.

The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all
kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that
once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward,
and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator
Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association
of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house
which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the
Trinita de' Monti, known to all foreigners as the 'Tempietto' or little
temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls
uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged.
Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the
Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there,
calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle,
full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant
reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge
built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the
abbe's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed
from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and
madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that
extinct world.

[Illustration: VILLA MEDICI]

Whatever life may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty
tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and
accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a
moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we
know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always
sad, always tragic, as no other city in the world can ever be.

Ignorance, tradition, imagination, romance,--call it what you will,--has
chosen the long-closed Pincian Gate for the last station of blind
Belisarius. There, says the tale, the ancient conqueror, the banisher
and maker of Popes, the favourite and the instrument of imperial
Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and
lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave
him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a
feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Oedipus in the utter ruin of his
life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and
gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa