he roof with his head, and
disappeared with many blasphemous yells as they entered.

VII

In those last years of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city of the
Middle Ages. The cupola of the Pantheon, the circular hulk of the
Colosseum, and the twin columns of Trajan and Antoninus projected, like
the fantastic antiquities of some fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli, above
domeless church roofs, battlemented palace walls, and innumerable
Gothic belfries and feudal towers. In the theatre of Marcellus rose the
fortress of the Orsinis; against the tower whence Nero, as the legend
ran, had watched the city burning, were clustered the fortifications of
the Colonnas; and in every quarter the stern palaces of their respective
partisans frowned with their rough-hewn fronts, their holes for barricade
beams, and hooks for chains. The bridge of St. Angelo was covered with
the shops of armourers, as the old bridge of more peaceful Florence with
those of silversmiths. Walls and towers encircled the Leonine City where
the Pope sat unquietly in the big battlemented donjon by the Sixtine
Chapel; and in its midst was still old St. Peter's, half Lombard, half
Byzantine. In Rome there was no industry, no order, no safety. Through
its gates rushed raids of Colonnas and Orsinis, sold to or betrayed by
the Popes, from their castles of Umbria or the Campagna to their castles
in town; and their feuds meant battles also between the citizens who
obeyed or thwarted them. Houses were sacked and burnt, and occasionally
razed to the ground, for the ploughshare and the salt-sower to go over
their site. A few years later, when Pope Borgia dredged the Tiber for
the body of his son, the boatmen of Ripetta reported that so many
bodies were thrown over every night that they no longer heeded such
occurrences. And when, two centuries later, the Corsinis dug the
foundations of their house on the Longara, there were discovered
quantities of human bones in what had been the palace of Pope della
Rovere's nephew. Meanwhile Ghirlandaio and Perugino were painting the
walls of the Sixtine; Pinturicchio was designing the blue and gold
allegorical ceilings of the library; Bramante building the Chancellor's
palace, and the Pollaiolas and Mino da Fiesole carving the tombs in St.
Peter's, while learned men translated Plato and imitated Horace.

Of this Rome there remains nowadays nothing, or next to nothing.
Sometimes, indeed, looking up the green lichened sides of some mediaev