VILLA 
PAMPHILJ DORIA, 
ROME. 
“J T makes one’s hair stand on end,” says Edmond 
About in his ‘* Rome Contemporaine,” “ to 
read the figures of the dowries with which 
the Jesuit decision, during the reign of 
Innocent X., permitted the Pope to enrich the 
various members of his House.” It was laid down 
as his privilege, to assure the future of his family by 
his savings from the Holy See. According to this 
judgment, the pontiff, without being considered over- 
lavish, might spend 400,000 francs a year, and might 
give a dowry of goo,ooo francs to each of his 
nieces. The Pope, therefore, set about founding the 
Pamphilj family, and in this laudable work he was 
ably assisted by his sister-in-law, Olimpia Pamphilj, 
one of those strange personalities which stands out 
from the past in a vignette and leaves an impression 
fresh and vivid after the lapse of more than two 
hundred years. 
Olimpia was born in 1594 at Viterbo; her 
father, Andrea Maidalchini, was a man of no 
particular importance, and his daughter was at first 
destined for a convent, but though taken there as a 
child, she had the strength of mind to resist 
violently, and finding she could make an impression 
in no other way, she accused her confessors of 
making love to her, and soon got the character of 
a dangerous inmate whom the nuns were thankful to 
get rid of. She married Paolo Nini, a noble of 
Viterbo. Both he and her little son died almost 
immediately. She soon after married Pamfilio 
Pamphilj, a soldier, who seems to have been a 
rough and unkind husband, and who died in 1639, 
leaving Donna Olimpia with three sons. She is 
forty-five before we hear much of her, but for many 
years past she had been gaining that influence, which 
made her fortune, over her brother-in-law, the abbé, 
who became Pope five years after Pamfilio’s death. 
When her husband died, Olimpia was still a 
young and beautiful woman, but she gave up 
all idea of pleasure, renouncing all weaknesses of sex, 
only going into the world when it was politic to do 
so, devoting all her energies to becoming a power 
and influence in the life of her exalted brother-in- 
law and to Innocent X., melancholy, undecided, 
her firm, optimistic nature, full of cheerfulness 
and sympathy, soon made her absolutely neces- 
sary. When the Pope was elected, the people 
swarmed according to custom to exercise their 
privilege of sacking the Pamphilj palace, and it 
was Olimpia who had prudently removed all the 
valuable furniture and tapestries, leaving them only 
rubbish to prey upon. 
From the first she established a splendid 
position for herself, only asked the most exalted 
persons to share her banquets, and Cardinals and 
magnates, say the contemporary chronicles, bowed 
before her, as her chair, with a baldaquin over it, 
was borne into the halls of the greatest nobles and 
the palaces of ambassadors. 
She lived in the Pamphilj palace in Piazza 
ee and the diarists of the time record many 
her visits to the Vatican and the Pope’s in 
return to her, It seems, they say, as if she was 
an integral part of his grandeur. After every 
event, every ceremony of importance, he would 
come and sup with Donna Olimpia, sometimes she 
would carry him off to spend the day in the garden 
of a villa, together they visited the great artists of 
the day. Olimpia was received everywhere, and 
even had permission to enter monasteries where 
women were not admitted, but where she was 
entertained by the monks at luncheon. What 
her real relations with Innocent had been in the 
past remains undecided and is comparatively unim- 
portant. At the time of his accession he was 
nearly seventy, and it is easy to account for the 
ascendancy of a brilliant, attractive woman, devoting 
all her tact and talent to pleasing and helping and 
advising the man whose coarse, obstinate, and weak 
face is immortalised for us on the magnificent 
canvas of Velasquez. The Roman people hated 
her for her power over the Pope, for her rapacity 
and her ostentatious magnificence, and made many 
pasquinades, plays upon her name—Olimpia, impia 
(impious Olimpia), representing her occupied 
with making hay in the sunshine, arranging mar- 
riages for her sons, securing the red hat for her 
brother. In one caricature, nailed to her palace 
door, Pasquino asks, “* Where is the door of Donna 
Olimpia?’ The answer was a witty enough play 
on the Italian words: “Che porta vede la porta, 
che non porta non vede la Pie = {© Win brings 
sees the door, who brings nothing, sees it not’). 
The Pope’s name was found effaced over the 
