Rome

around the obelisk. Winching in the cables required pulleys based on ship’s tackle, but of a huge size never used on a ship—scores of double-sheaved pulley blocks, iron-bound, with a two-to-one ratio, the largest of them five feet two inches long. The cables themselves were each 750 feet long, three inches in diameter, and spun in an especially large ropewalk at Foligno, with a breaking strain (Fontana figured) of fifty thousand pounds. This was the largest order of equipment the Italian maritime industry had ever known. But, then, nothing like this had ever been tried in the history of Italian civil engineering. It was going to need almost unheard-of care and coordination, which Fontana proposed to achieve with a system of sound signals—a trumpet to start each capstan pull, a bell to end it.

First the obelisk must be raised from its base, and then swayed down prone on the enormous carriage and rollers on which it would be dragged from the rear of Saint Peter’s to the site in front. Then the pylons and capstans must be brought round, rerigged, and used to stand the prodigious block of stone vertical again and gingerly lowered onto a base which had been prepared for it in front of the basilica.

Sixtus V issued lengthy and detailed orders that no one “shall dare impede, or in any way molest the work.” This meant invoking eminent domain over everything that lay along the route of the obelisk: if there was a house in the way, down it would go. The whole operation, which took days and consumed the labor of nine hundred men and some 140 horses, was watched by most of the population of Rome—who were kept back by a security fence and had been warned, in no uncertain terms, that anyone who made a noise or spoke a word would be instantly put to death. Nobody uttered a peep.

However, it became part of the folklore of this tremendous operation that, at a certain point, the ropes carrying the obelisk began either to fray from the load or to smolder from the friction. Disaster stared Fontana in the face. Legend has it that the day was saved by an iron-lunged Genoese sailor named Brescia di Bordighera, who broke silence by bellowing, “Acqua alle funi”—“Water on the ropes!” Far from punishing the man for breaking silence, the pope, when he realized how the sailor had saved the project, rewarded him with blessings and annuities.

Unfortunately, the story seems not to be true. Neither Fontana, who kept a log of the lowering, moving, and raising of the obelisk, nor anyone else who was there mentions the sailor and his saving cry, and it would hardly have been possible for anyone to find or bring the necessary water to Piazza San Pietro in time.

When the obelisk was vertical, Sixtus V could not contain his joy, crying in triumph, “Cio che era pagano ora e l’emblema della cristianita”—“The thing that was pagan is now the emblem of Christianity.” And that was the point: to Sixtus, the moving or “translation” of this and other obelisks, achieved with such immense, concerted effort and determination, symbolized the work of the Counter-Reformation, the reunification of the Church, the defeat and pushing back of heresy.

The pope showered Fontana with honors.

The bronze ball was opened, and it contained no trace of Caesar; it was quite empty. So much for superstition.

The Vatican obelisk and the Acqua Felice were the most spectacular projects that Sixtus’ papacy contributed to the fabric of Rome, but not by any means the only ones. An even bigger obelisk had been lying in three pieces near the cathedral, San Giovanni in Laterano. Originally commissioned by the Pharaoh Thutmose III, it was removed to Alexandria by Constantine in 330 C.E., and then transported to Rome by Constantius II in 337 C.E. and set up in the Circus Maximus. It was 105 feet high—fully twenty feet taller than the enormous Vatican one—and weighed 510 tons. At Sixtus V’s behest, Fontana managed to raise it, and repaired it so well that today its seams can be seen only if you look closely. He took charge of a third obelisk, which had also served as a marker in the Circus Maximus, and moved it to the Piazza del Popolo, where it still stands. Compared with the Vatican and Lateran obelisks, this was almost child’s play—a mere seventy-eight-footer, 263 tons. Finally, he had the obelisk that lay in four pieces on the Via di Ripetta, on the west side of the Mausoleum of Augustus, excavated and set up anew behind the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Piazza Esquilino. This was completed by the end of 1587.

This example was followed by several later popes, so that within a century a dozen obelisks were standing in Rome. The chief obelisk-pope, after Sixtus, was Pius VI Braschi, who had three erected during his twenty-four-year pontificate (1775–99). The first was put up on the Quirinal, between its huge white marble statues of the horse- taming Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. It, too, came from the Mausoleum of Augustus, where it had been found in the sixteenth century, reburied (it was a massive obstacle to riverside traffic on the Via di Ripetta), exhumed again in three pieces, and, under the direction of the architect Giovanni Antinori, set up in 1786 in front of the Quirinal Palace. The second was installed at the top of the Spanish Steps, outside Santissima Trinita dei Monti, in 1789. The third, extracted from Augustus’ Mausoleum and known (for its ancient use as a gnomon on the enormous sundial) as the Obelisco Solare, went in five pieces to Piazza Montecitorio and was reassembled by Antinori; it still stands there today, in front of the Palazzo dei Tribunali. Augustus had brought it back from Heliopolis, in Egypt, where it had been made for the Pharaoh Psammetichus I.

So Sixtus V’s obelisk raising was by no means unique. How, after inheriting a bankrupt papacy, could this manic-impressive pontiff keep up the rhythm of building public works that he insisted on? By the sale of offices, by the establishment of new monti or public loans (a money-raising device first employed by Clement VII in the sixteenth century), and above all by ferocious taxation. All this created a glut in the papal fiscus, which, like some omnipotent Scrooge McDuck, he preferred to keep in bullion and specie in giant iron-ribbed coffers (still to be seen, but gaping empty) in the Castel Sant’Angelo. In these money boxes he hid three million scudi in gold and 1.6 million in silver, the biggest mass of cash in Italy, one of the biggest in Europe. In fact, his accumulation took so much cash out of circulation that it created severe economic problems for the Roman economy; money could not circulate as before, and so business stagnated. Either Sixtus was unaware of this, or he did not care about it. The public display, the rhetorical obelisk, was the thing.

In most respects his politics, particularly in the field of foreign policy, were a mess. He was given to grandiose fantasy. Wasn’t he God’s vicar on earth? He would conquer Egypt, he would bring the Holy Sepulchre to Italy, he would annihilate the Turks. He renewed the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I of England, and agreed to give the Spaniards a large subsidy for the Armada which would conquer England—not, however, to be paid until the Spanish forces had actually landed, which of course they never did, so that their providential wreckage and dispersal by a storm in the Channel saved him a million crowns.

But the rethinking and rebuilding of Rome around those exclamation marks of the obelisks, the re-creation of the expanse of the city as a pattern of rhetorical circulation—that was something new, worthy of another Caesar: and all done in five years of an incredibly short, obsessively active papacy. A fair epitaph was pronounced on him by the nineteenth-century vernacular poet Giuseppe Belli (1834):

Fra tutti quelli c’hanno avuto er posto

De vicarj de Dio, non z’e mai visto

Un papa rugantino, un papa tosto,

Un papa matto, uguale a Papa Sisto.

??????Among all those who have held the place