The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward, and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the Trinità de' Monti, known to all foreigners as the 'Tempietto' or little temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged. Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there, calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle, full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the abbé's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that extinct world. [Illustration: VILLA MEDICI] Whatever life may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always sad, always tragic, as no other city in the world can ever be.