many of the cardinals had already gathered in Rome in advance of a subsequent conclave. Innocent X received the last rites on 28 December, and expressing a wish to take leave of the cardinals, thirty-nine gathered at his bedside at the Quirinal Palace. Secretary of State Chigi, who had been in attendance during the last twelve days, Prefect of the Sacred Palace Bishop Scotti, and Sacristan Monsignor Altini, as well as, various attendants were present when the Pope died on the night of 6 January 1655. The Swiss Guard escorted Papal Camerlengo Cardinal Antonio Barberini to the Quirinal to perform the requisite rituals and Cardinal de Medici visited with the Pope's three nephews, who were in another room. After an autopsy, the body was embalmed and the next day taken to the Vatican where it was placed on a catafalque in the Sistine Chapel. On 8 January it was transferred to St. Peter's Basilica, where the sealing of the coffin was witnessed by Cardinals Ludovisi, Chigi, Omodeo, Ottoboni, Santacroce, Aldobrandini, Vidman, Raggi, Pio and Gualtieri, Princes Pamphili, Ludovisi and Giustiniani, and the Master of Ceremonies Fulvio Servantio. A funeral held on 17 January. Innocent's tomb is located in the Church of Sant'Agnese in Agone which he had built in 1652 adjacent to the family palace, the Palazzo Pamphili, in Rome. Legends The anti-Catholic publicist Gregorio Leti wrote that During the last year of the pope's life, Olimpia Maidalchini scarcely ever left his side, completely controlling access to the Pope and to the money she could make and power she could wield through him. In the last weeks of his life, it was said, she would lock him in his room once a week while she removed money and other valuables from the Papal Palace to her own palace. Even with his death she did not flee the inevitable retribution, believing that she could produce a friendly result in the conclave through the exercise of influence and money. ...The dead pope she left to his own fate, not even providing him a proper coffin for his lying-in-state. Archbishop Austin Dowling characterizes Leti's "anti-papal histories of conclaves" as "mendacious and inexact". Nonetheless, Leti's account was subsequently repeated and widely disseminated by later historians and writers such as T.A. Trollope who recognized that Leti's "...inexactitude as an historian is notorious," yet reported that the body of the pope was completely abandoned for three