Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds. Oretta Zanini De Vita
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the Apartment, where it was possible also to pleasurably enjoy rich playing tables and finally, at 12 o’clock, came the fourth generous distribution of chocolate, cookies, and other sweets, ending the great feast at daybreak, with the greatest and most sincere applause that could express the Nobility and the Masks assembled there.
The palace had been so sumptuously adorned for the occasion that for some days after the pope himself went to admire the decorations.
In the streets, bull races had long been replaced by barberi, famous riderless racehorses owned by the noble Roman families. The starting point of the race was Piazza del Popolo, where the stallions, cared for by special grooms called barbareschi, were paraded. At the signal, the horses were let out and ran down the Via Lata (the medieval name of the Via del Corso) to Piazza Venezia, between two wings of people who urged them on, while the nobles watched from the windows of the palazzi on either side of the street. The 1751 prize, won by the barbero of the Rospigliosi family, consisted of a gold brocade cloth in the fashion of the time.
At midcentury, the race was on among the noble families for possession of the best barberi to run during Carnival. And the victory in the race almost always preceded a distribution of wine and food to the people by the victor. The Rospigliosi won again in 1764, which was a year of great hunger, and the prince distributed large quantities of bread, in addition to the irreplaceable barrels of wine, for the occasion.
Outdoor games almost always ended with grandiose displays of fireworks, which the people watched from the osterias, where they were eating la tonnina con la cipolla (pickled tuna with onion), washed down with Castelli wine.
In the great palazzi, in addition to attending balls, participants played games of chance, such as bassetta, goffo, faraone, zecchinetta, and many others. These were the ruin of many nobles, who recklessly bet their ancestral palazzi and estates. The matter became so serious that the pope, Benedict XIV, was obliged to intervene with severe measures to keep the players, often high-ranking members of the clergy, from total ruin.
The Roman Carnival now makes us think of the flower of the European aristocracy, in whose honor parties and banquets multiplied, palazzi and courtyards were embellished in ever more costly and magnificent ways, transformed by contemporary painters, as fashion dictated, into idyllic scenes of Mount Parnassus.
From an issue of Cracas, the newspaper of the day, we learn that during the Carnival of 1784, in the course of a dinner hosted by the Venetian ambassador in honor of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Archduchess Anne Marie of Austria, the guests, “so as not to waste time changing the 124 dishes, [were] invited . . . to move to another room where there was another table.” This flabbergasted the guests, since the table was laden with serving dishes of gold and precious stones and with splendid antiques.
Private parties, banquets, and theatrical representations multiplied. Banquets were held in the boxes at the theater, while on the stage playwrights and musicians, from Goldoni, Metastasio, Ariosto, and Monti97 to Cherubini, Paisiello, and Piccinni,98 in whose operas women’s voices, finally, were heard, triumphed.
Feasts and “wardrobe” (alla guardarobba) parties—those at which only cold dishes and sweets were served—were held in the foyers of the theaters as well, most notably in the long-gone Alibert. Sumptuous meals were also served in the Piazza del Campidoglio, as had been the custom since the Renaissance, and it was a race to find the most prized ingredients to put on the menu, such as the trout from Lake Garda, which weighed twenty-six libbre, served at a meal at the Campidoglio offered by Don Abbondio Rezzonico.
The winds of revolution toned down the more garish aspects of the Roman Carnival. The horse races stayed, and those families who could afford it, even in a minor key, continued to organize banquets.
Then came Napoléon to threaten the papal throne. The citizenry waited with bated breath, and the Vatican diplomatic corps was even more nervous: it was impossible to think of stopping the wave of blows of the Napoleonic victories advancing on Rome. And when the French army, during Carnival of 1798, under the command of Joseph Bonaparte, took up quarters at Monte Mario, the pope, before ordering the clearing out of the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo, thought to sweeten the enemy by sending him a gift of “40 bottles of wine, a milk-fed calf, and a sturgeon.”
But the temporal power of the Church was over. The Jews of the Ghetto, right in the middle of Carnival, in front of the synagogue, raised the tree of liberty accompanied with a generous distribution of free wine and refreshments.
The Jacobin feasts that were to follow moved from the houses of the aristocracy to those of the emerging bourgeoisie. Despite the introduction of new customs, however, the banquets were no less rich. During Carnival of 1802, Count Bolognetti hosted a banquet in his home to which, as a Carnival game, each guest was invited to bring a dish. This game was almost certainly the origin of the modern custom by which each person brings a different dish to dinner with friends. The dinner at the Bolognetti house enjoyed such success that it was later repeated and copied.
Money for masks flowed like water. The masquerade of 1805 made it into the annals: its theme was “the banquet of the gods,” painted and directed by Antonio Canova.
With the arrival of the French in Rome, and following a moment of stasis, Carnival resumed its old splendor, visited by ever more famous guests: there was not a king or emperor in Europe or the New World who did not travel to Rome in this period; and this time the doors of the great noble houses were open to the haute bourgeoisie as well. Barberi races and banquets were no longer restricted to Carnival, and on June 8, 1811, on the occasion of the birth of Napoléon’s son, proclaimed the king of Rome in his cradle, the French general Miollis, in charge of Rome, organized a barberi race and a banquet on the Campidoglio for 150 persons, chosen from among both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. In the evening, the dome, facade, and colonnade of Saint Peter’s were resplendent with thousands of torches, while a huge, luminous Catherine wheel lit up Castel Sant’Angelo.
No longer were the social classes rigidly separated and isolated to banquet in their respective palazzi. Rather, the nobles dined increasingly frequently in trattorias. Chigi wrote in his diary of a dinner held at the “trattoria of the Armellino, at the arch of Carbognano, 21 guests, 1 scudo and 65 bajocchi a head, including the women.”99
The Carnival of 1816 was enlivened by the passionate performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia commissioned by Duke Sforza Cesarini from the twenty-four-year-old Gioacchino Rossini, rising star of music. Success came at the second performance, as we learn from a letter of Rossini to the soprano Isabella Colbrand:
My Barbiere gains from day to day. In the evening all you hear in the streets is Almaviva’s serenade. Figaro’s aria “Largo al factotum della città” is every baritone’s war-horse. Girls go to sleep sighing “Una voce poco fa” and wake up with “Lindoro mio sará.” But what interests me a good deal more than the music is the discovery I’ve made of a new salad, the recipe for which I hasten to send you. I take oil from Provence, English mustard, French vinegar, a little lemon, pepper, and salt: beat everything together well and add some truffles cut up into small pieces. These truffles give the dressing a fragrance that sends a gourmand into ecstasy. The Cardinal Secretary of State, whose acquaintance I have made in the last few days, gave me his apostolic blessing for this discovery.
The Roman Carnival took place increasingly in the theaters and music halls, where Rossini launched Tancredi and La Cenerentola. After the theater, the old patrician families, ruined by gambling and no longer in any position to afford the parties they used to give, could enjoy the banquets offered by Principe Torlonia, the wealthy banker who had financed the needy scions of the great houses.
It was in those years that the governor of Rome banned the throwing of plaster stones in the streets, replacing them with coriander seeds covered with flour and sugar.
Political anticlericalism, which arose with the Roman Republic, was transferred to the table, and in trattorias the rage was a type of pasta that is still known today as strozzapreti.100
With the coming of the Kingdom of Italy, old papal Rome disappeared, the number of inhabitants increased disproportionately,