He claimed to be the natural child of Henry VII, the Holy Roman Emperor, but he was, in fact, born to a washerwoman and a tavern-keeper named Lorenzo Gabrini.

Dressed in full armour and attended by the papal vicar, Cola headed a procession to the Capitol, where he addressed the assembled crowd, speaking "with fascinating eloquence of the servitude and redemption of Rome.

As a result of his leadership, the tribune was received at St. Peter's with the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, while in a letter, the poet Petrarch urged him to continue his great and noble work, and congratulated him on his past achievements, calling him the new Camillus, Brutus and Romulus.

[2] All the nobles submitted, though with great reluctance; the roads were cleared of robbers; some severe examples of justice intimidated offenders, and the tribune was regarded by many as the destined restorer of Rome and Italy.

He wrote letters to the cities of Italy, asking them to send representatives to an assembly which would meet on 1 August, when the formation of a great federation under the headship of Rome would be considered.

[2] Cola di Rienzo's character has been described as a combination of knowledge, eloquence, and enthusiasm for ideal excellence, with vanity, inexperience of mankind, unsteadiness, and physical timidity.

He passed his time in feasts and pageants, while in a bull the Pope denounced him as a criminal, a pagan and a heretic, until, terrified by a slight disturbance on 15 December, he abdicated his government and fled from Rome.

[2][3] At Avignon, where he appeared in August 1352, Cola was tried by three cardinals and was sentenced to death, but this judgment was not carried out, and he remained in prison in spite of appeals from Petrarch for his release.

[2] In December 1352, Clement died, and his successor, Pope Innocent VI, anxious to strike a blow at the baronial rulers of Rome and seeing in the former tribune an excellent tool for this purpose, pardoned and released Rienzi.

Having vainly besieged the fortress of Palestrina, he returned to Rome, where he treacherously seized the soldier of fortune Giovanni Moriale, who was put to death, and where, by other cruel and arbitrary deeds, he soon lost the favour of the people.

In this process he was reimagined as "the romantic stereotype of the inspired dreamer who foresees the national future" as Adrian Lyttleton expressed it, illustrating his point with Federico Faruffini's Cola di Rienzo Contemplating the Ruins of Rome (1855) of which he remarks, "The language of martyrdom could be freed from its religious context and used against the Church.

[6] Cola di Rienzo's life and fate have formed the subject of a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1835), tragic plays by Gustave Drouineau (1826), Mary Russell Mitford (1828),[7] Julius Mosen (1837), and Friedrich Engels (1841),[8] and also of some verses of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) by Lord Byron.

Pointedly, the name was bestowed precisely on the street connecting the Tiber with the Vatican – at the time, headquarters of a Catholic Church still far from reconciled to the loss of its temporal power.

To further drive home the point, the Piazza del Risorgimento was located at the Via Cola di Rienzo's western end, directly touching upon the Church's headquarters.