Mistress of the Vatican (68 page)

Those exiting the church have to crane their necks upward. Among the shafts of light stabbing the soft gloom they will see a powerful old man wearing a bulbous papal tiara so high it scrapes the ceiling; indeed, the entire monument seems to have been squeezed in as an afterthought. But Innocent had always been a man of modest needs; he would not have demanded a huge tomb next to the altar. His statue seems pleased that he finally has a tomb at all. He extends his right hand in benediction and, perhaps, forgiveness.

Though Olimpia’s nephew Cardinal Francesco Maidalchini had started off as the laughingstock of the Sacred College, he would, over time, mature into a man esteemed for his pure morals, steadfast loyalty,

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and dedication to his duties, dying in 1700 at the age of seventy. If he wasn’t given any important responsibilities, at least he never shamed the church. It is likely that the only lifelong passion of this mild-mannered soul was his detestation of his crafty aunt.

After the election of Alexander VII, Cardinal Camillo Astalli became an honored member of the Sacred College. Perhaps in gratitude for the timely news of Innocent’s plans to invade Naples, Philip IV of Spain bestowed on Astalli many honors. He appointed him the Spanish protector of the kingdom of Naples and of Sicily. Cardinal Astalli died in 1662 at the age of forty-two.

The year after Olimpia’s death, Alexander VII married his nephew Agostino to Maria Virginia Borghese, the daughter of the princess of Rossano by her first husband. The pope spent a reported 100,000 scudi on the wedding festivities and bought for 275,000 scudi the principalities of Farnese and Ariccia, making his nephew a prince and duke. Dipping into Olimpia’s pots of gold, the princess of Rossano gave her daughter a dowry of 200,000 scudi. Gregorio Leti saw Machiavellian manipulation behind the exorbitant sum; the princess did this “to get the Popes favor, and have some part in the Vatican, which she hath always been ambitious of.”
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Leti recounted that the pope’s brother, Don Mario, raked up so much Vatican money that the people of Rome “cry out more against him than ever they did against Don Taddeo, nay, more than they did against Donna Olimpia herself. He hath invented so many new subtleties to get money out of those Offices which are ordinarily bestowed upon the Popes nearest Relations, that the Barberinis, who thought themselves masters in that Craft, do remain astonished to see themselves outdone by a new beginner.”
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Leti observed that while the pope had nothing against his male relatives raping the treasury, he was terrified of bringing his sister-in-law to Rome, “the very name of a sister-in-law being a most odious thing to the Romans, for Donna Olimpia’s sake.” But when Mario’s wife was allowed to come to Rome, the pope was relieved to see that unlike Olimpia, she knew her place. “Indeed, Donna Berenice is another sort of Woman, and one who shews modesty and reservedness in all her

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carriage, being unwilling to meddle with anything to which she is not call’d.”
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Pope Innocent XII finally outlawed nepotism in 1692, declaring the poor to be his real nephews. His relatives were not permitted to set foot in the Vatican. When the cardinals suggested he add to the Sacred College the archbishop of Taranto, a respected prelate worthy of the honor, the pope replied, “That is true, but he is my nephew.”
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His name was removed from the list of candidates. Though Innocent XII’s laws reduced the excesses, nepotism limped along for two more centuries. The last pope to practice it was Leo XIII (reigned 1878–1903), who in 1879 made his brother Giuseppe a cardinal.

The Papal States were folded into the new nation of Italy in 1861 when King Victor Emmanuel II united the squabbling, disparate principalities into one kingdom. After Rome was declared the capital of Italy in 1870, popes refused to accept the loss of their temporal kingdom, calling it completely illegal and an insult to religion. Anyone who voted in an Italian election could consider themselves excommunicated. For sixty years the Vicars of Christ hid in the Vatican rather than spot an Italian flag flying over Rome. But in 1929, in return for a huge lump sum, the church accepted the 109-acre Vatican City as its temporal territory, making it the smallest nation in the world.

