mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
Christian baptism sanctifying the ancient pagan arena. Olimpia, casting
her glance to the left out of her parlor windows as the fountain
rose, must have sighed with contentment.
But the people of Rome were not content. Just moving the obelisk
cost twelve thousand scudi, and the fountain cost an additional eighty
thousand, which the pope squeezed out of the Romans by placing a
special tax on them in the middle of a famine. One morning the engineers
arrived at the Piazza Navona to find a placard on the obelisk that
read, “This obelisk is consecrated in eternity in the Piazza Navona of
Innocent at the cost of the innocents.” 14 Pasquino cried: “We don’t want
an obelisk and a fountain head. Give us bread, bread, bread!” 15
Though Olimpia was not able to create a real garden in the Piazza
Navona, she found an opportunity elsewhere to build one of the most
beautiful gardens of the seventeenth century. With Camillo back in Rome
but instructed not to involve himself with anything important, Olimpia
took over the design of his gardens at his pleasure villa, Bel Respiro.
Unhappy over the fact that curious passersby on the Via Aurelia could
look up the sloping hill and stare at her villa, she wanted more privacy
out front and a fashionable sunken garden out back.
To this end she had hundreds of workmen cart thousands of wheelbarrows
full of dirt out of her backyard and dump them on the slope in
the front of the house. Then she built a massive retaining wall, which
was all that the gawkers below would now see. She planted the sunken
gardens with rare blooms, fragrant trees, and thick hedges, and decorated
with fountains, statues, and grottoes. She even placed a fountain
on the lower floor of the villa, which opened onto the terrace. There her
guests could relax or dine to the playful sound of falling water and look
out over her acres of stunning sunken gardens.
Many of the statues adorning her gardens were recent finds. It seemed
that whenever a spade hit dirt in or around Rome, the glories of the ancient
past resurfaced. In 1649, excavators digging in the Baths of Trajan
found a room with a floor of lapis lazuli and fifty-four intact statues.
Cemeteries were unearthed on the Via Latina, each tomb bursting with
carved urns, sarcophagi, frescoes, inscriptions, vases, and jewels. In both
cases, construction workers immediately sent word to Olimpia, who
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