ts, it was the time-honoured privilege of the rabble to sack and
plunder the late residence of the chosen cardinal, till, literally,
nothing was left but the bare walls and floors. This was so much a
matter of course, that the election of a poor Pope was a source of the
bitterest disappointment to the people, and was one of their principal
causes of discontent when Sixtus the Fifth was raised to the
Pontificate, it having been given out as certain, but a few hours
earlier, that the rich Farnese was to be the fortunate man.

[Illustration]

REGION IX PIGNA

There used to be a tradition, wholly unfounded, but deeply rooted in the
Roman mind, to the effect that the great bronze pine-cone, eleven feet
high, which stands in one of the courts of the Vatican, giving it the
name 'Garden of the Pine-cone,' was originally a sort of stopper which
closed the round aperture in the roof of the Pantheon. The Pantheon
stands at one corner of the Region of Pigna, and a connection between
the Region, the Pantheon and the Pine-cone seems vaguely possible,
though altogether unsatisfactory. The truth about the Pine-cone is
perfectly well known; it was part of a fountain in Agrippa's artificial
lake in the Campus Martius, of which Pigna was a part, and it was set up
in the cloistered garden of Saint Peter's by Pope Symmachus about
fourteen hundred years ago. The lake may have been near the Pantheon.

No one, so far as I am aware,--not even the excellent Baracconi,--offers
any explanation of the name and device of the Ninth Region.
Topographically it is nearly a square, of which the angles are the
Pantheon, the corner of Via di Caravita and the Corso, the Palazzo di
Venezia, and the corner of the new Via Arenula and Via Florida. Besides
the Pantheon it contains some of the most notable buildings erected
since the Renascence. Here are the palaces of the Doria, of the Altieri,
and the 'Palace of Venice' built by Paul the Second, that Venetian
Barbo, whose name may have nicknamed the racing horses of the Carnival.
Here were the strongholds of the two great rival orders, the Dominicans
and the Jesuits, the former in the Piazza della Minerva, the latter in
the Piazza del Gesu, and in the Collegio Romano; and here at the present
day, in the buildings of the old rivals, significantly connected by an
arched passage, are collected the greatest libraries of the city. That
of the Dominicans, wisely left in their care, has been opened to the