HIGH LIVING | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 13, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 18.

HIGH LIVING.

THE men employed about the dome and roof of St. Peter's at Rome are called San Pietrini. They dwell upon the roof. Most of them were born there, as were generations of their kind gone before. There are forty-one of them—twenty regular employes, seventeen supernumeraries, two aspirants to the place of supernumerary, and two who do only sweeping and cleaning. The illumination of the dome and cupola used to take over three hundred men. Extra hands were hired for the occasion from trades and occupations in which labor is done at dizzy heights, and they were set to work under the direction of the San Pietrini. Every precaution

was taken against accidents. The writer's informant, a San Pietrini grown old and gray in the service, said that, although oftentimes some of the men employed were careless, yet, during the forty-four years preceding 1870, only three men, all of them San Pietrini, had lost their lives by falling. One fell from the roof while repairing an arm of the statue of St. Andrew; the other two fell while illuminating the dome.—Independent.