The coronation pageant descended the Capitoline and traveled the Via Sacra to the palazzo by the Castel Sant'Angelo, [ 1 ] where the Ponte women, the scribe, the barber's widow, the saddler, pruner, and goldsmith perhaps all paused to stare, and then it bridged the Tiber. The street lined with ancient tombs focused on the basilica of St. Peter, whose entrance faced east to greet the rising sun, designed so during the reign of Constantine to eclipse the Roman cult of solar Apollo with homage to the light of Christ.
Petrarch crossed the courtyard, passed the ablutionary font, and entered the royal door leading to the symbolic throne of God. He strode the long nave between twenty-two massive columns, all spoils of war, and beneath a double tier of frescoes depicting Old Testament episodes.
Once in the transept, flooded with sun through huge windows and oculi, he approached the altar and hung his laurel there. The gesture repeated the traditional vernal offering of the first fruits, as he said. By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. Petrarch hung his laurel on an abandoned altar. The See of Peter was vacant, its pope exiled in a parallel "Babylonian captivity" of the Church.
In a city teeming with processions, the most triumphal had been those marking papal coronations. The inaugurated pope, flanked by a.
Along the route he was cheered by the faithful, who were incensed profusely and showered with coins in remembrance of Peter's reply to the paralytic beggar, "I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have" Acts a. His vatic vocation was the restoration of the papacy to Rome for the pacification of Italy. The term of the papacy in exile at Avignon โ78 virtually coincided with the span of Petrarch's life โ He witnessed its entrenchment from the age of eight when in his father, an exiled Florentine notary, settled his family with other Italian expatriates in Carpentras, a town about fifteen miles distant.
