The festival of St. Peter’s Chair, was once annually celebrated at Rome on this day, but was removed from the General Calendar by Pope Paul VI – only dissident anti-Vatican II Catholics keep the feast now. Lady Morgan in her 1821 book of travels, Italy, described the festivities as they occurred in the 19th century.
The splendidly dressed troops that line the nave of the cathedral, the variety and richness of vestments which clothe the various church and lay dignitaries, abbots, priests, canons, prelates, cardinals, doctors, dragoons, senators, and grenadiers, which march. in procession, complete, as they proceed up the vast space of this wondrous temple, a spectacle nowhere to be equalled within the pale of European civilization. In the midst of swords and crosiers, of halberds and crucifixes, surrounded by banners, and bending under the glittering tiara of threefold power, appears the aged, feeble, and worn-out pope, borne aloft on men’s shoulders, in a chair of crimson and gold, and environed by slaves, (for such they look,) who waft, from plumes of ostrich feathers mounted on ivory wands, a cooling gale, to refresh his exhausted frame, too frail for the weight of such honours. All fall prostrate, as he passes up the church to a small choir and throne, temporarily erected beneath the chair of St. Peter. A solemn service is then performed, hosannas arise, and royal votarists and diplomatic devotees parade the church, with guards of honour and running footmen, while English gentlemen and ladies mob and scramble, and crowd and bribe, and fight their way to the best places they can obtain.
At the extremity of the great nave behind the altar, and mounted upon a tribune designed or ornamented by Michael Angelo [it was actually Bernini], stands a sort of throne, composed of precious materials, and supported by four gigantic figures. A glory of seraphim, with groups of angels, sheds a brilliant light upon its splendours. This throne enshrines the real, plain, worm-eaten, wooden chair, on which St. Peter, the prince of the apostles, is said to have pontificated; more precious than all the bronze, gold, and gems, with which it is hidden, not only from impious, but from holy eyes, and which once only, in the flight of ages, was profaned by mortal inspection.
The throne itself, underneath all that zany baroque decoration, is said to have been given to Pope John VIII in 875; when it was inspected in the 1970s scientists pronounced it to be no older than the sixth century. This is how the chair looked when photographed by itself in 1867.
