ise the huge
walls of the Tor de' Conti, greatest of mediaeval fortresses built within
the city, the stronghold of a dim, great house, long passed away,
kinsmen of Innocent the Third. What is left of it helps to enclose a
peaceful nunnery.

There were other towers, too, and fortresses, though none so strong as
that, when it faced the Colosseum, filled then by the armed thousands of
the great Frangipani. The desolate wastes of land in the Monti were ever
good battlefields for the nobles and the people. But the stronger and
wiser and greater Orsini fortified themselves in the town, in Pompey's
theatre, while the Colonna held the midst, and the popes dwelt far aloof
on the boundary, with the open country behind them for ready escape, and
the changing, factious, fighting city before.

The everlasting struggle, the furious jealousy, the always ready knife,
kept the Regions distinct and individual and often at enmity with each
other, most of all Monti and Trastevere, hereditary adversaries,
Ghibelline and Guelph. Trastevere has something of that proud and
violent character still. Monti lost it in the short eruption of
'progress' and 'development.' In the wild rage of speculation which
culminated in 1889, its desolate open lands, its ancient villas and its
strange old houses were the natural prey of a foolish greediness the
like of which has never been seen before. Progress ate up romance, and
hundreds of acres of wretched, cheaply built, hideous, unsafe buildings
sprang up like the unhealthy growth of a foul disease, between the
Lateran gate and the old inhabited districts. They are destined to a
graceless and ignoble ruin. Ugly cracks in the miserable stucco show
where the masonry is already parting, as the hollow foundations subside,
and walls on which the paint is still almost fresh are shored up with
dusty beams lest they should fall and crush the few paupers who dwell
within. Filthy, half-washed clothes of beggars hang down from the
windows, drying in the sun as they flap and flutter against pretentious
moulded masks of empty plaster. Miserable children loiter in the
high-arched gates, under which smart carriages were meant to drive, and
gnaw their dirty fingers, or fight for a cold boiled chestnut one of
them has saved. Squalor, misery, ruin and vile stucco, with a sprinkling
of half-desperate humanity,--those are the elements of the modern
picture,--that is what the 'great development' of modern Rome brought
forth an