Ironically, the loss of his kingdom was a great boon to the pope, who could now concentrate on religion. As Jesus himself said, it is impossible to serve two masters.

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Most of Olimpia’s exquisite properties are still in use today. Her birthplace in Viterbo, a large town house, has been divided into spacious apartments. The walls are adorned with magnificent frescoes from Olimpia’s time, and the wooden ceiling beams are decorated with the eight-pointed gold Maidalchini star. In the garden, residents digging holes for plants find Etruscan vases, medieval pottery, and marble papal shields—layer upon layer of history. In 1944, serious bomb damage destroyed Viterbo’s Convent of Saint Dominic, where Olimpia’s sisters had

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lived into their seventies, and its records. Today Viterbo is a bustling modern city operating in beautifully preserved thirteenth-century buildings.

Olimpia’s masterpiece, the Piazza Navona palace, has been the home of the Brazilian Embassy since 1920. The façade has recently undergone a thorough cleaning and restoration to bring it back to the paleg-ray shade she had painted it in the 1640s. The embassy staff is well aware of Olimpia’s fascinating history and is proud to have offices in her former home. The ballroom where she threw magnificent parties still echoes with the clink of champagne glasses whenever the ambassador holds a reception. Her music room, where she held her lascivious comedies, Jesuit orations, and operas, is still used for embassy concerts.

The town of San Martino sits almost unchanged from Olimpia’s time. Many of the current 2,500 residents are direct descendants of the dowerless girls Olimpia brought in. Her palace houses the local tourism board and cultural exhibits and is used as a conference center.

The Pamphili villa of Bel Respiro, with its strange glued-together statues and fabulous sunken gardens, was sold in 1985 to the government of Italy. Currently being restored, it will be used as a venue for the prime minister’s social functions.

The Il Barco villa outside Viterbo, built by Olimpia’s brother, An-drea, is sliding into a state of poetic decrepitude. Many of the plaster ceilings have fallen, and many of the frescoes are flaking and bubbling with water damage. Recently the Italian government decided to restore the villa to its former glory and fixed the roof before it ran out of funds. The little church behind the villa has lost its roof entirely. The chestnut trees on which Olimpia hung roasted chestnuts for the pope’s delight are long gone, replaced by gnarled olive trees and tangled waist-high grass.

Innocent’s model prison, the Carceri Nuovi, is currently the anti-Mafia headquarters of the Italian government, guarded by handsome burly men wielding machine guns. The Quirinal Palace, where Innocent died, was taken from the pope by the Italian government in 1870 and used as the royal residence of the king of Italy. It currently

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houses the offices of Italy’s president and is used for presidential ceremonies.

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The two geniuses that Olimpia commissioned for her architectural projects continued their competition after her death, meeting with very different ends. In 1657 Camillo fired Francesco Borromini as architect of the Church of Saint Agnes. He was fired from other important projects, or never considered for the commissions, or when he was awarded the jobs he would soon after storm off in a rage. As Borromini’s star continued to fall, the star of his deadly rival, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, continued to rise.

In 1656, Pope Alexander gave Bernini the commission for the embracing columned portico surrounding Saint Peter’s Square. It was an immense, challenging, and prestigious job, completed to great acclaim in 1666. Bernini undertook it with characteristic zeal, but his success pushed his ancient competitor over the edge. Deeply depressed, in 1667 Borromini ran himself through with his sword. The forty-year clash of Rome’s artistic titans was over.

Bernini died in 1680 at the age of eighty-one. He sculpted right up until the end, standing on a platform with a young man on either side holding him so he would not fall. One day he had a stroke, which para-lyzed his right hand. “It is right,” the dying man said to his son, “that before death this hand, which has done so much work in life, should get a little rest.”
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Queen Christina continued to shock Rome. She discovered that a life of art and philosophy was not all she had imagined it to be. She missed power. Up to her elbows in political intrigue, she decided to become queen of a Catholic nation and chose, as Olimpia had a few years earlier, Naples. But when her private secretary betrayed her plans to Spain, she had him murdered in cold blood, begging for his life on his knees. The pope was disgusted, but he could hardly imprison for murder the personification of Catholicism’s triumph over the heretics.

