as the ornaments of a spacious piazza, there was at that time nothing but a collection of hovels extending as far as the Campo de’ Fiori. The far-sighted young cardinal--the Farnese were thrifty, for all their magnificence--bought the old palace from the monks, and lived there in ever-increasing splendor under the successive pontificates of Julius II, Leo X, and Adrian VI. Finally, under Clement VII, the great sack of the city caused him to fly to the Castle of St. Angelo. As in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, forty-seven years later, only those Huguenot gentlemen survived who were kept in the King’s closet, so during the horrors of the sack only those cardinals escaped outrage who were sheltered with the Pope in the Castle of St. Angelo. Farnese by this time ranked next to the Pope in importance, and he was, of course, among these. From the Castle he witnessed, with the terrified Clement, the devastation inflicted upon the latter’s exquisite pleasure-house on Monte Mario, an act of wanton vandalism committed by the Colonna to spite the Pope. Some ten years later Cardinal Farnese bought this wrecked palace, restored it, and presented it to his daughter-in-law, Margaret of Austria, who rested there on her triumphal wedding procession into Rome. It is called after her to this day the Villa Madama. In 1540, when the old Palazzo Ferriz was destroyed to make room for the Palazzo Farnese, the workmen came as usual upon traces of earlier times. Modern archæologists have discovered that the mosaic pavement under the right wing of the palace was a part of the flooring of the Barracks of the “Red Squadron of Charioteers.” It has been generally supposed that the new palace was built of stone from the Coliseum, but its materials came from numerous and varied sources. The great travertine blocks were quarried at Tivoli; and Paul III obtained permission to demolish and use for his building the partly ruined battlemented monastery of St. Lorenzo Outside the Walls. After this quarry was exhausted, his nephews obtained the ruins of Porto, the Baths of Caracalla, and what was still more important the remains of the greatest temple of imperial Rome--Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun, which, at that date still towered one hundred feet above the Colonna gardens. [Illustration: One of the fountains in the Piazza Farnese.] Contemporary artists sketched these various structures as the masons destroyed them, so that students of the present day can form some idea of their classic grandeur, and can judge for themselves the value of the Farnese Palace on the one hand and on the other that of the imperial baths and temple, and the mediæval monastery, out of which it is built. The great new palace made necessary the great new square in front of it; but years before this the Pope had begun that regeneration of Rome for which he is so gratefully remembered.