olosseum died to a ruin when Urban the Eighth showed his successor
how to tear down the outer wall and build a vast palace with a hundredth
part of the great theatre.

Sant' Angelo is a living fortress yet, and nearly a thousand years have
passed, to the certain knowledge of history, since it was ever a single
day unguarded by armed men. Thirty generations of men at arms have stood
sentry within its gates since Theodora Senatrix, the strong and sinful,
flashed upon history out of impenetrable darkness, seized the fortress
and made and unmade popes at her will, till, dying, she bequeathed the
domination to her only daughter, and her name to the tale of Roman
tyranny.

The Castle has been too often mentioned in these pages to warrant long
description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years
among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great
descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot
where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding
foundations there is but stone, again stone and more stone. From the
main entrance upwards the fortress is utterly irregular within, full of
gloomy chambers, short, turning staircases, dark prisons, endless
corridors; and above are terraces and rooms where much noble blood has
been shed, and where many limbs have been racked and tortured, and
battlements from which men good and bad, guilty and innocent, have been
dropped a rope's length by the neck to feed the crows.

Here died Stephen Porcari, the brave and spotless; here died Cardinal
Carafa for a thousand crimes; and here Lorenzo Colonna, caught and
crushed in the iron hands of Sixtus the Fourth, laid his bruised head,
still stately, on the block--'a new block,' says Infessura, who loved
him and buried him, and could not forget the little detail. The story is
worth telling, less for its historical value than for the strange
exactness with which it is all set down.

Pope Sixtus, backed by the Orsini, was at war with the Colonna to the
end of his reign; but once, on a day when there was truce, he seems to
have said in anger that he cared not whom the Colonna served nor with
whom they allied themselves. And Lorenzo Colonna, Protonotary Apostolic,
with his brothers, took the Pope at his word, and they joined forces
with the King of Naples, fortifying themselves in their stronghold of
Marino, whence the eldest son of the family still takes his title. The
Pope, see