Pope Alexander VI fled to the Vatican and, later, to the Castle of St. Angelo. Very little came--or, for the time, very little seemed to come--of all this glitter and commotion. “Charles VIII and his lusty company of young men, among them the youthful Bayard, all of good family,” says the old chronicler, “but little under control,” were making a holiday war. They could not have comprehended the great forces that were at work beneath the noisy agitation of their enterprise. Yet King and nobles fell at once under the spell of Italy. Charles VIII, bred in the fortress castles of Louis XI, wrote home to his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, describing the loveliness of his Neapolitan gardens and the genius of the Italian painters who were to do wonderful ceilings for him when he had carried them back to France. Before he quitted Rome, the army got one day of pillage and the King founded the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. Then after six months more of picturesque soldiering Charles went back to France, planning his return already in his heart, and taking with him over the Alpine passes an army which spread the legend of Italy far and wide through the northern countries. In the fifteenth century there were but two ways for a man to see the world. Either he went on pilgrimage to some far-distant shrine or he had to join an army of invasion! Charles VIII did not return, but he had shown his subjects the way to Rome, having been the first French King to cross the Alps since Charlemagne. Even before the Porta del Popolo was finished and long after the orchards and gardens of this district had been converted into the spacious Piazza del Popolo, Rome and France felt the influence for evil and for good set in motion by this unjustifiable and light-hearted incursion of (as the old Huguenot historian calls him) a “madly adventurous young King.” Modern methods of travel have deprived men of one of life’s greatest sensations. Lovers of Rome know this. One of them, a schoolboy, spoke for all when he came out of the railway station, exclaiming in bitter disappointment: “So this is ancient Rome! It might as well be modern Chicago!” The Piazza del Popolo is no longer the entrance hall to the Eternal City. It must be sought for, with guide-book or map; but when it is found there is no better way to revive the ghost of that thrill which came spontaneously to those who entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo than to seat oneself upon the edge of one of Valadier’s fountains, preferably the western one, and then--to try to think! PINCIAN [Illustration] PINCIAN