Rome is invoked rather than visited in these episodes: its great altar supplies a comparison for a lavishly gilded galley, while the city later appears in The Baron’s account of his passage through the Jesuit order. Together, the references make Rome a point of reference for spectacle and an institutional waypoint in a career that leads onward to Paraguay.

Ceremonial Splendor

In the Old Woman’s history, a galley on which she and her mother travel is described as gilded like the great altar of St. Peter’s at Rome. The comparison gives the vessel a measure of exceptional religious and material magnificence; Rome enters the story through an image of costly ornament, not as the location of the voyage.

That image belongs to a history in which the Old Woman recalls having grown up in a palace and wearing robes whose value, she says, exceeded the magnificence of Westphalia. Rome’s altar thus serves as a familiar benchmark for grandeur within her account of former rank and subsequent reversals.

A Jesuit Waypoint

The Baron’s account gives Rome a different function. After recovering from the massacre of his family and entering the Jesuit order, he says that he was sent to Rome some years later. The Father-General there needed young German Jesuits for service in Paraguay, where the sovereigns admitted as few Spanish Jesuits as possible and preferred members of other nationalities whom they considered more subordinate to their commands.

The Baron then recounts travelling to Paraguay with a Pole and a Tyrolese. There he received a subdeaconship and a lieutenancy, and by the time he tells his story he is both colonel and priest. Rome therefore marks a point in the institutional route that carries him from a Jesuit house to a military and clerical role in Paraguay.

Narrative Significance

The city’s two references are brief but distinct. In the Old Woman’s narrative, Rome names a standard of sacred magnificence; in The Baron’s, it is a practical link in a chain of religious recruitment and colonial service. Neither episode develops Rome as a setting in its own right. Instead, the city gains meaning from the people and institutions that invoke it: a remembered world of rank and display, and an organization directing personnel toward Paraguay.