Most people today ooh-and-aah when they experience or envision a trip to Rome.
It was not always so. Until the era of modern tourism, trips to Rome were rare, undertaken only by the wealthy. For devout Protestants, encountering Catholicism’s Eternal City could often induce more revulsion than admiration. Prior to Italian unification in the 1860s-1870s, the Pope ruled as temporal monarch over Rome and the surrounding Papal States, a huge slice of Italian geography. Lurid stories of the Inquisition’s torture chambers, descriptions of shameful acts in convents and monasteries, and condemnations of a putatively pervasive pharisaical legalism were all staples of Protestant polemical travel literature.
Read Full Article »