It is something of a shock to find Napoleon’s bust in that company of great Italians which Mazzini placed here. In these Pincian Gardens, as elsewhere in the world, he surely belongs in a niche by himself! However, the Roman episode was of small importance in his life, and he would not have grudged the honorable position to Valadier, whose bust stands alone facing the principal promenade of the Pincian. That architect lived to welcome back the exiled Pius VII and to finish for him the gardens begun by order of Napoleon. One explanation of Rome’s charm may be found in her power of suggestion. Although the things to be seen in the Eternal City are of transcendent interest, the things which are only apprehended have a still stronger hold upon the imagination. The actual loveliness of the Pincian Gardens is forgotten as the archæologists build up from buried marbles and scattered inscriptions the life lived here in centuries gone by. Where now is Valadier’s casino there stood in the second century of our era a great Roman dwelling, the home of a patrician family, Christian in faith, its members holding from generation to generation high offices of state and called by historians “the noblest of the noble.” The grounds about this house of the Acilii included not only the present public gardens but also the precincts of the Villa Medici, the garden and convent of the Sacred Heart, and a part of the Villa Borghese. It would be impossible to find nowadays in any land the exact counterpart of this Roman dwelling. Its comfort, splendor and universal perfection of detail could not be surpassed, perhaps not equalled. Its artificially heated bathrooms, the cool, dark recesses of the wine-cellars, the courts and offices and state apartments, the devices for garden and foundation building, everything which made up this perfect specimen of the highest domestic civilization the world has known, has been discovered on the Pincian Hill. The great buttresses which this private family built to sustain the northwestern boundaries of their terraced garden still support the public gardens of to-day, and were incorporated by the Emperor Aurelian into the great wall with which he surrounded the city. Surely no stories of the Pincian can ever give so good an idea of the power, solidity, and grandeur of Rome as do these archæological discoveries, which show in fullest detail the domestic life of the Roman patrician under the Antonines. Of all this the northwestern buttresses of the Pincian Hill and the immortality of Nature alone remain.