The Borgias passed away from Rome. Cardinal della Rovere was made Pope, and men set about to obliterate all memories of that brood whose crimes had made Rome a stench in the nostrils of Christendom. Gradually, but effectively, the work was accomplished. Alexander VI’s tomb was built without any monument. The Fountain of the Gilded Bulls, the emblem of the Borgias, which stood before St. Peter’s was destroyed. The Borgia apartments in the Vatican were walled up, and remained so for centuries. The nude figure of the beautiful Giulia Farnese on the tomb of her brother Pope Paul III in St. Peter’s was covered with painted metal draperies. Even the Via Alessandrina became the Borgo Nuovo. Cardinal Adriano Corneto lived through the pontificate of Pope Julius II and into that of Pope Leo X; but the fame of his riches did at last work his undoing. Leo X, who needed money as much as Alexander VI, insisted that the cardinal was privy to a conspiracy against his life. Corneto was deprived of his cardinalate, even degraded from the priesthood, and was obliged to make his escape from Rome. He died in obscurity, leaving his beautiful palace, still unfinished, to his benefactor King Henry VII, who made it the residence of the English ambassador. A century later, when Maderno built the fountain of the Scossa Cavalli for Pope Paul V, Cardinal Corneto’s palace had again passed into the hands of the Romans, where it has remained. The Reformation had swept over England, and there was no longer an English ambassador to the Papal See. PIAZZA PIA [Illustration] PIAZZA PIA No one can walk the Roman streets without perceiving, and almost at once, that here time is of no importance. It is, in fact, an absolutely negligible quantity. Buildings and monuments dating from widely diverse periods stand side by side, and it is in no wise incongruous from the Roman standpoint to find at the head of the Borgo (the ancient Leonine city) one of the very latest fountains of papal Rome. It is a charming little creation, quite consciously harking back to the great days of the papacy and rebuking by its sober, yet imaginative sculpture those geometrical designs or extravagant ebullitions of fancy--the fountains of the present régime. It stands in the Piazza Pia, against that narrow façade which blunts the point of the long angle or wedge-shaped block of buildings lying between the Borgo Vecchio and the Borgo Nuovo. Its Fontanesque mostra is composed of two beautiful white Carrara columns with Corinthian capitals supporting a pediment and entablature on which is an inscription to the effect that the fountain was erected by Pius IX in the sixteenth year of his pontificate, which would make it the year 1862. The sculptural part of the fountain bears a certain resemblance to the work of Luigi Amici and Bitta Zappalà, the artists who not many years later executed the modern figures in the side fountains of the Piazza Navona.