R. A. Scotti Read Free Page A

malodorous as a cesspool.
    Yards of canvas like the sails of a Roman galley billowed over the excavated earth. The wind slapped the canvas and swirled through the construction yard by the papal palace, raising a fine white dust that turned the site into a flour bowl. At first light, April 18, 1506, a ribbon of cardinals began snaking across the cluttered yard. Trailed by an entourage of secretaries and servants, they picked their way around the ancient stones, pilfered from the Colosseum on the pope’s orders, around the mounds of travertine carted from quarries in Tivoli and Michelangelo’s boulders of milk-white marble.
    By dawn, every prominent figure in Rome had converged on the site. Cesare Borgia, the vicious bastard son of the previous pope, was in the audience, feigning goodwill. Rumor was that Julius held him hostage. There was a contingent from Florence: the ambassador and wit, Niccolò Machiavelli; and the heirs of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and his bastard cousin Giulio. Both would become deplorable popes. A third future pope, the elegant young monsignor Alessandro Farnese, who would become Paul III, attended with his mistress. Julius’s current favorites—the banker Agostino Chigi, on his way to becoming the richest man in Rome, and the architect Donato Bramante, who was designing the new Basilica—occupied places of honor beside members of the pope’s family, his youngest daughter, Felice, and his cardinal-cousin Raffaele Riario, the chief financial officer of the Church.
    To the blare of trumpets and the ring of applause, a line of thirty-five cardinals processed to the lip of the excavation pit. The wind whipped their crimson cassocks and swirled through the crowd, carrying gossip with the dust. The renegade artist Buonarroti had absconded in the night like a criminal, his contract unfulfilled, his work in limbo. Pope Julius was in a fury, his day of glory spoiled by the sculptor’s surreptitious flight.
    Behind the cardinals, carried aloft in the sedia gestatoria, Julius towered above the crowd like a thunderhead and tossed commemorative coins into upstretched hands. He was sixty-three years old, an old man by Cinquecento standards, but he was built like a bull—powerful neck, powerful shoulders—and his tendency was to charge like a bull, trampling impediments and opponents alike. He never retreated except to regroup, to gain time and disarm his enemies. He charmed. He finessed. He even managed an occasional moment of humility, if it assured that his will would prevail. But he was never deterred.
    As bearers lowered the chair by the lip of the pit, he stepped out, shrugging violently to shake the dust off his cope. The heavy brocade embroidered with gold thread was beginning to look like a baker’s smock. Two masons descended first, followed by two cardinals, and then the pope, grim-faced. He climbed down the ladder carefully, his ringed fingers grasping the rungs, encumbered by the heavy clothing, the weighty tiara, descending lower, lower yet. The Ager Vaticanus was marshy, the earth in the pit damp, the air close.
    As Julius disappeared into the trough, the crowd pressed forward for a better view. Dirt flew, striking his tiara. For a terrifying moment, he thought the sides would cave in and bury him. The foundation pit would become his tomb, not the magnificent sarcophagus abandoned without permission the night before by the impudent Buonarroti.
    The trench was “like a chasm in the earth,” the papal master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, recorded in his journal, “and as there was much anxiety felt lest the ground should give way, Pope Julius thundered out to those above not to come too near the edge.”
    An urn holding a dozen commemorative medals, signifying the twelve apostles, was lowered into the pit. Cast of bronze and gilded, the medals featured on one side an image of the pope and on the other a picture of the