art.

[Illustration: PIAZZA NAVONA]

The names of Bernini and of Piazza Navona recall Innocent the Tenth, who
built the palace beside the Church of Saint Agnes, his meannesses, his
nepotism, his weakness, and his miserable end; how his relatives
stripped him of all they could lay hands on, and how at the last, when
he died in the only shirt he possessed, covered by a single ragged
blanket, his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldachini, dragged from beneath his
pallet bed the two small chests of money which he had succeeded in
concealing to the end. A brass candlestick with a single burning taper
stood beside him in his last moments, and before he was quite dead, a
servant stole it and put a wooden one in its place. When he was dead at
the Quirinal, his body was carried to Saint Peter's in a bier so short
that the poor Pope's feet stuck out over the end, and three days later,
no one could be found to pay for the burial. Olimpia declared that she
was a starving widow and could do nothing; the corpse was thrust into a
place where the masons of the Vatican kept their tools, and one of the
workmen, out of charity or superstition, lit a tallow candle beside it.
In the end, the maggiordomo paid for a deal coffin, and Monsignor Segni
gave five scudi--an English pound--to have the body taken away and
buried. It was slung between two mules and taken by night to the Church
of Saint Agnes, where in the changing course of human and domestic
events, it ultimately got an expensive monument in the worst possible
taste. The learned and sometimes witty Baracconi, who has set down the
story, notes the fact that Leo the Tenth, Pius the Fourth and Gregory
the Sixteenth fared little better in their obsequies, and he comments
upon the democratic spirit of a city in which such things can happen.

Close to the Piazza Navona stands the famous mutilated group, known as
Pasquino, of which the mere name conveys a better idea of the Roman
character than volumes of description, for it was here that the
pasquinades were published, by affixing them to a pedestal at the corner
of the Palazzo Braschi. And one of Pasquino's bitterest jests was
directed against Olimpia Maldachini. Her name was cut in two, to make a
good Latin pun: 'Olim pia, nunc impia,' 'once pious, now impious,' or
'Olimpia, now impious,' as one chose to join or separate the syllables.
Whole books have been filled with the short and pithy imaginary
conversations between Marforio, the statue of