which, previous to Michelangelo’s time, led up from the Piazza of the Ara Cœli to the Capitol. All about it was held the public market; the city officials, found guilty of misdemeanors, were made to do penance sitting astride the Lion’s back with their hands tied behind them and their faces smeared with honey--the Roman version of the pillory! The ferocity of the Lion was thought to typify the punishment of crime, and the public executions were held before this old fragment. Here, on August 31, 1354, the famous soldier of fortune, Fra Monreale, was beheaded by order of Cola di Rienzi. On October 8 of the same year, Rienzi himself was caught as he was escaping in disguise from the burning palace of the Capitol, and here he stood, during the last hour of his life, leaning against the Lion, turning his head this way and that in vain quest of succor, while the mob which was so soon to tear him to pieces held back in a strange awe, and a silence reigned over everything! That was the greatest of all the tragedies--though there were so many of them--connected with the Lion. The old bit of sculpture continued to hold its sinister place in Roman life, until the pontificate of Paul III (Farnese, 1534–1549). At that time Master Michelangelo (to use Vasari’s phraseology), working for the Pope, remodelled the Capitol and decorated it with many old statues. The group of the horse and lion was then completely, though poorly, restored, and placed in the court of the Palazzo dei Conservatori--this being the first of the three buildings of the Capitol to be built after Michelangelo’s designs. At the same time the place for the public executions was transferred from the piazza of the Ara Cœli to the Piazza di Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The Lion was placed in its present position in 1903, and Rome of the twentieth century is responsible for the extraordinary taste which converted into a fountain this old fragment, highly interesting as an antiquity but repulsive in itself, and associated chiefly with the bloodiest and least attractive pages in Roman annals. It is impossible to leave the Campidoglio without a heightened appreciation of the might of the constructive imagination. Only that faculty, developed to its highest power as in Michelangelo, could have produced this magnificent harmony out of the incongruous mass of classic and mediæval survivals with which he had to deal. FARNESE [Illustration] FARNESE “At the entrance to this palace stand two rare and vast fountains made of granite stone and brought from the Baths of Titus.” Thus wrote John Evelyn in November, 1644. The description holds to this day, although the modern sight-seer will substitute Caracalla for Titus.