L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 10 L'Italo-Americano E very other Egypt- i a n o b e l i s k i n R o m e t e l l s y o u w h o p u t i t u p , a n d t h e o n e i n the middle of St. Peter's Square tells you nothing at all: eighty-three feet of red Aswan granite without a sin- gle hieroglyph cut into it, the o n l y u n i n s c r i b e d a n c i e n t obelisk in the city. The crowds that fill the square every day walk around a monument whose original o w n e r c a n n o t b e n a m e d , because whoever quarried and raised it left no claim on it, and Egypt did not general- ly do modesty in stone. What can be established starts later, with Pliny, who r e p o r t s t h a t i t c a m e f r o m Heliopolis; by about 30 BC it was standing in the Forum Iulium at Alexandria, where its base carried a dedication cut by Cornelius Gallus, soldier, elegiac poet, friend of Virgil, and the first Roman prefect of Egypt. Gallus did not enjoy the post long, hav- ing put his own name on too many monuments for a man administering a province on Augustus's behalf; he was dis- graced, stripped of his posi- tion, and took his own life around 26 BC. His inscription o n t h e o b e l i s k ' s b a s e w a s partly chiseled away, and dedications to the deified A u g u s t u s a n d t o T i b e r i u s were later cut across the other faces. So the blankness of the stone is not only Egyptian ret- icence; Rome did some of the erasing, too. G e t t i n g i t t o R o m e w a s Caligula's idea, in about 40 AD, and it required a ship built for the purpose. Pliny, who saw it, thought the vessel the most astonishing thing ever put on the water, but it did not have a long career: Claudius had it filled and sunk as part of the founda- tions of his new harbor at Portus, so that a hull built to carry a single stone ended up a s t h e u n d e r p i n n i n g o f a mole. A wreck of about the right size and period turned u p n e a r F i u m i c i n o i n t h e 1950s, during the building of the airport, though whether it is that ship or another of its class remains open. Caligula set the obelisk on the spine of the circus his family had laid out on the V a t i c a n h i l l , t h e o n e t h a t passed to Nero, and what happened in that circus is the reason the stone is still where it is: Christians were put t o d e a t h t h e r e u n d e r Nero, and the tradition that Peter was crucified in it is old and firm enough that the whole basilica was eventually o r i e n t e d a r o u n d t h e s u p - posed site of his grave near- by. Medieval Rome, work- i n g f r o m t h a t , c a l l e d t h e obelisk the Pyramis Beati Petri, the pyramid of blessed Peter. Others preferred a dif- ferent story and held that the bronze globe on its summit contained the ashes of Julius Caesar. Through all of it, the thing stayed upright, beside the old basilica, for close to fifteen centuries, the only a n c i e n t o b e l i s k i n R o m e never to have fallen. In 1586, Sixtus V decided to move it, and the operation consumed most of the year. The architect was Domeni- c o F o n t a n a , who had to work out from first principles how to lower, transport, and re-erect a monolith of about 330 tons, since nobody had done anything on that scale in over a thousand years. The p u b l i s h e d f i g u r e s f o r t h e operation are 907 men, sev- enty-five horses, forty cap- stans and five great levers, deployed to shift the obelisk roughly two hundred and seventy-five yards from the south flank of old St. Peter's to the center of the piazza. The lowering began on the thirtieth of April, the move itself at the end of August, and the stone went up onto its new pedestal on the tenth of September. Two stories about that day have outlived the engineer- ing: in the first of them, Six- tus forbade anyone in the crowd to make a sound, on p a i n o f d e a t h , s o t h a t Fontana's orders could be heard. In the second, the ropes began to smoke under the strain and a sailor in the crowd broke the silence to shout acqua alle funi, water to the ropes, saving the oper- ation and earning, in place of execution, the right for his family to supply the palms carried in St. Peter's on Palm Sunday. The sailor is usually n a m e d a s B e n e d e t t o Bresca, of Bordighera or of S a n r e m o , d e p e n d i n g o n which stretch of the Ligurian coast is telling it, and the palm privilege is a real and living tradition. The rest is almost certainly invention, since a work that ran from April to September could hardly have hung on a single held breath, and the earliest accounts do not mention it. However, it is a very good story, and Liguria has never shown the slightest inclina- tion to give it up. Along with the move, there w e r e o t h e r c h a n g e s : t h e b r o n z e g l o b e w a s t a k e n down, opened and found to contain dust rather than Cae- sar, and it went to the Capito- line Museums, where it still is. In its place went a cross. The base was cut with the line Ecce Crux Domini, fugite partes adversae ( behold the Cross of the Lord, flee ye adversaries), the pope having taken the view that a stone which had stood over the deaths of martyrs needed for- mal reclaiming. A relic of the True Cross was said to have been sealed into the cross at the time, but a later restora- t i o n o p e n e d i t a n d f o u n d nothing; a documented frag- ment was installed in 1740. The last addition was sci- entific: in 1817, a meridian line was laid across the pave- m e n t o f t h e s q u a r e , w i t h marble markers and a wind rose, turning the obelisk into the gnomon of an enor- mous sundial: the shadow of the cross falls on the mark- er for the solstice at noon, and on the others through the year, which most of the crowd walks over without looking down. The stone has now been standing in the open air, in one city or anoth- er, for something over two thousand years, outlasting the pharaoh who commis- sioned it, the prefect who signed it, the emperor who shipped it, the circus it deco- rated and the basilica it once stood beside. Yet, it has still not said who it initially belonged to. T h e b l a n k s t o n e : w h a t a n E g y p t i a n obelisk is doing in St. Peter's Square GIULIA FRANCESCHINI ALL AROUND ITALY TRAVEL TIPS DESTINATIONS ACTIVITIES A low-angle view across St. Peter's Square, with the ancient obelisk rising beside St. Peter's Basilica (Photo: Marc Johnson/Dreamstime)

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