mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
There they were buried very deeply to prevent the corpses’ miasmas
from seeping up through the ground and contaminating the air.
Jews were always viewed with suspicion whenever an epidemic
struck; in late June they were all walled up in their Trastevere ghetto to
prevent them from intentionally spreading the plague among good
Christians by throwing dead bodies down their wells. But after three
weeks the situation in the ghetto was becoming desperate due to lack of
food. On July 18 the Roman government deputized fourteen Jews of
respectable character to leave the ghetto to bring back food and medicine.
In the cramped conditions, plague was rampant; some eight hundred
of the ghetto’s four thousand residents would die.
As the number of plague victims grew, the Carceri Nuovi, Innocent’s
model prison, which had recently been completed by Pope Alexander,
was sequestered as another lazaretto. Though in the heart of the city, it
offered spacious cells with balconies and fresh air facing an inner courtyard,
from which, it was assumed, the miasmas would not spread to
neighboring houses. Cardinal Decio Azzolini was named superintendent
of the new lazaretto.
In September 1656 Giacinto Gigli and his family obtained permission
to go to a vineyard outside the city gates for fifteen days. “I heard
news that 100 or more were dying of the plague every day,” he wrote.
“When I returned to Rome with all my family safe and sound, by the
grace of God, it was a terrible thing to see. The cadavers were being carried
in carts covered with waxed cloth with a cross on top, pulled by
horses, and big bells were rung so that the people on the streets knew to
stand aside as the carts passed by on the way to Saint Paul’s meadow to
bury them. . . . I could relate many other things but I will not because
they are disgusting things.” 8
As the plague raged into the fall, Camillo found that in addition to
worrying about infection, he was suffering serious financial problems.
Pope Alexander had forced him personally to pay the costs of building
Saint Agnes, and given the structural problems, the amount continued
to skyrocket. In October 1656 Camillo wrote his mother that
he had sold many properties to pay for the construction, though “the
jewels they cannot touch because my wife has taken them away. The
[ 402 ]