usta, S. Silvestro,
&c.). The town also contains some fine palaces: the municipality has a
museum, with a collection of Roman inscriptions and some illuminated
service books. The Palazzi Dragonetti and Persichetti contain private
collections of pictures. Outside the town is the _Fontana delle
novantanove cannelle_, a fountain with ninety-nine jets distributed
along three walls, constructed in 1272. Aquila has some trade in lace
and saffron, and possesses other smaller industries. It was a university
town in the middle ages, but most of its chairs have now been
suppressed.

Aquila was founded by Conrad, son of the emperor Frederick II., about
1250, as a bulwark against the power of the papacy. It was destroyed by
Manfred in 1259, but soon rebuilt by Charles I. of Anjou. Its walls were
completed in 1316; and it maintained itself as an almost independent
republic until it was subdued in 1521 by the Spaniards, who had become
masters of the kingdom of Naples in 1503. It was twice sacked by the
French in 1799.

See V. Bindi, _Monumenti storici ed artistici degli Abruzzi_ (Naples,
1889), pp. 771 seq.

AQUILA, in astronomy, the "Eagle," sometimes named the "Vulture," a
constellation of the northern hemisphere, mentioned by Eudoxus (4th
cent. B.C.) and Aratus (3rd cent. B.C.). Ptolemy catalogued nineteen
stars jointly in this constellation and in the constellation _Antinous_,
which was named in the reign of the emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-138), but
sometimes, and wrongly, attributed to Tycho Brahe, who catalogued twelve
stars in Aquila and seven in Antinous; Hevelius determined twenty-three
stars in the first, and nineteen in the second. The most brilliant star
of this constellation, [alpha]-_Aquilae_ or Altair, has a parallax of
0.23", and consequently is about eight times as bright as the sun;
[eta]-_Aquilae_ is a short-period variable, while _Nova Aquilae_ is a
"temporary" or "new" star, discovered by Mrs Fleming of Harvard in 1899.

AQUILA ROMANUS, a Latin grammarian who flourished in the second half of
the 3rd century A.D. He was the author of an extant treatise _De Figuris
Sententiarum et Elocutionis_, written as an instalment of a complete
rhetorical handbook for the use of a young and eager correspondent.
While recommending Demosthenes and Cicero as models, he takes his own
examples almost exclusively from Cicero. His treatise is really adapted
from that by Alexander, son of Numenius, as is expressly st