Pilgrims and Poverty in Renaissance Rome
Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor could be very different.
An unprecedented number of pilgrims travelled to Rome for the last two jubilees of the 16th century. Held every 25 years, jubilees were a rare opportunity for the faithful to earn plenary indulgences that absolved them from the ‘temporal punishment’ for sins that had already been forgiven. The sight of people from so many nations joining together in worship symbolised the papacy’s renewed strength after the great turmoil and division of the Reformation. A commemorative print gives an impression of the crowds at the opening ceremony in St Peter’s Square on Christmas Eve 1574. Pope Gregory XIII is carried aloft in a sedan chair towards the Holy Door of the basilica, surrounded by a great throng of pilgrims and spectators. Over the following year, reports suggested that as many as 400,000 people came to the city, a remarkable figure given that its entire population was around 80,000. In 1600 this grew to an estimated 536,000 pilgrims, from countries as far afield as Armenia, England, Poland, and Spain.
Providing food and lodging for the many visitors who could not support themselves was a tremendous logistical challenge and many of the city’s inhabitants welcomed strangers into their homes. This included high-ranking members of the clergy, such as the Milanese archbishop Carlo Borromeo who offered his official lodgings in Rome to pilgrims. The Spanish Jesuit Rafael Riera’s account of the events of 1575 singled out the contributions of a merchant’s wife who housed 30 women every night and a woman ‘of an illustrious family who hosted more than 90 women at a time in her home throughout the year’. Like others, she fulfilled a spiritual as well as a practical role, washing the feet of her guests to emulate the story of Christ washing the feet of his disciples.
The main burden of hospitality fell on Rome’s confraternities – associations typically formed of lay people coming together for charitable and religious purposes – especially the Most Holy Trinity of Pilgrims and Convalescents (Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini e Convalescenti). Founded in 1548, the group rented lodgings to give a small number of pilgrims who were sleeping on the streets somewhere to stay during the 1550 jubilee. From this modest start it expanded rapidly so that by 1575 it presided over a complex of dormitories, refectories, and a hospital that accommodated hundreds of pilgrims at a time. It received donations from a range of benefactors and was heavily subsidised by the Vatican, even being reassigned funds from the papal treasury that were usually set aside for celebrations during Carnival.
Given that many pilgrims travelled long distances to Rome on foot and arrived in weak physical conditions, they frequently required more than simply a bed for the night. The confraternity of the bakers’ guild, whose charitable efforts usually centred on providing dowries for their poorer members’ daughters, looked after 350 poor and infirm pilgrims in their hospital near the Trajan Forum in 1575. They were commended because only ten of these patients died, a better outcome than was recorded at other hospitals.
The care lavished on visitors passing through the city contrasted starkly with plans to tackle Rome’s escalating poverty rates. The Most Holy Trinity of Pilgrims and Convalescents statutes, for example, specified that their services were intended solely for pilgrims and only ‘in certain truly desperate cases’ could they offer hospitality to others. Yet as Rome’s population nearly doubled in the second half of the 16th century, so did the numbers of its hungry and homeless inhabitants.
People who congregated in the streets, squares, and outside churches asking for alms were criticised for causing a public nuisance and oppressive measures were devised to reduce their growing visibility. Official proclamations attempted to ban begging and in 1564 ‘all vagabonds whatsoever who are without craft or means’ were ordered to leave the city or risk being sent to row on the galleys. In 1569 Pope Pius V recommended the confinement of beggars to four specific neighbourhoods, to prevent them ‘going around like vagabonds causing a disturbance’. In recompense they would be provided with food. The proposal never came to fruition, but equally draconian policies of segregation had already been implemented in Rome, with the restriction of prostitutes to the area of Campo Marzio in 1566 and the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in 1555. When the idea of founding a hospital for beggars was raised in 1581 the first location proposed was an abandoned monastery in an uninhabited area that soon proved unusable as it was infected with malaria.
In 1596 a public decree, issued by the apostolic chamber, introduced a new system to visually mark out people considered eligible to receive alms. Applicants had to prove their credentials by answering questions on topics about their religious devotion and life experiences, ranging from whether they had a criminal record to what they hoped to do in the future. If they could demonstrate that they were unable to earn a living any other way, they were given a licence to beg, to be worn pinned to their left shoulder where it could always be seen. This selection process was enforced well into the 17th century.
The desire to categorise poor people was partly driven by suspicions about impostors. The popular print ‘The Deceits of the World’ by Cristofano Bertelli shows the supposed tricks played by people on the streets: near the centre of the page is a man holding a stave pretending to be a pilgrim, a phenomenon reported in the statutes of the Most Holy Trinity of Pilgrims and Convalescents, which outlined the process by which they vetted and turned away those who disguised their identity, or admitted them ‘if they did not suspect them of being vagabonds or similar’.
Accounts of the jubilee years repeatedly lauded the charitable acts they inspired. In 1577 the cardinal of Florence Angelo Pientini claimed that the feat of housing many thousands of pilgrims was famed across the globe and likened it to the challenge of feeding the labourers who built the Great Pyramid of Giza. Another observer praised how ‘the whole of Rome transformed itself into a hostel for pilgrims’. Yet these events perpetuated well-established distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor, confirming the notion that only certain members of society were worthy recipients of charity.
Elizabeth Currie is the author of Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio (Reaktion Books, 2025).
