side of the Square of St. Peter’s. From thence the water was conducted down the Via Alessandrina (now the Borgo Nuovo) to this small piazza of the Scossa Cavalli where Maderno constructed for it this second and very properly less splendid fountain. Thus it will be seen that the water as well as the architectural part of this fountain belongs to the beginning of the seventeenth century; but the interest attaching to the buildings surrounding the square in which it stands dates back farther than that, dates back in fact to the crowded days of the High Renaissance, when this prosaic little piazza was a centre of ardent and vivid life. The long, plain, yet dignified building to the south, now called the Ora Penitenzieri, was built by Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, who was one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV and brother to Pope Julius II, the friend and patron of Michelangelo. To the west, and on the corner made by the square and the street of the Borgo Nuovo, stands the house built by Bramante, and purchased by Raphael. The atelier of the “divine painter” is the corner room on the second floor. Against the wall behind those gloomy windows stood his last picture, “The Transfiguration,” unfinished; and on a bed placed at the foot of that picture, Raphael died. Another death agony is connected with the history of the square, for in the gardens behind the palace to the north, now called Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia, was held that fatal supper where the Borgias, father and son, fell victims to the poison which they had prepared for the cardinal who was their host and the owner of the palace. Even the legends of classic Rome seem somewhat colorless compared with the memories which haunt this dull little square. Nothing could be more prosaic than its present-day appearance. It is truly “empty, swept, and garnished,” but the devils which have gone out of it have seldom had their equal; its memories belong to a more splendid and to a more shameful past than is the heritage of any other city of our modern world. In 1492, when Columbus had discovered the Western Hemisphere and Copernicus was revolutionizing the mediæval view of the universe, Rome was still emerging from the shadow under which she had lain while the popes resided at Avignon. In 1471 Sixtus IV began to restore and embellish the city, and with him the Holy See entered upon that long period of secularization which reached its acme of infamy, of magnificence, and of territorial possessions in the respective pontificates of the Borgia, Medici, and Barberini popes. Each of these pontiffs left his mark on some particular quarter of the city; and although in the years following the times of Alexander VI efforts were made to obliterate the memory of the Borgias, the Borgo Nuovo remains forever bound up with their history. [Illustration: Upper basin of the fountain in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli.]