Vatican Hill

The Vatican was built on a hill above reclaimed swamp land where a necropolis had cropped up. Romans worshipped there at the temple of Cybele as Christian martyrs filled the necropolis. Hundreds of years passed before St. Peter joined their ranks and was honored with a basilica built over the cemetery where he’d been laid to rest. Though already in its ascendancy, the hill presided over the Tiber River’s soggy lowlands and their endemic diseases.

In the 11th century, fever elected Pope Nicholas IV when it swept through crowded monasteries, killing six papal candidates and running the others off. The soon-to-be-pope kept fires burning to purify the “bad air”. The fever was likely malaria (mal-aria), a mosquito-borne illness that fires would protect against. At the Dirt Church we sit around a fire in summer to ward off mosquitoes. People have done this since the discovery of fire, but they couldn’t know that mosquitoes carried a fever and the papal candidate couldn’t either. And yet, they had some wisdom.

One hundred years after Pope Nicholas’s election, the first outbreak of the Black Death arrived in Vatican City. The resident physician ordered Pope Clement VI to install himself between two bonfires. The arrangement recalls a druidic rite that purifies herds by walking them between two bonfires. The pope’s doctor also could not know how the plague was spreading (we don’t know either) but he had inherited advantageous practices and they would serve him nonetheless.