Jubilee 1350: Rome Without a Pope

A tide of rudderless pilgrims, a wounded city reinventing itself: the Jubilee of 1350 unfolds while the Pope is far away and Rome learns to bear, on its own, the weight of the sacred and of history. The story takes shape as a montage of statues, inscriptions, coins, seals, manuscripts, reliefs, and devotional objects - many never before seen - that restore the contradictory energy of a restless century. From the memory of the first Holy Year in 1300 to the echo of the “Avignon captivity,” between the Black Death (1348) and the earthquake (1349), icons and outtakes emerge: a model of the Palais des Papes, a rare fourteenth-century fresco of the Holy Trinity, epigraphic fragments noting donations to rebuild what fire had destroyed. The city organizes itself as a machine for welcome - nearly thirty hospitals, regulated flows, pilgrimage badges bearing saints and archangels - while politics burns in the gestures of Cola di Rienzo and in Petrarch’s archaeological dream. Lead badges and finds that bring faith closer to propaganda stand out. The journey closes with the Pope’s return and with the voice of a woman, Jacopa dei Prefetti di Vico, whose sarcophagus tells of the surrender of communal autonomy to papal authority. Out of it emerges a plural Rome: bruised, devout, visionary. A city that, even without a pope, still finds its own way to govern the spirit.