Chapel 279
Saint Peter's 289
Mamertine Prison 294
Interior of St. Peter's 305
Pieta of Michelangelo 318
Tomb of Clement the Thirteenth 321
Ave atque Vale. Vignette 327

[Illustration]

Ave Roma Immortalis

REGION VII REGOLA

'Arenula'--'fine sand'--'Renula,' 'Regola'--such is the derivation of
the name of the Seventh Region, which was bounded on one side by the
sandy bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto to the island of Saint
Bartholomew, and which Gibbon designates as a 'quarter of the city
inhabited only by mechanics and Jews.' The mechanics were chiefly
tanners, who have always been unquiet and revolutionary folk, but at
least one exception to the general statement must be made, since it was
here that the Cenci had built themselves a fortified palace on the
foundations of a part of the Theatre of Balbus, between the greater
Theatre of Marcellus, then held by the Savelli, and the often mentioned
Theatre of Pompey. There Francesco Cenci dwelt, there the childhood of
Beatrice was passed, and there she lived for many months after the
murder of her father, before the accusation was first brought against
her. It is a gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy
walls, its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; one
might guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowing how
Francesco died. And he, who cursed his sons and his daughters and
laughed for joy when two of them were murdered, rebuilt the little
church just opposite, as a burial-place for himself and them; but
neither he nor they were laid there. The palace used to face the Ghetto,
but that is gone, swept away to the very last stone by the municipality
in a fine hygienic frenzy, though, in truth, neither plague nor cholera
had ever taken hold there in the pestilences of old days, when the
Christian city was choked with the dead it could not bury. There is a
great open space there now, where thousands of Jews once lived huddled
together, crowding and running over each other like ants in an anthill,
in a state that would have killed any other people, persecuted
occasionally, but on the whole, fairly well treated; indispensable then
as now to the spendthrift Christian; confined within their o