"Only drank the precious wine of youth,"

but who

"... lives immortal in the hearts of men,
... and the world is fairer
That he lived in it."

The Colonna date back to the eleventh century, and they gave many
princes and cardinals to the country. At the close of the thirteenth
century they were arrayed against Boniface VIII, the Pope, who accused
them of crime, while they disputed the validity of his election to the
holy office. In retaliation, the Pope excommunicated the entire family,
anathematized them as heretics and declared their estates forfeited to
the church. The Colonna, far from being intimidated, commanded three
hundred armed horsemen, attacked the papal palace, which they plundered,
and made him a prisoner,--an incident referred to by Dante in the
"Inferno." The Colonna and the Orsini were also at warfare, and when a
member of the former family was elevated to the papacy under the name of
Martin V, they despoiled property of the Orsini.

Gay excursionists to-day, who fly over the Campagna in their
twentieth-century touring cars to the lovely towns of the Alban hills,
may look down from Castel Gandolfo on the gloomy, mediaeval little town
of Marino, part way up a steep hillside, whose summit is crowned by the
castle once belonging to the Colonna and in which Vittoria passed her
early childhood. "Nothing," in his "Roba di Roma," says Story, "can be
more rich and varied than this magnificent amphitheatre of the Campagna
of Rome, ... sometimes drear, mysterious, and melancholy in desolate
stretches; sometimes rolling like an inland sea whose waves have
suddenly become green with grass, golden with grain, and gracious with
myriads of wild flowers, where scarlet poppies blaze and pink daisies
cover vast meadows and vines shroud the picturesque ruins of antique
villas, aqueducts, and tombs, or drop from mediaeval towers and
fortresses."

Flying in the swift motor-car of the time toward the Alban hills, Marino
may be easily reached in less than an hour from the Porta San Giovanni,
and in the near distance Monte Albani, rising into the cone of Monte
Cavi, is a picture before the eye, while on the lower slopes gleam the
white villages of Albani, Marino, Castel Gandolfo, and Frascati, with
the campanile of a cathedral, a fortress-like ruin, or gardens and olive
orchards clambering up the heights. The Papal town of Rocca di Papa
crowns one summit where once Tarquin's temple to Jupiter stood and