gged along the Via Flaminia, from S. Marcello to the mausoleum
which had been occupied and fortified by that powerful family once
more in 1241. In the mean time, the Jews had gathered in great numbers
around the "Campo dell' Augusta," as the ruins were then called.
Thistles and dry brushwood were collected and set afire, and the body
thrown into the flames; this extemporized pyre being fed with fresh
fuel until every particle of the corpse was consumed. A strange
coincidence, that the same monument which the founder of the empire,
the oppressor of Roman liberty, had chosen for his own burial-place,
should serve, thirteen centuries later, for the cremation of him who
tried to restore popular freedom! Here is the description of the
event by a contemporary: "Along this street (the Corso of modern days)
the corpse was dragged as far as the church of S. Marcello. There it
was hung by the feet to a balcony, because the head had been crushed
and lost, piece by piece, along the road; so many wounds had been
inflicted on the body that it might be compared to a sieve
(_crivello_); the entrails were protruding like a bull's in the
butchery; he was horribly fat, and his skin white, like milk tinted
with blood. Enormous was his fatness,--so great as to give him the
appearance of an ox (_bufalo_). The body hung from the balcony at S.
Marcello for two days and one night, while boys pelted it with stones.
On the third day it was removed to the Campo dell' Augusta, where the
Jewish colony, to a man, had congregated; and although the pyre had
been made only with thistles, in which those ruins abounded, the fat
from the corpse kept the flames alive until their work was
accomplished. Not an atom of the great champion of the Romans was
left."

I need not remind the reader that the house near the Ponte Rotto, and
opposite the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, which guides attribute to Cola
di Rienzo, has no connection with him.[99] He was born and lived many
years near the church of S. Tommaso in Capite Molarum, between the
Palazzo Cenci and the synagogue of the Jews, on the left bank of the
Tiber. The church is still in existence, although it has changed its
mediaeval name into that of S. Tommaso a' Cenci.

The house by the Ponte Rotto, just referred to, has still another name
in folk-lore; it is called the _House of Pilate_. The denomination is
not so absurd as it at first seems; it brings us back to bygone times,
when passion-plays were perfor