The horses on Via del Corso and the multilingual printing house

26 July 1471. Paul II, the Venetian Pietro Barbo, died. A nephew of Pope Eugene IV, he is also remembered for his involvement in the Roman Carnival, for which horse races (without jockeys) were organised along the ancient Via Lata, which consequently took the name Via del Corso. The races took place between Piazza del Popolo and the Palazzo di San Marco (later Palazzo Venezia), a building he had commissioned whilst he was a cardinal and which, from 1466, became his permanent residence, from where he could comfortably watch the finish of the races and the spectacular ‘capture’ of the horses.

27 July 1061. Nicholas II, Gerard of Burgundy, died. He had been elected in Siena in an unusual manner, by five cardinal bishops, without the involvement of the clergy or the Roman people. His pontificate proved crucial for the libertas Ecclesiae, one of the main aims of the reform of the Church in the 11th century. To definitively remove the papal election from the control of secular power, particularly imperial authority, he promulgated the bull "In nomine Domini" in 1059, by which he established that the choice of the Pope rested solely with the cardinal-bishops, by majority vote, who were then joined by the other cardinals and, finally, by the clergy and the people for approval; the Pope thus elected immediately possessed the full powers of the office, irrespective of his taking possession of the Roman See and his enthronement; during the vacancy of the See, the cardinal bishops were responsible for the Roman Church. The decree drastically reduced the electoral college, and the election was effectively removed from lay control. The procedures were further clarified 120 years later, when Alexander III established that popes were to be elected by all the cardinals by a two-thirds majority, rules which remain in force to this day.

29 July 1644. Urban VIII, the Florentine Maffeo Barberini, died. Pope for over twenty years, he carried out noteworthy initiatives, such as the foundation of a college for the training of missionaries and a multilingual printing press to publish books in alphabets other than those used in Europe. He played a part in the reform of the breviary, promulgated new procedures for the canonisation of saints, approved various religious orders, acted repeatedly to ensure the implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent, and left a profound artistic legacy in Rome, particularly through the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. His political involvement, however, was not quite so constructive. Highly self-assured and at times irascible, he too was responsible for the hardening of attitudes that led to the definitive condemnation of Galileo Galilei, of whom he had been an admirer and personal friend. He radically changed his stance after realising that his own arguments against heliocentrism had been attributed to Simplicio, a character in "Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo" who personified a famous Aristotelian commentator, often derided in the Florentine scientist’s work as a ‘simpleton’.