Cicero had a villa near this place; and it was on this coast where that great orator was murdered in his litter, as he was endeavouring to make his escape to Greece. The fortress of Gaeta is built on a promontory, about three miles from Mola; but travellers, who have the curiosity to go to the former, generally cross the gulph between the two; and immediately, as the most remarkable thing in the place, they are shewn a great cleft in a rock, and informed that it was miraculously split in this manner at the death of our Saviour. To put this beyond doubt, they shew, at the same time, something like the impression of a man’s hand on the rock, of which the following account is given.—A certain person having been told on what occasion the rent took place, struck the palm of his hand on the marble, declaring he could no more believe their story, than that his hand would leave its stamp on the rock; on which, to the terror and confusion of this infidel, the stone yielded like wax, and the impression remains till this day. Nothing is so injurious to the cause of truth, as attempts to support it by fiction. Many evidences of the justness of this observation occur in the course of a tour through Italy. That mountains were rent at the death of our Saviour, we know from the New Testament; but, as none of them are there particularized, it is presumptuous in others to imagine they can point out what the Evangelists have thought proper to conceal. This rock, however, is much resorted to by pilgrims; and the Tartanes, and other vessels, often touch there, that the seamen may be provided with little pieces of marble, which they earnestly request may be taken as near the fissure as possible. These they wear constantly in their pockets, in case of shipwreck, from a persuasion, that they are a more certain preservative from drowning, than a cork jacket. Some of these poor people have the misfortune to be drowned, notwithstanding; but the sacred marble loses none of its reputation on that account. Such accidents are always imputed to the weight of the unfortunate person’s sins, which have sunk him to the bottom, in spite of all the efforts of the marble to keep him above water; and it is allowed on all hands, that a man so oppressed with iniquity, as to be drowned with a piece of this marble in his pocket, would have sunk much sooner, if, instead of that, he had had nothing to keep him up but a cork jacket. Strangers are next led to the Castle, and are shewn, with some other curiosities, the skeleton of the famous Bourbon, Constable of France, who was killed in the service of the emperor Charles the Fifth, as he scaled the walls of Rome.