Fountains of Papal Rome — Background and Themes

e gardens of his mother, the noble Agrippina the elder, which lay along the northern side of the plain between the Janiculum and Mons Vaticanus. There it stood on the centre of the _spina_, the long, straight line stretching down the middle of the arena from the two opposite goals at either end. Caligula was assassinated before he could finish the circus and it was completed some thirteen years later by Nero, under whom it became the scene of those atrocities against the Christians which have rendered his reign infamous. St. Peter was crucified one year before the death of Nero. His cross was raised on the _spina_ of the circus at an exact distance between the two goals--_metas_--built at either end of the amphitheatre, and therefore, at the foot of the obelisk which stood on that spot.

Christian tradition handed down the description of the place “between the two goals” (inter duas metas). Now _meta_ was a name afterward given to tombs of pyramidal shape, two of which existed in mediæval Rome--one, that of Caius Cestius, still standing next to the present Protestant Cemetery, and the other in the Borgo Vecchio, destroyed later by Alexander VI. A straight line drawn from one of these tombs to the other has its centre in a point on the Janiculum, and therefore this spot was thought to be the exact location of St. Peter’s martyrdom. Even to-day visitors to the exquisite Tempietto of Bramante, erected in the cloister of the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, are shown below its pavement the very stone in which the cross of St. Peter was fixed. The legend of this location for the crucifixion of St. Peter grew up during the Middle Ages, a period in which all knowledge of the authentic site was entirely lost. Modern archæology has recently succeeded in locating this position and its topography can now be easily understood.

When the Emperor Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity, determined to build a basilica in honor of St. Peter, he planned to erect the edifice so that its centre should rise directly over the tomb of St. Peter, who, according to historical documents, was buried not far from the scene of his martyrdom. To do this, he found himself obliged to build so near the Circus of Caligula and Nero that the southern wall of his edifice corresponded exactly to the northern wall of the Circus. He therefore used this wall of the Circus as the southern foundation wall of his church. This naturally brought the southern side of the old St. Peter’s within a very short distance of the _spina_ of the Circus, on which stood the obelisk, with a chapel before it called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. The Chapel disappeared seven or eight centuries ago, but not before its true significance had been quite forgotten, and men supposed the name to refer not to the crucifixion of St. Peter but to the Crucifixion of Our Lord. An old engraving by Bonanni, antedating the reign of Sixtus V, shows the old Church of St. Peter on its southern side, with the obelisk, still tipped by its Pagan ball, standing in close proximity. When the plan for the new Church of St. Peter was accepted it was seen that the southern side of the great edifice would extend so far beyond the limits of the original church that it must entirely cover the spot on which the obelisk was standing; and as the connection of the obelisk with the martyrdom of St. Peter had long since been forgotten, Pope Sixtus V conceived the idea of moving the obelisk to a more conspicuous and important position.

Thus it came about that the obelisk now forms the central feature in the piazza before the Cathedral of Christendom; while the place of St. Peter’s crucifixion, that site of transcendent interest to all Christians, remains unidentified, buried beneath the masses of masonry composing the Baptistery on the southern side of the vast structure which bears St. Peter’s name.