What I Learned from ‘La Papessa,’ the Woman Who Ran the Vatican

On my first walk in Rome, I felt a strange sense of belonging and the beautiful relief of being far from the tired familiar. Arriving in a new country in a fragile emotional state, I clung to signs and signals, locals and legends, anything really, for comfort. I thought about the lives of the people who walked those same stones before me. Bakers. Masons. Footmen. Muses. Artists. Slaves. Gladiators. Clergymen. Concubines. Thieves. Vestal Virgins. Believing that I could commune with these ghosts made me less afraid to be alone there.

But I was alone. I had arrived that day with two suitcases and a steadfast determination to make this foreign place my new home. I was heart-soft, that sad step beyond heartbroken when you’re letting everything and everyone in. I was desperately looking for deeper meaning, so I found it everywhere. Heartbreak had split me open and made me completely soft, like an overripe kumquat. A heart without a shield.

Right before moving from Canada to Italy, I had worked at a temp job assisting five busy oncologists. The patients and their family members would phone—their voices cracking, desperate for comfort; for a miracle—and I committed their stories to memory, letting some of their pain lodge in my heart and throat. The charts I sorted and the dictations I typed out, describing tumors that were ravaging human bodies and lives, pushed me to tears in the bathroom on my lunch break. He was no longer the reason I cried.

The move to Rome was part of my mission to find something that would let me know that losing my house, my money and, most upsetting, my dog, to my two-timing ex-boyfriend were all shitty things I could get over, not life-ruining events I’d be stuck rewinding and replaying forever. I’d put an ocean between myself and the man who once threw a large box at my head because I’d asked why he’d bought me such an expensive gift, who hated my family and friends, who lied to me endlessly, and who had emotionally tortured me for four years. Rome was the right move because it felt like the only move. And it wasn’t running away, I told myself, if the experience could enrich me in some way; if I could learn and recover there.

I would recover in Rome, and I would also harden slightly. Because that’s what deeply sensitive, heart-soft people have to do to survive, eventually. My mom had often told me that I needed to toughen up, stop being so sensitive. How do you do that, I wondered, without blocking the world out? How do you do that and remain yourself?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to toughen up. But I did want to learn to be stronger and more self-sufficient. I found my guide in an old dusty bookstore in Rome’s historic center. The book was The Mistress of the Vatican by Eleanor Herman, and the name of my new muse, Olimpia Maidalchini.

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Olimpia Maidalchini was born in a small Italian town outside of Rome in 1591 to a family of no wealth and little influence. The money her father did make, he intended to leave solely to his son, meaning that Olimpia and her two sisters were dowerless. At the time, women without dowries to marry living men were strongly encouraged to wed Jesus (who was considered a better bargain) by becoming nuns. In seventeenth-century Italy, single women were viewed as money-leaching, horny sex vixens, and those without husbands to control them, it was believed, desperately needed the containment of convents.

Forcing your daughter into nun life was all well and legal before the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563 and reformed many of the Church’s outdated practices, revitalizing it in the wake of Protestantism. After Trent, no one was supposed to force a woman to enter a monastery, but of course they still did. Even though Olimpia was born decades later, her father tried everything in his power to compel her into the convent—the thought of which horrified the feisty teenager.

These were not Fraulein Maria’s abbeys. They were places where young women were often holed up in what looked like prison cells, removed from the community and made to renounce their families. They weren’t allowed to make friends at the convent, would be punished for gossiping, and were denied all contact with the outside world in the name of Jesus. Many nuns would adopt the chickens they raised for eggs as pets because they were so starved for love. Despite this, some women still saw convents as a step up to marrying a mean mess of a man and having his children. But for Olimpia, who was interested in science, math, business, and finances, who excelled at understanding and dealing with people, it was out of the question. When she refused to surrender herself, her father hired a priest to be with her at all times and extol the virtues of Godly devotion.

Olimpia wrote to a local bishop complaining that not only was her father defying the Council of Trent, but the priest hired to help sway her into nunhood had, in fact, tried to molest her. The appalled bishop escalated the complaint to the Holy Tribunal and reprimanded her father. The priest was sent to jail, his career over. Olimpia was free.

Women who defied their families at this time were few and far between, and those who did were often punished severely. What’s perhaps even more amazing than Olimpia’s boldness is the fact that a teenager in 1600s Italy only had to write a letter of complaint to a Bishop about almost being assaulted by a priest to get that priest punished. She was believed. In a time when women couldn’t vote, be single, or own land, let alone wield power over or in patriarchal institutions.

At this point in Olimpia’s story, she became a sort of superhero among survivors for me; a real-life, Roman Jessica Jones. I remain envious of her outcome. So many of us have reported sexual assault only to be disbelieved and ostracized, or have not reported to avoid the trauma of an unknown but likely unpleasant outcome. I reported my assault and stood trial against a babysitter who molested me at seven years old, rehashing the trauma to a courtroom full of strangers, having my credibility challenged by his lawyer. He got off with community service hours. At seven, I was just starting to grasp that life was often not fair, especially for women. Many of us don’t get the chance for revenge, justice, or even goddamn peace.

For me, Olimpia came to represent an immutable female force against the patriarchy who somehow managed to succeed, throughout her entire life, where men wanted to hold her down and see her fail. After being freed of the Holy path, Olimpia married, had two children, lost both in infancy, and soon became a young, rich widow. Had she been closer to forty, she would have been able to be independent—as women of that age were thought washed-up hags, no man would want to put their members near. According to Herman, at the time, the belief was that a young widow like Olimpia “had known the pleasures of coitus and would likely do anything to enjoy them again.” And if she managed to avoid the pleasures of coitus, she would “break out into pimples and lose her mind as the naughty vapors rose from her private parts up to her head.”

