The Castle has been too often mentioned in these pages to warrant long description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding foundations there is but stone, again stone and more stone. From the main entrance upwards the fortress is utterly irregular within, full of gloomy chambers, short, turning staircases, dark prisons, endless corridors; and above are terraces and rooms where much noble blood has been shed, and where many limbs have been racked and tortured, and battlements from which men good and bad, guilty and innocent, have been dropped a rope's length by the neck to feed the crows. Here died Stephen Porcari, the brave and spotless; here died Cardinal Carafa for a thousand crimes; and here Lorenzo Colonna, caught and crushed in the iron hands of Sixtus the Fourth, laid his bruised head, still stately, on the block--'a new block,' says Infessura, who loved him and buried him, and could not forget the little detail. The story is worth telling, less for its historical value than for the strange exactness with which it is all set down. Pope Sixtus, backed by the Orsini, was at war with the Colonna to the end of his reign; but once, on a day when there was truce, he seems to have said in anger that he cared not whom the Colonna served nor with whom they allied themselves. And Lorenzo Colonna, Protonotary Apostolic, with his brothers, took the Pope at his word, and they joined forces with the King of Naples, fortifying themselves in their stronghold of Marino, whence the eldest son of the family still takes his title. The Pope, seeing them in earnest and fearing King Ferdinand, sent an embassy of two cardinals to them, entreating them to be reconciled with the Church. But they answered that they would not, for his Holiness had given them permission to ally themselves with whom they pleased, and refused them money for service, and they said that they could not live without pay--a somewhat ironical statement for such men as the Colonna, who lived rather by taking than by giving an equivalent for anything received. [Illustration: CASTLE OF SANT' ANGELO] Then the Pope made war upon King Ferdinand, and when there had been much bloodshed, and plundering and burning on both sides, Prospero Colonna quarrelled with the Duke of Calabria, who was on Ferdinand's side and for whom he had been fighting, and came over to the Church, and so the Colonna were restored to favour, and the Pope made a treaty with the King against Venice, and so another year passed.