DE PUELLA ROMAE REPERTA - A RENAISSANCE POEM INSPIRED BY A REMARKABLE FIND IN THE YEAR 1485 A.D.

Abstract

For the day of April 16, 1485, the secretary of the city of Rome (senatus populique Romani scriba), Stephanus lnfessura, wrote the following lengthy entry in his diary: "On this day the brethren of the monastery of S. Maria Nuova ordered an excavation on a piece of ground belonging to them which is situated on the Via Appia approximately five or six miles outside the Porta Appia. After they had totally destroyed a funeral monument 1 . situated near the road, they found deep inside the foundations a marble coffin covered with a marble lid and sealed with molten lead. When they had opened the coffin they found the intact body of a woman""'coveredwith an aromatic substance, and wearing a kind of golden cap or fillet on her head which was surrounded by blonde hair. Her cheeks had the rosy colour of flesh as if she were still alive, the eyes and also the mouth were slightly opened and one could pull the tongue out of the mouth and watch it return to its previous position. The nails of the hands and feet were hard and white and the arms could be moved up and down as if she had only just died. She was kept many days in the Palace of the Conservatori2 where, as a result of exposure to the air, the colour of her face turned black. Nevertheless neither the fat nor the flesh of the body putrefied. The Conservatori had placed the body in its own sarcophagus on a place near the cistern3 in the cloister of the building. Pope lnnocentius ordered them, however, to remove it by night and carry it to an unknown place outside not far from the Porta Pinciana, where a pit had been dug, and to bury it there. The body was believed to be that of lulia, daughter of Cicero. During those first days when she had been found and transported to the Conservatori Palace, such a large number of people anxious to see her converged on the Capitol that all over the square on the top sellers of oils and other articles were plying their trade.4 According to what was told the strongly smelling mixture with which she had been covered had been made of myrrh and olive oil or, according to others, of aloe and oil of turpentine, which has a very strong odour by which one can become slightly drugged.