of the apse, and a tablet on the right
records the names of the Popes who left these strange legacies to the
church.

In passing, one may remember that Mazarin himself was born in the Region
of Trevi, the son of a Sicilian,--like Crispi and Rudini. His father was
employed at first as a butler and then as a steward by the Colonna,
married an illegitimate daughter of the family, and lived to see his
granddaughter, Maria Mancini, married to the head of the house, and his
son a cardinal and despot of France, and himself, after the death of his
first wife, the honoured husband of Porzia Orsini, so that he was the
only man in history who was married both to an Orsini and to a Colonna.
In the light of his father's extraordinary good fortune, the success of
the son, though not less great, is at least less astonishing. The
magnificent Rospigliosi palace, often ascribed by a mistake to Cardinal
Scipio Borghese, was the Palazzo Mazarini and Mazarin's father died
there; it was inherited by the Dukes of Nevers, through another niece of
the Cardinal's, and was bought from them between 1667 and 1670, by
Prince Rospigliosi, brother of Pope Clement the Ninth, then reigning.

Urban the Eighth, the Barberini Pope, had already left his mark on the
Quirinal hill. The great Barberini palace was built by him, it is said,
of stones taken from the Colosseum, whereupon a Pasquinade announced
that 'the Barberini had done what the Barbarians had not.' The
Barbarians did not pull down the Colosseum, it is true, but they could
assuredly not have built as Urban did, and in that particular instance,
without wishing to justify the vandalisms of the centuries succeeding
the Renascence, it may well be asked whether the Amphitheatre is not
more picturesque in its half-ruined state, as it stands, and whether the
city is not richer by a great work of art in the princely dwelling which
faces the street of the Four Fountains.

Among the many memories of the Quirinal there is one more mysterious
than the rest. The great Baths of Constantine extended over the site of
the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and the ruins were in part standing at the end
of the sixteenth century. It is related by a writer of those days and an
eye-witness of the fact, that a vault was discovered beneath the old
baths, about eighty feet long by twenty wide, closed at one end by a
wall thrown up with evident haste and lack of skill, and completely
filled with human bodies that fell to dust at th