In imagination one would willingly sweep away the three stiff buildings on the Capitol, the bronze Emperor and his horse, the marble Castor and Pollux, the proper arcades, the architectural staircase, and the even pavement, and see the place as it used to be five hundred years ago. It was wild then. Out of broken and rocky ground rose the ancient Church of Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, built upon that altar which the Sibyl of Tivoli bade Augustus raise to the Firstborn of God. To the right a rude fortress, grounded in the great ruins of Rome's Archive House, flanked by rough towers, approached only by that old triumphal way, where old women slowly roasted beans in iron chafing-dishes over little fires that were sheltered from the north wind by the vast wall. Before the fortress a few steps led to the main door, and over that was a great window and a balcony with a rusty iron balustrade--the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of far mountains. That was the scene, and those were the surroundings, in which the Roman people reinstituted a Roman Senate, after a lapse of nearly six hundred years, in consequence of the agitation begun and long continued by Arnold of Brescia. Muratori, in his annals, begins his short account of the year 1141 by saying that the history of Italy during that period is almost entirely hidden in darkness, because there are neither writers nor chroniclers of the time, and he goes on to say that no one knows why the town of Tivoli had so long rebelled against the Popes. The fact remains, astonishing and ridiculous,--in the middle of the twelfth century imperial Rome was at war with suburban Tivoli, and Tivoli was the stronger; for when the Romans persuaded Pope Innocent the Second to lay siege to the town, the inhabitants sallied out furiously, cut their assailants to pieces, seized all their arms and provisions, and drove the survivors to ignominious flight. Hence the implacable hatred between Tivoli and Rome; and Tivoli became an element in the struggles that followed.