Monument Cola Di Rienzo

Statue of the Cola di Rienzo Tribune by the sculptor Girolamo Mazzini in 1877. Erected near Campidoglio where he was beheaded on October 8, 1354 by an enraged crowd.

This statue pays homage to Nicola Gabrini, better known as Cola di Rienzo, a papal notary and tribune, who lived in 14th century Rome, proclaiming a new form of government inspired by the Republic. It is located to the left of the Cordonata Capitolina, a staircase designed by Michelangelo, which leads from Piazza d'Aracoeli to Piazza del Campidoglio. The statue, somewhat smaller than life size, presents Cola covered with a hood, with his right arm raised in an attitude of haranguing the crowd and holding a sword in his left hand. The monument was inaugurated in 1887; the bronze statue, the work of the Florentine sculptor Girolamo Masini, stands on a brick pedestal, covered with some fragments of ancient reliefs, the work of the architect Francesco Azzurri. In the sculpture there is only a sober inscription that reads "Cola di Rienzo".

Undoubtedly an important figure for the Roman mid-1300s, but also contradictory and anomalous. Arriving in Rome from Avignon on a mandate from Pope Celestino, he forced himself to restore the city to its former glory as in the meantime it was in the hands of the baronial families and in the most complete disorder. After a first period where he reduced the taxes and the power of important Roman families increasing his prestige among the people, with subterfuges and conspiracies he tried to increase his own power but was first attacked by the same noble families who claimed their privileges and then abandoned from the support of the King of Hungary who at that time ruled Naples and had always protected it. Flee from Rome for Prague but the king, who in the meantime had returned due to the spread of the plague in Italy, imprisons him instead of helping him '. The Pope asked for and obtained his release and then returned to Avignon but Rome had returned to chaos and therefore was given a second chance to administer the city. Once he arrived in Rome, however, the situation had changed and the people no longer supported him. In a panic caused by the revolt of the citizens who besieged him under the Capitol, he tried to escape with dirty face and mingling in the crowd like any other citizen, he was recognized due to the fact that he still wore gold bracelets and jewelry and therefore could not be a citizen like everyone else. Here the first stabs began and on the way to the square in front of Palazzo Colonna where he was hanged, he continued to lose body parts from the many blows inflicted. Considered a traitor, he was eventually burned because he was not worthy of burial.

Here is a bronze statue depicting a man who lived in the fourteenth century but made at the end of the nineteenth century. And there is a reason ... The man in question is Cola di Rienzo, a Roman and commoner who in the Rome of the 14th century became a living symbol of freedom and secularism, as he succeeded, exploiting the Avignonese captivity and the absence of the Pope from Rome, to be elected senator unique and, fundamentally, to rule the Eternal City like a real king. A secular power, therefore, which in words should have guaranteed the people greater rights by putting, on the other side of the scale, a strong anti-clerical as well as anti-real estate sense. Too bad that then Cola di Rienzo got carried away and became more of a tyrant than anything else, to the point of being killed, by his own people, in Piazza del Campidoglio. It is no coincidence, however, that the sculpture was placed here at the end of the 19th century, just when Rome was "liberated" from the temporal power of the pontiff. A man like Cola di Rienzo, so allergic to the figure of the Pope, could only be remembered in that particular context.

In the X district (Campitelli), climbing up the "Cordonata Capitolina", designed by Michelangelo (XVI century) to go to the Piazza del Campidoglio, we find on the left in the garden that flanks it the bronze monument depicting Cola di Rienzo, placed on a base composed of a curtain of bricks in which fragments of sculptures and various ancient inscriptions are inserted. The bronze statue (from the 19th century) represents the famous Roman tribune (Rome n.1313 m.1354), in the oratory act and as can be seen from the gesture of the arm and the expression of the face and well represented his vehemence that led to lead a popular movement for the creation of a Republic in Rome, even excluding the nobility. After various vicissitudes and alternating fortunes, in 1354 he was sent back to Rome by the Pope who was in Avignon, to reconstitute the State of the Church, but his tyrannical attitude caused a revolt in the people (fomented by the nobles) which led to his killing. , right near where the monument is located today, and as the chronicles of the time report, his body was exposed for days to public mockery. NOTE: Nearby, in today's Via Petroselli you can see his house (12th century) also called Casa dei Cresenzi. NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The work was created in Rome in 1871 by the important Florentine sculptor Girolamo Masini (1840 - 1885), who painted a bust of the same character that we can admire in the suggestive walk of the Pincio.

The chronicle of the last of the Tribunes of Rome. Cola di Rienzo, in the century Nicola di Lorenzo Gabrini or in medieval Romanesque Cola de Rienzi (Rome, 1313 - Rome, 8 October 1354), was an Italian leader, tribune and scholar. It remained in history because, in the late Middle Ages, it attempted to establish a form of Commune in the city of Rome torn by conflicts between the people and the barons. In homage to the ancient history of the city and to reconnect with it, he defined himself as "the last of the tribunes of the people. He was assassinated. Born in the Regola district, son of a tavern keeper and of a Magdalene "who lived by washing clothes and bringing water", in a house in front of Ponte Rotto, "river song, among the mills" (the mills on the Tiber worked up to construction of the walls of the Tiber), therefore of a very modest condition. When his mother died, he was transferred to Anagni, with peasant relatives, where he worked in the countryside and was able to devote himself to the study of literature and Latin. He lived in Anagni for 13 years and returned to Rome following the death of his father. He became an excellent orator but above all a notary, and in this capacity he was sent to Avignon at the papal court, Clement VI, as ambassador of the popular government of Rome, known as the "Thirteen good men". The Pope appreciated him very much and he took the opportunity of this familiarity to complain about the abuses of the Roman barons, thus attracting the ire of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. However, he returned to Rome in 1344 with the post of notary of the Apostolic Chamber, an institution of the Papal State which through its members - chamberlain, treasurer, commissioner, chamber clerics and others - administered the finances and observed the legislative and judicial competences. But Cola di Rienzo's goal was to make Rome too, despite the fact that it was the seat of the pope and theoretically also of the emperor, a Municipality with its own regulations and resources, governed by representatives of the people of Rome. A brief period began in which it seemed that Rome, starting from the memory of ancient greatness, could develop a municipal civilization: the classes that then represented modernity and elsewhere led the cities out of the Middle Ages - judges, notaries, merchants - came to swear allegiance to the new Municipality; in the Capitol a just justice was administered, severe against the barons but also against the commoners who had taken advantage of their office; the oppressors fled the city.

Nicola Gabrini, (Rome 1313 – 1354), better known as Cola di Rienzi and Cola di Rienzo, was a papal notary and tribune of the Roman people and proclaimed in Rome a new form of government inspired by the Roman Republic which he called "The good state”.