with its vast portico, and the
Mithraeum at the other end, and when the walls of Aurelian are built, and
when ruin comes upon Rome from the north, the Campus Martius is still
almost an open stretch of dusty earth on which soldiers have learned
their trade through a thousand years of hard training.

Not till the poor days when the waterless, ruined city sends its people
down from the heights to drink of the muddy stream does Campo Marzo
become a town, and then, around the castle-tomb of the Colonna and the
castle-theatre of the Orsini the wretched houses begin to rise here and
there, thickening to a low, dark forest of miserable dwellings threaded
through and through, up and down and crosswise, by narrow and crooked
streets, out of which by degrees the lofty churches and palaces of the
later age are to spring up. From a training ground it has become a
fighting ground, a labyrinth of often barricaded ways and lanes, deeper
and darker towards the water-gates cut in the wall that runs along the
Tiber, from Porta del Popolo nearly to the island of Saint Bartholomew,
and almost all that is left of Rome is crowded and huddled into the
narrow pen overshadowed and dominated here and there by black fortresses
and brown brick towers. The man who then might have looked down from the
Pincian hill would have seen that sight; houses little better than those
of the poorest mountain village in the Southern Italy of today, black
with smoke, black with dirt, blacker with patches made by shadowy
windows that had no glass. A silent town, too, surly and defensive; now
and then the call of the water-carrier disturbs the stillness, more
rarely, the cry of a wandering peddler; and sometimes a distant sound of
hoofs, a far clash of iron and steel, and the echoing yell of furious
fighting men--'Orsini!' 'Colonna!'--the long-drawn syllables coming up
distinct through the evening air to the garden where Messalina died,
while the sun sets red behind the spire of old Saint Peter's across the
river, and gilds the huge girth of dark Sant' Angelo to a rusty red,
like battered iron bathed in blood.

Back come the Popes from Avignon, and streets grow wider and houses
cleaner and men richer--all for the Bourbon's Spaniards to sack, and
burn, and destroy before the last city grows up, and the rounded domes
raise their helmet-like heads out of the chaos, and the broad Piazza del
Popolo is cleared, and old Saint Peter's goes down in dust to make way
for the