e first touch, evidently
laid there all at the same time, just after death, and probably
numbering at least a thousand. In vain one conjectures the reason of
such wholesale burial--one of Nero's massacres, perhaps, or a plague. No
one can tell.

The invaluable Baracconi, often quoted, recalls the fact that Tasso,
when a child, lived with his father in some house on the Monte Cavallo,
when the execrable Carafa cardinal and his brother had temporarily
succeeded in seizing all the Colonna property; and he gives a letter of
Bernardo, the poet's father, written in July to his wife, who was away
just then.

[Illustration: PIAZZA BARBERINI]

'I do not wish the children to go to the vineyard because they get too
hot, and the air is bad there this summer, but in order that they may
have a change, I took steps to have the use of the Boccaccio Vineyard
[Villa Colonna], and the Duke of Paliano [then a Carafa, for the latter
had stolen the title as well as the lands] has let me have it, and we
have been here a week and shall stay all summer in this good air.'

The words call up a picture of Tasso, a small boy, pale with the heat of
a Roman summer, but restless and for ever running about, overheated and
catching cold like all delicate children, which brings the unhappy poet
a little nearer to us.

Of those great villas and gardens there remain the Colonna, the
Rospigliosi and the Quirinal, by far the largest of the three, and
enclosing between four walls an area almost, if not quite, equal to the
Pincio. The great palace where twenty-two popes died is inhabited by the
royal family of Italy and crowns the height, as the Vatican, far away
across the Tiber, is also on an eminence of its own. They face each
other, like two principles in natural and eternal opposition,--Rome the
conqueror of the world, and Italy the conqueror of Rome. And he who
loves the land for its own sake can only pray that if they must oppose
each other for ever in heart, they may abide in that state of civilized
though unreconciled peace, which is the nation's last and only hope of
prosperity.

[Illustration]

REGION III COLONNA

When the present Queen of Italy first came to Rome as Princess Margaret,
and drove through the city to obtain a general impression of it, she
reached the Piazza Colonna and asked what the column might be which is
the most conspicuous landmark in that part of Rome and gives a name to
the square, and to the whole Region. T