Venti Settembre (Pasquino remembers the Breach of Porta Pia)

Each year I dread September 20. On this day in 1870 Piedmontese artillery blasted a hole in Porta Pia, the fortified gate on the northeastern side of the Aurelian Wall. Black-plumed Bersaglieri routed pantalooned Papal Zouaves, ending a thousand years of pontifical civil rule. Romans called it the Great Breach. Italy was finally united, but the city was bitterly divided between the Blacks and the Whites, who respectively supported the deposed pope Pio Nono (Pius IX) and the new king Victor Emmanuel.

 

The Blacks boasted Rome’s oldest noble families, the Barberini and Odoleschi, the Chigi and Borghese, who detested the House of Savoy. Prince Torlonia changed his footmen’s red livery so as not to share the same color with the royal grooms. The Blacks paraded their grief and outrage. If His Holiness was a prisoner in the Vatican, they would be prisoners in their homes. The lords shuttered their palazzi, covered their gilded mirrors, and wore elegant mourning. The ladies stopped their daily carriage rides in the Corso, except during the summer, when the court left the capital on vacation.  Both boycotted receptions at the Quirinal and, now that the Savoyards had torn down the walls of the Ghetto, no longer slummed for fried artichokes in Jewish trattorias.

 

The Whites consisted of younger noble families, who had made strategic marriages with the rising middle class and owned banks and businesses. They were eager to help the new regime to modernize the city.

Until now, Rome had been a bucolic provincial capital, two-thirds of it covered with vineyards, orchards, and farmlands. Where the Via Veneto lies today, wood and bush grew then. The Palazzo Barberini was on the outskirts of town. The hovels and the shacks of the rural poor stood beside classical ruins. Cattle grazed in the Forum. Italy would never take its rightful place among the nations if its capital remained a squalid barnyard.

 

The Whites and their allies, local speculators and transplanted bureaucrats from Turin, went to work. They shaved the ivy off the Coliseum and uprooted its wild flowers. They bought up the Prati district, dynamited churches and villas, and used the rubble to build administrative offices. The sound of hammering and falling masonry rang in the streets. Plaster dust hung in the air like the ashes of Pompeii.

Thousands of workers were injured in construction site collapses and landslides. What remained standing were ponderous stone monstrosities that soon turned blacker than the ancient pillars of Octavia’s Portico. To cover up this blunder, the government whitewashed everything—churches, convents, palaces—until Rome became a Victorian mausoleum.

 

The Blacks retaliated, quoting Thucydides: “They have the number, we have the heights.” If the Whites controlled real estate, the Blacks dictated protocol. The king’s chaplain could not celebrate mass in the royal chapel because the Quirinal, along with the rest of the palace, fell under papal interdiction. The king and queen were forced to worship in Santa Maria Maggiore, where, on one occasion, Queen Margherita was given the ceremonial reserved for foreign royalty. The Blacks refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian monarchy. When the Spanish ambassador would not allow the king and queen to pass through his anteroom to attend a benefit for Andalusian earthquake victims, masons had to cut an entry from the road into the embassy.

 

This feud continued for 59 years, long after the pope and the king had passed away. After the longest pontificate in modern history, Pius IX died on February 7, 1878. His body was buried temporarily in St. Peter’s grotto but moved in a night procession on July 13, 1881 to the Basilica of Saint Lawrence outside the Walls. When the cortege approached the Tiber, a gang of anticlerical radicals threatened to throw the coffin into the river but the militia prevented them. “Death to the Pope!” they cried. “Long live Italy!”

 

Ironically, Victor Emmanuel had predeceased Pio Nono, succumbing to malaria on January 9, 1878. To honor the Father of the Fatherland, the government built an immense mausoleum between Piazza Venezia and the Capitoline Hill. Made of dazzling white Brescia marble, to distinguish it from Rome’s ocher-colored travertine, the Vittoriano is an eyesore. Romans call it the Wedding Cake or the Typewriter. It is hollow to the core. The king’s corpse had deteriorated too quickly to be interred here.

 

What Rome really buried was the hope of unity. During the Sesquicentennial of the Risorgimento, radicals denounced the Vatican Secretary of State when he spoke at a September 20 ceremony. Across town, the Union of Christian and Center Democrats held a memorial for the 19 Papal Zouaves killed at Porta Pia.