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Christina continued to love Cardinal Decio Azzolini until her death, though his initial interest in her soon cooled and became platonic. At the end of her life she declared that she, too, had become an ancient Roman monument and one of the sights of Rome. Her last wish was to be buried in the Pantheon, that ancient pagan temple to all the gods. But when she died in 1689 at the age of sixty-two, she was interred in that most Catholic of tombs, the papal grottoes below Saint Peter’s Basilica, as if to force her finally to become a good Catholic.

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While Olimpia is somewhat known in Rome, Viterbo, and other places associated with her, the stories about her are bleared with time and spiced with sex. In Viterbo it is said that Olimpia was a beautiful woman who stuck her head out of the window, tantalizing men with her lovely hair and inviting them to come up to her room. In her castle of Alviano in Umbria, there is a well in the courtyard. Down the well, it is said, the black widow Olimpia threw the bodies of the men she had slept with and murdered.

Wherever Olimpia lived, rumors abound that millions of pieces of gold are stashed there, somewhere. Olimpia’s castle of Attigliano, included in her auction purchase of 1654, is now razed except for a few picturesque walls. There, it is said, in the covered-over dungeons, sits Olimpia’s gold. And in her Nini town house in Viterbo the gold is thought to be hidden in the apartment walls. One young resident, An-nalisa Marinetti, remembers as a child in the 1990s tapping on the walls with her brother to find the hollow space where Olimpia’s treasure was stored. It’s in there somewhere, her father, now deceased, told the children.

Anyone who visits the glorious Doria Pamphilj Galleries in Rome will see where the treasure actually went. It was not hidden in walls or dungeons but bequeathed to Camillo and the princess of Rossano. There, in their palace on the Corso, the couple started an immense art collection, which was added to by later generations. There Olimpia’s gold—including what she had taken from under the pope’s bed—hangs on the wall in the form of Raphaels, Tintorettos, Brueghels, and Titians.

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In 1671 Camillo’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna, married Gio-vanni Andrea Doria, scion of a powerful Genoese family. In 1763, when the male Pamphili line died out, Anna’s descendants took the combined name of Doria Pamphilj so that the illustrious papal name would continue. A more famous descendant is the actress Brooke Shields, who goes back twelve generations to Olimpia through Olimpiuccia. One of Brooke’s half sisters is named Olympia.

But Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili has a far more important legacy than illustrious descendants or a fabulous art collection. Her legacy is that of a woman who refused to conform to the misogynistic traditions of her time. She would not become a nun. She refused to remain poor and powerless. She grasped power with outstretched hands and ended up running the most antifemale institution in history, the Vatican, with the pope himself and many of his cardinals her puppets.

Though she was the most notorious woman of her time, the memory of Olimpia has almost completely vanished. The Catholic Church must be glad. After all, within a two-thousand-year history encompassing thousands of leading actors, there are bound to be regrettable stories mixed in with those of holy saints and martyrs. The Church still has to contend with the image of the incestuous Lucrezia Borgia, her golden ankle-length hair shining in the candlelight as she smilingly slips arsenic from a poison ring into her guest’s wine—a story that is blatantly untrue. Then there’s that pesky tale of Pope Joan, giving birth while processing through the streets—another falsehood. And they will always have to contend with nasty rumors about that unfortunate testicle-groping coronation chair—a lie if ever there was one.

But Olimpia’s story, completely true, has been completely forgotten. New church scandals fill the newspapers. New saints inspire the faithful. And in an age when other Christian churches have permitted female priests, the Catholic Church adamantly refuses to consider doing so, citing tradition. The church does not concede that a woman has already run the Vatican itself, and her name was Olimpia Maidalchini.