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ON THE CONSTITUTION
amidst commotion that commonly was at- tended with riot. This locality was the Fleet Street of Rome. Here resided the chief merchants, especially the goldsmiths, from whom the quarter derived its name; for in Rome, as elsewhere, the goldsmiths did business as money-brokers and bankers, figuring as the natural agents and go-betweens in all money operations.[1] While, in May 1335, the Cardinals were shut up for the second time in that year, after the death of Marcelius II., the Pope of reforming promise, whose abrupt death caused so many hopes to be dashed, it is on record how the excited temper of the city as to the issue of the pending election broke into an extraordinary
- ↑ When Benvenuto Cellini plied his calling in Rome he had his workshop in this locality; and it was while sitting in it—probably a dark vaulted chamber in the ground-floor of a palazzo, with an arch on the street to serve at once as door and window, such as are many shops in the older portions of Rome — that he was affronted by the insulting gestures of the goldsmith Pompeo, who, swaggering down the street, and infected with the licentious spirit of an interregnum season—for this happened when the Cardinals had just entered Conclave,—drew up opposite Benvenuto's shop, and insolently flouted the hot-blooded Florentine, until, unable any longer to check his passion, he bounded out after Pompeo, and for his sauciness stabbed him to the heart. (See Cellini's Autobiography, book i. ch. xv.)
