ll-temper
against their masters, opened the gates for the nobles again, and no man
lifted a hand to help Giovanni degli Stefaneschi, when the men-at-arms
bound him and dragged him off to prison. Strange to say, no further
vengeance was taken upon him, and for once in their history, the nobles
shed no blood in revenge for a mortal injury.

No man could count the tragedies that swept over the Region of Ponte
from the first outbreak of war between the Orsini and the Colonna, till
Paolo Giordano Orsini, the last of the elder branch, breathed out his
life in exile under the ban of Sixtus the Fifth, three hundred years
later. There was no end of them till then, and there was little
interruption of them while they lasted; there is no stone left standing
from those days in that great quarter that may not have been splashed
with their fierce blood, nor is there, perhaps, a church or chapel
within their old holding into which an Orsini has not been borne dead or
dying from some deadly fight. Even today it is gloomy, and the broad
modern street, which swept down a straight harvest of memories through
the quarter to the very Bridge of Sant' Angelo, has left the mediaeval
shadows on each side as dark as ever. Of the three parts of the city,
which still recall the Middle Age most vividly, namely, the
neighbourhood of San Pietro in Vincoli, in the first Region, the by-ways
of Trastevere and the Region of Ponte, the latter is by far the most
interesting. It was the abode of the Orsini; it was also the chief place
of business for the bankers and money-changers who congregated there
under the comparatively secure protection of the Guelph lords; and it
was the quarter of prisons, of tortures, and of executions both secret
and public. The names of the streets had terrible meaning: there was the
Vicolo della Corda, and the Corda was the rope by which criminals were
hoisted twenty feet in the air, and allowed to drop till their toes were
just above the ground; there was the Piazza della Berlina Vecchia, the
place of the Old Pillory; there was a little church known as the 'Church
of the Gallows'; and there was a lane ominously called Vicolo dello
Mastro; the Mastro was the Master of judicial executions, in other
words, the Executioner himself. Before the Castle of Sant' Angelo stood
the permanent gallows, rarely long unoccupied, and from an upper window
of the dark Torre di Nona, on the hither side of the bridge, a rope hung
swinging slowly i