mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
entered the Eternal City in the returning pope’s train were shocked at
its utter ruin. The writer Aretino described Rome not by its impressive
ancient title of caput mundi—the head of the world—but as coda
mundi—the rear end of the world.
The narrow thoroughfares of Rome were often obstructed by mountainous
heaps of ancient buildings collapsed by earthquakes or time.
Streets were also choked by man-made obstructions: porticoes, or walkways
over the street connecting houses, and balconies jutting out well
into the street. Sometimes a road was completely blocked when a home
owner, eager for a larger house, built an addition across the entire
street.
Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484) began an ambitious program to
clean and widen the roads, a program that succeeding popes would
continue. The maestri di strada, or street controllers, arranged for ancient
rubble blocking the thoroughfares to be carted away. They tore
down all the illegal home additions that had obstructed city roads. They
forced citizens to clean up the manure, sewage, and refuse they had
thrown into the street, and then imposed a hefty fine. The city hired
dust carts to pick up the garbage and dump it where it was supposed to
go—into the Tiber River, the main source of water for household consumption.
Fortunately, Sixtus and the popes who followed him repaired aqueducts,
opening up new areas of the city for home building and commerce.
Starting in the sixteenth century, cardinals built sumptuous
palaces on the hills, enjoying fresh breezes and the cachet of living
where Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Cato had lived fifteen hundred years
earlier. Artists flocked to Rome from Florence and Venice, highly paid
by popes to turn the heap of ruined monuments into a cultural center
worthy of its glorious past. The population increased, art flourished,
and business thrived.
But in 1527 Rome was invaded by a new horde of plundering barbarians,
the troops of Emperor Charles V, who was angry at Pope Clement
VII for siding with France in a political dispute. They murdered tens of
thousands of citizens, stole their wealth, and destroyed some thirty
thousand houses, or about half the buildings in the city. The German
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