mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
in installments. Altogether, the dowry was worth about six thousand
scudi.
“The marriage was celebrated in Rome with all the pomp possible,”
Gregorio Leti reported, “and with the entire satisfaction of both parties.”
4 She was now Lady Olimpia—Donna Olimpia in Italian—which
accounted for her entire satisfaction. She was a noblewoman, and no
one would ever dare to try sticking her in a convent again.
Olimpia found herself the mistress of the old Pamphili family manse in
the Piazza Navona, the heart of Rome. The site had a long and illustrious
history. In a.d. 86, Emperor Domitian built a fifteen-thousand-seat
stadium for athletic games called agoni. The lozenge-shaped arena was
covered with travertine marble and adorned with statues of the gods
and heroes. The emperor presided from his podium wearing his purple
Greek toga, a crown of golden laurel leaves on his head.
When Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire
to Constantinople in a.d. 330, the agoni stadium fell into disuse.
Enterprising builders recognized it immediately as a free quarry, as
most of imperial Rome had become. They arrived with horse-drawn
carts, pried off the travertine blocks, and hauled them off to be used in
houses and churches.
By the fifth century a tradition had arisen that a fourteen-year-old
Christian virgin named Agnes had been martyred in the stadium in
a.d. 303 during the persecution of Emperor Diocletian. When the executioner
exposed Agnes nude to the hoots of the crowd, the angels
made copious waves of hair sprout from her scalp to hide her nudity.
But the angels didn’t stay the headsman’s axe. It is almost certain that
the fictional Agnes developed from a corruption of the word agoni.
A little chapel was made to honor the saint under an arch in the decaying
amphitheater, which in time became the tiny Church of Saint
Agnes, located a few doors from Olimpia’s new home. Those who still
venerate Agnes’s purported skull today must be aware that something is
remarkably odd about it, since it is the skull of a seven-month fetus. But
some legends are just too good to let facts interfere with them.
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