Prisoner of the Vatican by David I. Kertzer

lines of the faithful. They placed the bier in the waiting wagon, covering it with a red cloth bearing the pontifical insignia. Flares shot into the sky, signaling the procession to begin. Two pairs of black horses pulled the huge wagon, the front horses each carrying a black-suited rider wearing a pointed hat.
    Giuseppe Manfroni described his feelings of helplessness: "St. Peter's Square was packed, and the police (a hundred men in all)—submerged in a vast sea of people—were impotent." The carriage carrying the pope's body, with four official Vatican carriages behind it, was followed by two hundred carriages of the Catholic faithful and three thousand candle-bearing marchers chanting prayers in Latin and Italian and reciting the rosary. But the procession had no sooner left St. Peter's Square than anticlerics began to drown out the mourners' prayers with shouts and songs. At Sant'Angelo bridge, fears mounted that the assailants might succeed in tossing the papal bier into the Tiber, with two to three hundred anticlerics bellowing, "Into the river! Into the river!" 8 The police desperately tried to separate the anticlerics from the processioners, but, as Bacco reported in a telegram sent to the prefect, "it was not possible because they were all mixed in among the carriages and the crowd."
    A police captain described the scene as the procession reached the other side of the river: "The demonstrators became much more aggressive, one heard loud whistles, hostile shouts against the priests, and all of a sudden almost everybody was swept up into the demonstration, people taking one side or the other, not only in the street but from the adjoining houses as well." The police did their best to keep the protesters away from the procession once it reached the other bank, but by Piazza Pasquino what had already become unruly and embarrassing turned into something much more dangerous. In Questore Bacco's words, "The shouts on the one side and on the other were growing louder and ever more threatening. The horses of one carriage reared up in fear, and in that narrow piazza, packed with people, there was great confusion." Meanwhile, all along the way, many homes—just how many was part of the polemics that would follow—had placed special lights and decorations outside their windows to mark the occasion, and from some of them people tossed flowers onto the funeral bier. But the lanterns perched on the windowsills were tempting targets for the protesters, whose well-aimed rocks showered shards of glass onto the street. Outside the palaces of those noblemen who lived on the route, servants bearing torches and dressed in their most formal livery had been instructed to form a line to pay their respects. They too faced jeers and worse.
    The police tried to summon the military squads that had been placed in reserve along the route, but so great was the crush of the crowd that they could not get through. Near Piazza del Gesù, faced by an angry crowd, a panicked municipal guardsman unsheathed his sword, provoking shouts of outrage. His horrified captain rushed in and pulled him away.
    The procession soon reached Piazza Termini, where the protesters began hacking away at a pontifical crest that a devout storekeeper had placed over his shop. When police intervened, the violence grew worse. Rocks rained on the carriages of the funeral procession, and angry demonstrators shouted, "Death to the priests!" Two military squads finally succeeded in entering the piazza and separating the protesters from the funeral cortege. But with the protesters rushing through side streets to try to reassemble farther down the route, the police urged the funeral wagons to hasten their pace, leaving many of the faithful, now disorganized and the target of hostile whistles and shouts, straggling well behind in the last stretch leading to San Lorenzo. By 3 A.M., the wagon with Pius IX's remains, accompanied by the carriages of the Vatican dignitaries,