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Updated: May 20, 2025
The damp that lies in the atrium outside, making the grass and poppies sprout round the Byzantine pillar which carries a cross over a pine-cone, has invaded the flat-roofed nave and the wide aisles, separated from it by a single colonnade. A greenish mildew marks the fissures in the walls, rent here and there by landslips and earthquakes.
And it's not right of you to tell me nothing about all this, or to fling me plumb at his head like a pine-cone thrown to a sow. If you'd confided in me first I could have told you what's trumps with Uli. What he says is: 'Gold, I love you; and then he expects us to hear: 'Girl, I love you." "You're a queer Jenny," said her aunt, "and you act as if you was the daughter of a lord."
And soon the fire was overhung with much meat, being smoked with a pine-cone smudge in preparation for the journey into the unknown. "Inside of a week, at this rate," he judged, "we'll be able to start again. You must set to work platting a couple of sacks. The grass along the brook is tough and long. We can carry fifty or seventy-five pounds of meat, for emergencies.
Southward a few steps from the Church of the Minerva is the little Piazza della Pigna, with a street of the same name leading out of it. And at the corner of the place is a small church, dedicated to 'Saint John of the Pine-cone, that is, of the Region. Within lies one of the noble Porcari in a curious tomb, and their stronghold was close by, perhaps built in one block with the church itself.
But, familiar as he was with all the infinite disturbances of the woodland, and even the simulation of intrusion caused by a falling branch or lapsing pine-cone, he was arrested now by a recurring sound, unlike any other. It was an occasional muffled beat interrupted at uncertain intervals, but always returning in regular rhythm, whenever it was audible.
The winged figure wearing the horned cap, which is so constantly represented as attending upon the monarch when he is employed in any sacred function, would seem to be his tutelary genius a benignant spirit who watches over him, and protects him from the spirits of darkness. Why the pine-cone was chosen for this purpose it is difficult to form a conjecture.
It is, when full grown, about two feet in height, and shaped like a loosely constructed pine-cone set up on end. Its entire substance is like wax, and the whole concern stalk, broad curling leaves, and all is a brilliant scarlet.
The dresses of those engaged in sacred functions seem to have been elaborately embroidered, for the most part with religious figures and emblems, such as the winged circle, the pine-cone, the pomegranate, the sacred tree, the human-headed lion, and the like.
Its pod, which, when just ripe, has a blush that might rival that on the cheek of a maiden, was beginning to wither and shrivel in the sun, and opening to scatter flakes of a silky substance finer than the thistle's beard, leaving bare the myriad seeds arranged something like a pine-cone.
The truth about the Pine-cone is perfectly well known; it was part of a fountain in Agrippa's artificial lake in the Campus Martius, of which Pigna was a part, and it was set up in the cloistered garden of Saint Peter's by Pope Symmachus about fourteen hundred years ago. The lake may have been near the Pantheon.
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