The last remains of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun were presented by Prince Colonna to the Pope and went into the fabric of the villa, and a great collection of portrait busts of the Emperors, found in the villa of Hadrian, helped to adorn the loggias and niches. The villa was filled with rare marbles, tables, statues, and vases, and the marble columns of the central loggia were so lustrous that Amannati says they mirrored every one who entered there. As the villa is constructed on the hillside, various levels are the natural result, and this feature has been used with diverse and happy effects. The various courts are all on different planes while, with the one exception of the grand double stairway in the central court, all the stairs are cunningly concealed so that there is no suggestion of physical effort as the eye passes from one plane to another. The vaulted roofs of the long semicircular galleries and various rooms were decorated with paintings or with stucco work of the most exquisite perfection. Traces of this last are still to be seen above the niches containing the colossal river-gods, the Tiber and the Arno (Amannati was a Florentine). The place was truly a Palace of Art. Nothing but beauty was permitted to enter it. Stables, offices, and kitchens were placed outside the villa, and the one house which stood within the villa grounds--that of the keeper or custodian--was designed and decorated with great care, so that, according to Amannati, the entire invention was of such beauty that it was in itself “good enough for any great prince.” Nothing remains of this splendor but the bare shell, and this has been so tampered with that it is only from old plans or from outlines of restoration by Letarouilly and Stern that a true conception can be obtained of the villa of Pope Julius III. It is necessary to know, for instance, that the front court, now a commonplace garden, was originally a great paved cortile filled with statuary now in the Vatican or scattered far and wide over Italy. The loggia leading up and out of this court was originally closed and entered by doors. The shallow, broad stairway leading down from the right-hand garden under the terraces was put in for the benefit of the cavalry quartered there during a petty war of the eighteenth century, when the horses were taken down to drink at the Nymphæum! The present gardens in no wise represent the beautiful formal gardens which stretched there on either side of the various courts, and the present walls cannot possibly enclose that space which was once filled with orange groves and every sort of device for fastidious delight. Somewhere in those grounds, probably on the right hand, there was a monticello or little hill from which could be seen the Tiber, the Seven Hills, the “beautiful Strada Flaminia,” the Vatican, and the vast erection of new St. Peter’s overtopping and gradually engulfing the old basilica, the view extending even to the sea.