Locked Up and Locked In: Of Roman Imprisonments and Liberations

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Locked Up and Locked In: Of Roman Imprisonments and Liberations Cristina Mazzoni (bio) If today Rome’s art treasures beckon travelers the world over, in the early modern period it was the presence of the martyrs’ remains that made this city such a popular travel destination. Foremost among these relics were of course those of Saint Peter, the first pope: he is quite spectacularly remembered in the basilica that bears his name. There are other places in Rome that display the mark of Peter’s passage, too. One of these is the Mamertine Prison: an unadorned, dark and damp cell, the oldest jail in Rome, carved into the slope of the Capitoline Hill in the fourth century BCE It is here that the Gaul leader Vercingetorix and the African King Jugurtha were incarcerated, and it is here, as legend tells, that the apostles Peter and Paul, held captive like ordinary criminals, awaited execution. Known as the Mamertine Prison since the medieval period, this jail was identified as the Carcer Tullianum in ancient Roman times. It was the top-security prison for the Roman state, consisting then, like today, of two rooms: a top one (the Carcer) made of travertine and tufa stone, and another below it (the Tullianum), a round structure, also made of stone and originally built around a natural spring of water. This spring was later regarded as miraculous because it was believed to originate, supernaturally, out of Saint Peter’s need to baptize his fellow prisoners. The Carcer and the Tullianum in turn lie below two other structures: the Chapel of the Holy Crucifix (named after a much-revered wooden crucifix once hanging on the façade of the Carcer) and, on top of that chapel, the Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami, Saint Joseph of the Carpenters. In her Notes from England and Italy (1869), Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, the painter, illustrator, and writer best known for her marriage to Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote at length of the Mamertine, concluding: “It made me faint to think how utterly impossible it would be to escape. It would be as easy to tear asunder a mountain as to break through these ponderous stones. I hope St. Peter was allowed a torch.”1 Discouraged by her husband from pursuing her interests in painting and writing, and impeded by the practical restrictions of caring for a busy family in a foreign country, one can imagine why Sophia was especially sensitive to the suffering brought on by constrictions and thus so moved by her visit to the Mamertine Prison. Darkness is what frightened [End Page 246] Sophia most, and through her hope that “St. Peter was allowed a torch,” she dwells on the metaphor of light as life, and death as but a temporary, and only partial, triumph of the night. For Sophia, jails meant more than physical imprisonment: the severe ground of the Mamertine represented a place of passage, a road to glory and not to destruction. The Mamertine’s darkness, for this New Englander, led to light as death brings on a life that cannot be lost again: “I hope St. Peter was allowed a torch. O wonderful revolution! He who was chained and martyred then, now rules Christendom from the throne of the most magnificent Cathedral in the world, and a hundred ever-burning lamps watch round his sacred grave, under the high altar, like so many sleepless eyes of seraphs. He who was in black darkness has light enough now, and having died for his Lord Jesus, he has found his life, which he can never lose again.” To stand within the Mamertine Prison can be today, as it was for Sophia some fourteen decades ago, an experience of the contrast between light and darkness and strength and weakness, unearthed in the hard stone clearly carved with great exertion, and in the effortlessly flowing, gentle spring of water. To be captured and to be free: many are the ways of human entrapment, and though some are not of stone, they are no less durable, no less confining. The complex ways of our spirit can make even the most privileged among us feel victimized and unable to change a seemingly...