The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo had been built by the Roman people in the twelfth century, and from that time on it and the Augustinian convent beside it became the first hospice and sanctuary to the pilgrims from beyond the Alps. This was because the church and convent stand close to the Porta del Popolo, the gateway to the Flaminian Road, which is the great highway leading to the north. With these Augustinian monks stayed young Martin Luther when business connected with that order had brought him to Rome. The German seminarist who threads his way to-day among the Pincian alleys must often cross those vanished paths in the vineyard once trodden by the sandalled feet of his great fellow countryman, since Luther’s northern feeling for nature would surely have carried him at dawn or sunset to the convent’s vineyard. There the voices of the birds and the well-trained vines could soothe a spirit dazed and disquieted by the splendors and vices of Rome. The history of the German Reformation may well have had its earliest beginnings in the thoughts which thronged the mind of that young monk, as he leaned upon the vineyard wall and gazed with eyes that saw and saw not at the papal city, where old St. Peter’s--the church in which Charlemagne had been crowned--was being made over by Bramante into its present form; and beside it the huge pile of the Vatican housed the fighting Pope, Julius II, and a hierarchy of utter worldliness. The monks retained possession of their Pincian vineyard during the three following centuries, or until 1809, at which time Napoleon annexed the Papal States to his Empire, banished the recalcitrant Pope, Pius VII, and set about making Rome over to suit himself. He found the architect who had worked for Pius VI and Pius VII equally ready to serve him, and it was to this architect, Giuseppe Valadier, that Napoleon intrusted the conversion of the old convent vineyard into the Pincian Gardens of the present day. The work was not begun until 1812, and before it was finished Pius VII was back in Rome, and Napoleon was eating out his heart in St. Helena. In that long dying, when this last of the world’s great conquerors had time to remember even all that he himself had done, Napoleon must have often thought of Rome. The old mother who had always believed in him, yet never looked up to him, still lived there in her sombre palace under the shadow of the Austrian Legation and the Austrian hate. His favorite sister, Pauline, was a princess of one of the greatest of the Roman families; and the little son, who was to grow up as the Austrian Duke of Reichstadt, was still, to his father, the King of Rome. Did he ever think of the instructions he had given to Valadier about a public garden for the Romans? There was time to think of everything as the seasons came and went and the remote seas washed the crags beneath his feet, while his English jailers watched him from a distance with hard, uncomprehending eyes.