At the Sacred Area of Largo Argentina, near the ruins of four roman temples that go from the III to the I century b.C., stands a small medieval tower called Tower of Papitto. First of all it is a medieval and visible evidence, but overall it is a proof of a hard perdiod for the Eternal City.

The Tower of Papitto was erected in the XII century, being linked to a man, Pietro Pierleoni, who gotknown with the name of Anacleto II when he was elected...antipope! Oh yes, because this tower is a direct historical evidence of how the medieval Rome was often a city split in two specific factions, with rival noble families which did not hesitate to take advantages of the temporal power and the popular consensus that the figure of the pontiff could have. For this reason sometimes, when a Pope died, the Conclave (the meeting of cardinals who should elect the new pontiffs) was not so cohesive. Sometimes the cardinals belonged to different factions, so much to form two different conventions which elected two different popes. The official one and the not official one. This small tower, then, brings us directly into an era tangled and dangerous for Rome, when the streets of the Eternal City were paved with the blood of the members of the various noble families who often attacked each other. Do you remember the Montague and Capulet of "Romeo and Juliet" by Shakespeare? Environment and similar situations, but often with far more than only two families...

The name Papitto comes from the nickname that the anti-pope Anacletus II had: it was, in fact, named Papetto, probably because of his low stature. In this case, being Anacletus II an antipope, his main enemy was the official Pope, Innocent II, who attempted in every way to expelled him from the city of Rome. We are in 1130, Pope Honorius II was already close to death. In Rome were mainly two families that were vying for power: the Frangipane, loyal to the pope Honorius II, and the Pierleoni. What happened?

In the night between the 13th and 14th of February, after the death of Honorius II, a group of cardinals organized a conclave to elect Gregory Papareschi, who will take the name of Innocent II. This election obviously was not accepted by the faction of Pierleoni, which organized another conclave: the cardinals who were favourable to this family elected as an antipope precisely Peter, who took the name of Anacleto II. Imagine how the situation became so heavy that, with the same population of Rome divided between the two men, Innocent II had to flee from Rome in order to seek consensus, funding and new allies. So it happened that in 1132, in Piacenza, was led a new Conclave, and in the presence of the rulers or the representatives of England, Aragon, and Castile, who chose Innocent II as the legitimate Pope. For this reason many went to Rome to straighten things and hunt Anacleto II from the city, and the antipope was forced to hide in the St Angel Castle, barricading himself in the fortress. Anacleto II then fled, trying to turn allies, both within the clergy that Kings and Emperors to die in 1138. The Torre del Papitto is, today, a small witness of what has been a time: the property of the family of the Pierleoni, that is able to tell a turbulent time for Rome, one of the so much so that the Eternal City lived in the course of its long history.