, and all good people, as if freed from bondage, were full of joy.' Old Stephen Colonna, who, at the news of Rienzo's triumph, had galloped back to Rome, threatening to 'throw this fool out of the window of the Capitol', had to fly for his life, and the nobles who had once laughed at Rienzo were forced to swear allegiance to him. So began his reign of seven months. Rienzo proved that he was a brilliant Senator, but a deplorable Caesar. Like his recent successor, when he gave up local matters for world affairs, he ruined himself by his own follies.
His vanity and his sense of the theatre were tremendous. He rode about Rome dressed in silk, half green and half yellow, furred with miniver, and a wand of steel in his hand on top of which was an apple of silver-gilt in which was a fragment of the Holy Cross. One day he decided to knight himself.
In the Baptistry of the Lateran is a basalt font in which it was once erroneously believed that Constantine the Great had been baptized. Rienzo spent the night in the Baptistry and took a bath of purification in the font. In the morning the crowds saw him stride out on the balcony of the Lateran Palace, clothed in scarlet, with the gold spurs of knighthood at his heels. The trumpets sounded and he addressed the crowd from the balcony; and the mind leaps forward six centuries to the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. His voice was no longer that of the chief magistrate; it was the voice of an emperor. As he called upon the Pope to return to Rome, the startled protests of the Papal Vicar were silenced with-a roll of drums. He claimed the right of choosing the German Emperor, a right, he said, invested in the people of Rome. He commanded all who disagreed with him to appear in Rome and give their reasons on pain of his sovereign displeasure. That night there was, a great banquet. The nostrils of the horse of Marcus Aurelius spouted wine.
Rienzo's coronation was a ceremony devised by himself. High dignitaries of the Church placed a number of symbolic wreaths upon his head, of ivy, laurel, myrtle, of weeds gathered on the Arch of Constantine, and as each crown touched his head, a beggar, standing behind the throne, took it off and impaled it upon the point of a sword. Yet wrapped up in all this symbolism was an idea. He had invited envoys from the Italian cities to attend his coronation and he now married their cities to Rome with rings of gold. So the emperor of words and symbols was the first to visualize a united Italy. Yet what an exasperating mountebank he was! His life was a series of scenes and curtains. When he received a papal legate, sent to rebuke him and call him to order, he went to the vestry of St Peter's and donned the dalmatic worn by the Roman Emperors at their coronation.
His fall was hastened by a tactless drama in which, as usual, he had cast himself as hero. During a banquet he suddenly arrested all the nobility of Rome. He sent confessors with the Sacrament to them and in the morning they were led into a hall draped for an execution. As the nobles appeared before him, many on their knees begging for their lives, Rienzo descended from his tribunal and made a speech on the virtues of forgiveness and—invited them all to dinner! They left hating him and swearing to be revenged.
Until here the account of H.V.Morton, “A traveller in Rome”. I hope you liked it, and next time you come to Rome, try to visit it with his diary in Your hands.
A shame that Hollywood never made a movie of his life, all the ingredients are there: Rome in decline, baronies fighting with each other, luxury lifestyle of popes in Avignon, revolution, Coronation on the Capitol, Petrarca, madness, his wife dressed as a monk, the Angel Castle, public execution. Wha...oh !! if that not suffice?
But a great composer did it. Richard Wagner dedicated his first opera to “Rienzo”. Unfortunately, most of it was lost in the Second World War.
Cola di Rienzo
Living statue of Cola di Rienzo, Rome
Wagner’s first Opera:
“Rienzo”