"Letter from Rome," Boston Daily Advertiser, April 29, 1871
Dublin Core
Title
Subject
Description
Credit
Creator
Source
Publisher
Date
Type
Article Item Type Metadata
Text
A Deputation of English Pilgrims – Holy Week – Ancient Music – An Interesting Course of Lectures – Discovery of Ancient Chemical Works – Raphael's House – Garibaldi's Agricultural Colonies Project – Various Matters.
(From our regular correspondent)
Rome, Italy, April 4, 1871.
Just now Rome at the Vatican is deeply interested in the visit of the English deputation to the Pope. [...]
The old public ceremonies of Holy Week, which made Rome so attractive to strangers in past times, will not take playce this year. The Pope is to celebrate the usual services very privately in the small Pauline chapel, which is at the west wend of the Gala Regia--the one which has in it Michel Angelo's frescoes of the Conversion of St. Paul and the Martyrdom of St. Peter. [...]
The Pope is in excellent health, but his prime minister is not. A friend of mine went over to the Vatican on business a fortnight ago, and was told that his eminence could not receive, as he was ill in bed with podagra (gout); and he saw a cameriere entering the cardinal's bed-room with his hands full of all the journals of the day. Cardinal Antonelli always has an attack of the gout when he is vexed or troubled. The day before La Capitale, a scurrilous little Roman paper, published an infamous attack on the cardinal, accused him of many crimes, among others of robbing the sacred shrine of Loretto of valuable gems; raked up the old Campana Museum story, and then added to this dish of gossip the fierce, vulgar, disgusting spice of illicit love scandal.
The Vatican inhabitants read everything in the way of newspapers. Cardinal Grasselini told another friend of mine lately, that whenever he had an audience on business of the Pope, he always saw in his room a large table covered with the daily caricatures and journals of Rome, from the stupid, heavy Mazzini organ, to the licentious Capitale. Not nice reading for such holy eyes at all; for of all printed free speech, the licenses seen in the Roman newspapers are the greatest. The tone is of the lowest and vulgarest. If the common people of Rome is to be instructed, and human progress is to come out of this new state of things, certainly the public press of Rome will have no hand in the improvement. [...]
The funeral of the Italian patriot, Mattei Montecchi, takes place in Rome tomorrow. There is to be a tine[?] procession through the principal streets. A saucy letter was sent this evening, so a young liberalist tells me, to the members of the English deputation, inviting them, "if they wish to
"see for themselves the true feeling of the Roman
"people, to attend this funeral; they will then know
"how Romans regard and honor the memory of a
"man who always combated lites veribus the tem-
"poral power of the Pope, always believed in the
"unity of Italy, and always struggled and suffered
"for it."