So Olimpia needed another husband, stat. She found that man in the imaginatively named Pamphilio Pamphili, who hailed from a formerly noble Roman family that had fallen from grace. Pamphilio, pushing fifty, was all too happy to marry a rich twenty-year-old lady. The Pamphilis were once on top of the Roman pecking order as descendants of Pope Alexander VI (otherwise known as the infamous Rodrigo Borgia). But popes came and went, and their power and the subsequent riches bequeathed unto their dynasties survived or perished at the hands of their predecessors. The Pamphilis had become a fallen name without any serious cash flow behind it until this rich, shrewd widow married into their family and took them higher up the Roman power structure than they’d ever been.

Pamphilio’s brother, Gianbattista, was a priest and lawyer trained in canon law, and he quickly came to rely on Olimpia’s calculating mind for every single move he made. Of course, the gossips of the time called her his mistress. In truth, she was his advisor, instructing and funding him to make moves that helped him become a bishop, then a cardinal—and finally, in 1644, she made the behind-the-scenes deals that would ultimately secure his post as Pope Innocent X. After the conclave, a prominent cardinal at the time, Cardinal Bichi announced to the court of France via letter: “Gentlemen, we have just elected the first female pope!”

On Wikipedia, Olimpia is credited only with infusing Innocent X’s papal reign with her womanly vices: “The avarice of his female counselor gave to his reign a tone of oppression and sordid greed.” This isn’t all wrong. Greedy, power-hungry, and not kindly in the way a holy figure might aim to be, Olimpia was the business behind the throne. That girl who started from the bottom loved money and made sure her house and deeds reflected her brother-in-law’s popely position. She turned Pamphili palazzo into a noble dwelling. And she had her brother-in-law commission the artists that would turn the Piazza Navona, which back then was a dirty, crowded market, into the beautiful, fancy-fountained tourist haven it is today.

She also gave money to dowerless girls, so they wouldn't have to enter convents. She improved living conditions for nuns, and put the prostitutes of Rome under her protection by allowing them to use the Pamphili coat of arms. And she had a wonderful sense of humor, delighting in putting on elaborate plays (designed by the likes of Gian Lorenzo Bernini) that made fun of her and her contemporaries. Despite this, in her the people of Rome found a scapegoat for all of their civic frustrations. A woman was running the Vatican, and therefore she was to blame when things went wrong.

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Learning about Olimpia gave me a strong, powerful, defiant woman to focus on while living in the city and country that invented the Madonna/Whore complex. Olimpia was neither, although some tried to make her into the latter. We can see fragments of her story repeated over and over—recently, in the female tropes that were dragged out during the 2016 election, and in the vilification of women who have spoken out against powerful male abusers.

Of all the ghosts I felt and wondered about while living in Rome, I saw Olimpia as my own guardian angel. I counted on her to look out for me, and all women who dare to be themselves and stick their necks out. If she could go from poor to “Papessa,” I could find the strength to put the past behind me and live well in a foreign country.

And I did, although it wasn’t all that hard to live well in Rome. I lived in Trastevere, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, with two young Italian women. Our seventeenth-century apartment had old shutter windows and an ingenious little galley kitchen that would have been at home in an IKEA showroom. There was a bar underneath us, but eventually I adapted to the random street noise. Piazza Navona became a place I visited almost daily. I walked through it before or after teaching gigs, and not just because of Olimpia and its overall magic vibe, but because the area is also home to my most treasured gelato spot—which I happened to find the same day I found the book on Olimpia during my first walk in Rome.

Once I settled into the rhythm of Rome, which is equal parts frenetic and tranquil, I began to find joy again in everything around me. It felt as close as my life has ever been to a fairy tale, even as I was observing other people live theirs. I found joy watching multigenerational families out for walks together after dinner, or seeing priests and nuns giggling in piazzas while eating gelato; I tasted joy in the truly mind-blowing pizza, pasta, wine, cappuccino and in apperitivo hour; I smelled it in the scent of fresh-made candy that wafted into my bedroom window at three o’clock every afternoon, though I never did discover its source; I heard joy, and experienced a lot of personal embarrassment, while learning a language so full and flowery that my actual voice changed into its Disney version when I spoke it. I made a host of expat friends, found lovely souls bound together by the strange freedom in being far away from home and enjoying it. I made friends with Italians, who pronounced my name properly and beautifully, pushed me to embrace and respect my family’s culture in ways I really hadn’t before, and also taught me how to deal with Rome’s aggressive catcallers (with a menacing disregard for their existence).

It was a full life there. So full that I didn’t date at all that year. Before Italy, I had gone from living with my dad to living with a man who didn’t treat me well; I’d never truly been by myself or in charge of myself. Italy is a fantastical distraction from all that ails you, if you can handle the pace. There were times when I felt stressed out that I wasn’t more stressed out, and I’d have to remind myself to stop listening to my North American-trained brain for just a little while longer.

A few years ago, Pope Francis had to end the tradition of releasing peace doves from Vatican windows because seagulls circling above would immediately murder them, horrifying onlookers. Seagulls, the dumbest birds in Finding Nemo, apparently had the tenacity to take over the entire Eternal City. To survive and get ahead in Rome, one of the oldest and trickiest cities in the world, I think one must possess some of this bawdy seagull pluck.

A dove, specifically one with an olive branch in its mouth, is the symbol of the Pamphilis. Olimpia might have married into this family, but she herself was more of a seagull—focused on survival and ready to pounce at opportunity when and where she saw it. And so, I have learned, am I.

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Sources

All information about Olimpia and her story taken from Eleanor Herman’s Mistress of the Vatican.

Other historical events mentioned: Council of Trent

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