ould Rome burn? Would the Colosseum fall - as in the ancient prophecy "When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall / And when Rome falls - the world"? Few people believed that Hitler would pardon the capital of the traitor-nation he had vowed to punish - not while his own capital was burning and falling, bombarded almost nightly by enemy air power.
The Romans, who had come to feel the Führer's wrath, believed what they saw and heard, the window-rattling thunder coming out of perfect skies, the distant fires already encircling Rome. "The Germans would resist to the extreme," went the rumor cited by Elsa Morante, "and anyway they would first blow up all those famous places they had mined, and the Pope was getting ready to flee along with the Vatican's fleet of armored planes to someplace unknown."
The Pope in fact was said to have told Polizeiführer Wolff in their secret audience that he would never leave Rome voluntarily, adding, "My place is here, and here I will struggle on to the end for the Christian commandments." But down to the last moment Pius XII and the vast information-gathering apparatus of the Vatican would have no inkling of whether the Germans would defend against the Allied advance on Rome. The truth was that no one would know with any certainty, not the Allies, less so the Resistance, and not even the Germans. In the end, only Mussolini would express his desire to see Rome flattened into rubble like the abbey at Monte Cassino, and only the Pope would lift his voice in a warning of damnation, deeming that "whosoever raises his hand against Rome will be guilty of matricide before the civilized world and the eternal judgment of God." Others, belligerents or allies, would agree on a more practical approach: Rome must be saved, unless it must be destroyed.
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