The Frair’s Head Of Santa Maria Maggiore

“He who speaks from a window or a pulpit, or the top of a good name
or any high place, should speak wisely, if he speak at all, unto
those who pass.”

The Church of Santa Maria Maggiore “remounts,” as the Italians say, or can be traced back to 700 A.D., but it was enlarged and renewed by the architect Bueno in the twelfth century, and according to Pitré it was the germ of a new style of architecture which we find much refined (_ringentilata_) in Santa Maria del Fiore. “There were, regarding its bell-tower, which no longer exists, many tales and curious anecdotes, which might form a part of a fine collection of local legends.” There is still to-day on the wall above the little side-door facing the Via de’ Conti, a much worn head of stone, coming out of a round cornice, which is in all probability the one referred to in the following legend:

“There was once a condemned criminal being carried along to execution, and on the way passed before the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. One of the friars put his head out of a little round window, which was just large enough for it to pass through, and this was over the entrance on the lesser side of the church, facing the Via de’ Conti. As the condemned passed by the friar said:

“‘Date gli da bere, ’un morira mai.’
“‘Give him a drink and he never will die.’

“To which the condemned replied:

“‘E la testa di costì tu ’un la levrai’.
“‘And thy head shall stick where it is for aye.’

“And so it came to pass that they could not get the head of the friar back through the hole, so there he died. And some say that after they got the body out they carried his likeness in stone and put it there in the little round window, in remembrance of the event, while others think that it is the friar himself turned to stone—_chi sa_?”

* * * * *

The conception of a stone head having been that of a person petrified for punishment is of the kind which would spring up anywhere, quite independently of tradition or borrowing; hence it is found the world over. That ideas of the kind may be common, yet not in common, nor yet uncommon, is shown by the resemblance of the remark of the friar:

“Give him a drink and he never will die,”—

which was as much as to say that inebriation would cause him to forget his execution—to a verse of a song in “Jack Sheppard”:

“For nothing so calms,
Our dolorous qualms,
And nothing the transit to Tyburn beguiles,
So well as a drink from the bowl of Saint Giles.”

There is a merrier tale, however, of Santa Maria Maggiore, and one which is certainly far more likely to have occurred than this of the petrified _pater_. For it is told in the ancient _Facetiæ_ that a certain Florentine nobleman, who was a jolly and reckless cavalier, had a wife who, for all her beauty, was _bisbetica e cattiva_, capricious and spiteful, malicious and mischievous, a daughter of the devil, if there ever was one, who, like all those of her kind, was very devout, and went every day to confession in Santa Maria Maggiore, where she confessed not only her own sins, but also those of all her neighbours. And as she dwelt with vast eloquence on the great wickedness of her husband—having a tongue which would serve to sweep out an oven, or even a worse place {150}—the priest one day urged the husband to come to confession, thinking that it might lead to more harmony between the married couple. With which he complied; but when the priest asked him to tell what sins he had committed, the cavalier answered, “There is no need of it, Padre; you have heard them all from my wife many a time and oft, and with them a hundred times as many which I never dreamed of committing—including those of all Florence.”

It was in the first Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which stood on the site of the present, that San Zenobio in the fourth century had walled into the high altar an inestimable gift which he had received from the Pope. This was “the two bodies of the glorious martyrs Abdon and Sennen, who had been thrown unto wild beasts, which would not touch them, whereupon they were put to death by swords in the hands of viler human beasts.” I may remark by the way, adds the observant Flaxius, that relics have of late somewhat lost their value in Florence. I saw not long ago for sale a very large silver casket, stuffed full of the remains of the holiest saints, and the certificates of their authenticity, and I was offered the whole for the value of the silver in the casket—the relics being generously thrown in! And truly the mass of old bones, clay, splinters, nails, rags with blood, bits of wood, dried-up eyes, _et cetera_, was precisely like the Voodoo-box or conjuring bag of an old darkey in the United States. But then the latter was heathen! “That is a _very_ different matter.”