Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Ex libris sticker in from. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> My greatest difficulty by far has been deciding what to leave out of this history of nineteen hundred years. Unfortunately a good many prosaic particulars are expected from the chronicler of a single building even one of such diverse religious symbolism and romantic association as St Peter’s Rome. I found in the process of writing that facts names and dates simply refused to be ignored. They swarmed around me like a cloud of gnats. The more I swatted them the more persistently they made themselves felt. Ar last 1 gave way to them in despair. So there they remain an abiding testimony of their victory and my defeat over several years’ abortive effort to reduce them to a minimum. In consequence many picturesque incidents which came to light during my prolonged studies have had to be sacrificed to drier data. I refer to those little kaleidoscopic scenes of the past which bring constant delight and sometimes edification. There is for example that of King Theodoric stagger- ing and sweating under the weight of two massive candelabra which the engaging Ostrogoth insisted on personally handing to a cool and supercilious pope in old St Peter’s Or that of England’s first royal pilgrim to Rome King Caedwalla who was so smitten with the city’s beauty that he refused to go home abdicated was baptized and ultimately buried in St Peter’s in a snow white garment. I see too the horrified English pilgrims recovering pieces of the True Cross strewn in the mud after a Roman riot and the good Pope St Nicholas I allowing them in reward to take a piece back to England for their king. Then I like to imagine the expression on the face of Pope Eugenius IV when on his return to Rome at the end of the Western Schism he came upon the wolves disinterring and eating corpses in the Vatican graveyard. Or the pleasure on that of Pope Leo X as he watched the Portuguese king’s present of a white elephant bend the knee to him three times in the piazza. Or the expression on the faces of the cardinals who were obliged to witness Julius III bestowing the red hat upon the seventeen-year-old keeper of His Holiness’s pet ape. I enjoy too dwelling upon the consternation of Pius IV’s attendants as they desperately tried to keep pace with the sexagenarian pontiff who would climb in midsummer just for fun to the top of the cupola with the agility of a squirrel. These and countless other irrelevant incidents I may picture at leisure- now that my book is finished – while you I like to suppose will be grappling in the ensuing pages with matters of greater moment to the history of St Peter’s such as the number of pillars used in Constantine’s basilica or the vexed problem whether Michelangelo on his death- bed wanted the contour of his dome to be hemispherical or ovoid.