hill. Alive, he was
condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by
his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a
thousand years where they had been laid by his two old nurses and a
woman who had loved him. And during ten centuries the people believed
that his terrible ghost haunted the hill, attended and served by
thousands of demon crows that rested in the branches of the trees about
his tomb, and flew forth to do evil at his bidding, till at last Pope
Paschal the Second cut down with his own hands the walnut trees which
crowned the summit, and commanded that the mausoleum should be
destroyed, and the ashes of Nero scattered to the winds, that he might
build a parish church on the spot and dedicate it to Saint Mary. It is
said, too, that the Romans took the marble urn in which the ashes had
been, and used it as a public measure for salt in the old market-place
of the Capitol. A number of the rich Romans of the Renascence afterwards
contributed money to the restoration of the church and built themselves
chapels within it, as tombs for their descendants, so that it is the
burial-place of many of those wealthy families that settled in Rome and
took possession of the Corso when the Barons still held the less central
parts of the city with their mediaeval fortresses. Sixtus the Fourth and
Julius the Second are buried in Saint Peter's, but their chapel was
here, and here lie others of the della Rovere race, and many of the
Chigi and Pallavicini and Theodoli; and here, in strange coincidence,
Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the Popes, erected a high altar on the
very spot where the worst of the Emperors had been buried. It is gone
now, but the strange fact is not forgotten.

Far across the beautiful square, at the entrance to the Corso, twin
churches seem to guard the way like sentinels, built, it is said, to
replace two chapels which once stood at the head of the bridge of Sant'
Angelo; demolished because, when Rome was sacked by the Constable of
Bourbon, they had been held as important points by the Spanish soldiers
in besieging the Castle, and it was not thought wise to leave such
useful outworks for any possible enemy in the future. Alexander the
Seventh, the Chigi Pope, died, and left the work unfinished; and a folk
story tells how a poor old woman who lived near by saved what she could
for many years, and, dying, left one hundred and fifty scudi to help the
completion