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Porcari hung, clad in black, from the battlement of Sant' Angelo. It was
always the same story. The Barons were the Sabines, the Latins and the
AEquians of Mediaeval Rome; but there was neither a Romulus nor a
Cincinnatus to lead the Roman people against steel-clad masters trained
to fighting from boyhood, bold by inheritance, and sure of a power which
they took every day by violence and held year after year by force.

In imagination one would willingly sweep away the three stiff buildings
on the Capitol, the bronze Emperor and his horse, the marble Castor and
Pollux, the proper arcades, the architectural staircase, and the even
pavement, and see the place as it used to be five hundred years ago. It
was wild then. Out of broken and rocky ground rose the ancient Church of
Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, built upon that altar
which the Sibyl of Tivoli bade Augustus raise to the Firstborn of God.
To the right a rude fortress, grounded in the great ruins of Rome's
Archive House, flanked by rough towers, approached only by that old
triumphal way, where old women slowly roasted beans in iron
chafing-dishes over little fires that were sheltered from the north
wind by the vast wall. Before the fortress a few steps led to the main
door, and over that was a great window and a balcony with a rusty iron
balustrade--the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the
standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and
battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a
desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a
holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points
between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with
many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above
underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of
far mountains. That was the scene, and those were the surroundings, in
which the Roman people reinstituted a Roman Senate, after a lapse of
nearly six hundred years, in consequence of the agitation begun and long
continued by Arnold of Brescia.

Muratori, in his annals, begins his short account of the year 1141 by
saying that the history of Italy during that period is almost entirely
hidden in darkness, because there are neither writers nor chroniclers of
the time, and he goes on to say that no one knows why the town of Tivoli
had so long rebelled against t