All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
CAMILLO WAS SUMMONED from Rome. According to some reports, he found his mother naked on a stripped bed because her servants, having come back to check on her, had robbed the corpse and bed hangings.
Given the threat of contagion, the body had to be buried immediately. Luckily, her tomb was already prepared in the Church of San Martino, right next door to her palace. But there was the little matter of a coffin. With so many recent deaths, all the coffins in San Martino, and in Viterbo for that matter, were already six feet under—actually, eight feet under in the case of plague victims. Camillo rooted around the palace and in the basement found some packing crates that had been used to bring furniture from Olimpia’s Piazza Navona palace out to San Martino. These were hammered into a makeshift coffin. Washed and dressed, Olimpia was interred in the shabby box, which many saw as divine retribution for her having caused the same treatment of Innocent.
There is an unconfirmed story that when they lifted Olimpia’s body into the coffin, the head turned to one side, the mouth dropped open, and Camillo saw three huge diamonds hidden inside her cheek. Given her attention to worldly goods, it is possible that Olimpia, knowing she could very well fall into a coma and be robbed by her servants, might have secreted such valuable gems in a place where she would wake to find them. No one would stick their hands into the miasma-spewing mouth of a comatose plague victim.
We have a detailed description of how Olimpia was dressed for burial, given by a certain Antonio Bernardini, who opened her tomb in 1762. Camillo’s grandson Prince Girolamo Pamphili had died, having uttered the express wish to be buried next to the illustrious ancestress responsible for all subsequent greatness of the Pamphili family. Ashamed of the story that she had been buried in a furniture crate, the family prepared an elaborate coffin into which they would transfer her remains.
On Monday, March 30, on the occasion of digging in the Church of San Martino to inter the body of His Majesty, Signor Prince Don Girolamo, they had to remove the tombstone of Donna Olimpia, and under the headstone they found the cadaver of Donna Olimpia in a wooden box placed in a space surrounded by masonry which had been made under the tombstone. The cadaver consisted only of bones that were a bit consumed by time.
The dress was recognized as a ribbed silk, the color of crimson. A brass crucifix with an ebony cross, about as long as a palm, was placed on the chest, a crown of coconut palm threaded with red ribbon, two small medallions of silver and one of brass and a little Agnus Dei [a small wax lamb blessed by the pope]. Under the body was a cushion, but no one could tell what material it was made of.
All the hair was still on the skull, and part of it was a wiglet and part was woven into a part of the wiglet and another part braids, and wound by means of cardboard. You could recognize the well-done braids by their gold color and they are as pretty as can be. A new casket was made and was the same size as the planks of the old one that were underneath. She was placed in the new casket the same way she had been in the old one, along with all that was there without removing anything.1
It is fascinating that Olimpia was buried not in her traditional black widow’s weeds and peaked cap but in a gown of ribbed crimson silk, with golden false braids woven into her hair. It is possible that her servants had stolen all her gowns and Camillo hurriedly obtained clothing from someone else to place on Olimpia. It might have been Camillo’s last, bungling attempt to please his mother, tarting her up in a red dress and blond wig for her trip to meet God.
When news of Olimpia’s death reached the city, it aroused various reactions. Her relative and friend Cardinal Gualterio was devastated by the death of the woman who had single-handedly made him a cardinal. On October 9 he poured out his grief to a friend, Niccolò Caferri.
Donna Olimpia has died with no friends around her. I feel such great despair that I don’t know where I am. To vent this grief I have written two very long letters to my dear Signor Don Camillo. And he alone will be the object of my most obliging and heartfelt gratitude. If he cares for me as does Your Holiness, I ask you to please extend to him the kindest affection I have for that most Illustrious woman of, unfortunately, happy memory.
Oh my dear, dear signora, whom I can no longer serve. Now she has been lifted up and where is she? Oh the pain. God have compassion for that soul and give me the light of understanding from this lesson, as He has done in similar circumstances.
Gualterio then added the surprising news that Olimpia had made up her differences with the princess of Rossano.
I am consoled that her death occurred after having made peace with the Princess…. The goodness of God postponed the death of the mother until she made peace with the wife.
I assure you that…the lady of the P.M. [Pontifex Maximus?] served well and diligently, and she never received any of the recognition she should have.2
Many rejoiced at Olimpia’s demise. Gregorio Leti saw her death as God’s vengeance for her sins. He moralized, “But if men had abandoned chastisement of this woman, or if, better said, the pope had been forced to postpone it until a more convenient time, God, who watches constantly while men sleep, threw the powerful thunderbolt against the woman who was guilty of so many crimes.”3
But if God had truly wanted to punish Olimpia, it would have been years earlier, certainly not after allowing her to run the Vatican for the better part of a decade, and certainly not at the ripe old age of sixty-six, which in the 1650s was more like eighty in our own times. At that age, a quick death after a few days of fever was not so much a punishment as a blessing.
Olimpia’s death sealed the triumph of her family. The pope was not inclined to punish innocent relatives, even though they had clearly profited from her corruption. The embezzler was dead, and it was far more dignified to let the matter rest. Moreover, having found the time to look carefully into the financial records of Urban VIII, the pope found that the Barberini family had stolen many times what the Pamphilis had pocketed. Some estimates indicate that Taddeo Barberini had pilfered 42 million scudi, while Cardinal Francesco reportedly stole 29 million, and Cardinal Antonio another 20 million. Whatever Olimpia had purloined, it was a drop in the bucket by comparison.
Therefore, if Alexander were to prosecute the Pamphilis, he would also have to prosecute the Barberinis, who now boasted three cardinals in top church positions. If he did that, he would have to look into the ill-gotten gains of other papal families—the Ludovisis, Borgheses, Aldobrandinis, Perettis, and Buoncompagnis, just to mention a few. He could hardly prosecute all papal families for corruption and confiscate their wealth. If he did so, given the intricate marriage alliances, not a single noble line in Rome would be left unscathed. Moreover, he would have to prosecute himself, given the rampant nepotism he had begun to practice. Clearly it was in the best interests of the Holy Roman Church to drop the case against Olimpia’s heirs.
“As they say in Rome, dead dog, dead rabies,” Gregorio Leti wrote. “So that no one thought any more of her.”4
Camillo and the princess of Rossano enjoyed Olimpia’s wealth. They now owned two enormous palaces in Rome—the Palazzo Pamphili and the Palazzo Aldobrandini, which came in handy when the couple had a knock-down, drag-out fight and temporarily separated. Camillo lived principally in the Piazza Navona. His inheritance included not only Olimpia’s properties, furniture, and art collections but also the astonishing sum of two million gold pieces.
Camillo died in 1666 at the age of forty-four. It is not known exactly what killed him, though those who knew of the deplorable state of his marriage suspected that he had, in fact, been nagged to death. His wife, the princess of Rossano, died in 1681 at the age of fifty-eight, having connived to get their second son, Benedetto, made a cardinal.
The Church of Saint Agnes did eventually become the resting place for Innocent’s bones, but not until 1677, when Camillo’s son Gianbattista had them dug up from the shoddy grave in Saint Peter’s basement and transferred there. His funerary monument was not completed until 1729. It was placed above the main door, so that visitors rarely, if ever, notice it.
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, 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.”5
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.”6
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 carriage, being unwilling to meddle with anything to which she is not call’d.”7
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.”8 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.
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 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 palegray 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, Andrea, 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 houses the offices of Italy’s president and is used for presidential ceremonies.
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 paralyzed 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.”9
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.
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.
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, Annalisa 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.
In 1671 Camillo’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna, married Giovanni 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.