Rome

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.”

The obelisks of Rome were souvenirs of the Empire’s conquest of Egypt, and most of them had been brought to the city in imperial times. Ancient Egypt had three basic commemorative forms: the pyramid, the sphinx, and the obelisk. But the task of moving an obelisk (never mind a sphinx or a pyramid) across the Mediterranean was hardly less daunting than making the thing to begin with, which was difficult enough—indeed, insanely so—and could only have been undertaken by a theocratic anti-state like ancient Egypt.

All known Egyptian obelisks came from the same quarry—a deposit of extremely hard and fine-grained syenite, a rock similar to granite, at Aswan, below the first cataract of the Nile. It lay seven hundred miles from Alexandria and five hundred from Heliopolis, where the biggest concentration of finished obelisks stood.

The tools of ancient Egypt were very simple. No stonecutting saws or explosives, of course; no steel; and for moving the heavy blocks of syenite, once they were free of the quarry, only the timber lever, the roller, the inclined plane, the wedge, palm-fiber ropes, grease, and limitless manpower. Human muscle, at least, was not in short supply, and it was preferred to animal traction, since the fellahin could obey orders a team of oxen would not understand. Egypt had about 11,500 square miles of inhabitable terrain, and a population, in pharaonic times, of perhaps eight million people, a density of some seven hundred per square mile—six times more than China’s or India’s then.

The task of cutting out the granite block for an obelisk was simplicity itself—tedious, infinitely laborious simplicity.

You and other slaves marked the intended line of cleavage in the granite by gouging a channel for its full length, about two inches deep and two wide. Into the bottom of this channel you drilled a line of holes, each about three inches in diameter and six inches deep, spaced some eighteen inches apart.

You and your fellow slaves now had two choices.

The first was to hammer a wooden plug into each of these holes and then fill the channel with water, which