young brother Flaminio in Padua, whither they had gone to live on the duke’s great legacy. Vittoria’s possession of Bracciano’s fortune, and the outraged pride of the Orsini occasioned by her marriage, for she was of humble origin, prompted Ludovico’s crime. But all three of these actors in the tragedy were guests of Venice, and Ludovico Orsini had in very truth reckoned without his host. There was one pride greater than that of a Roman noble, and that was the pride of Venice. Padua was Venetian territory, and the republic suffered no such acts of lawless vengeance within her jurisdiction, no matter by whom they were committed nor on what provocation. The Venetian reprisals were summary and fearful. Ludovico Orsini was strangled by the Bargello with the red silk cord which, as a nobleman, he had a right to demand; and his accomplices died by torture in the public square. It was an age of crime, flagrant and atrocious; but the story of Vittoria Accoramboni, involving, as it did, the temporary ruin of the Orsini family, lives on when others equally horrible have been happily buried and forgotten in the archives of the families in which they occurred. Sixty years after the death of Sixtus V this region about the Quattro Fontane had become both fashionable and beautiful. The fountains were then known as the four fountains of Lepidus, and Evelyn described them as the “abutments of four stately ways.” Sixtus V had made it illegal for any house along his great thoroughfare of the Felice to be torn down against the will of the owner, even after a decree of the Tribunal. In an age of uncertainty created by the Pope’s own high-handed measures, this security alone must have gone a long way toward encouraging building. In 1587 Sixtus himself bought the beautiful Piazza of Monte Cavallo from the heirs of the Caraffa family, and the Quirinal Palace, already begun by Gregory XIII, was finished by him with great magnificence. Fontana also built in one corner of the Quattro Fontane the Palazzo Mattei, now the Palazzo Albani. The invaluable stimulant of the “master’s eye” was always to be felt about the neighborhood, for Sixtus V often took his Sunday walk after mass along these streets, examining, criticising, and commanding everything. He was “always in a hurry.” It was as if he felt the time was short. No modern methods surpass the rush of his undertakings; but unlike the modern building, that which he built remained, and remains until this day. The feeble body which so successfully deceived the Conclave at his election and yet survived for those five titanic years of his pontificate lies in Santa Maria Maggiore, in the great chapel built for him by his Fontana. There, as Stendhal truly says: “Amid all the marble magnificence, what one really cares to see is the sculptured physiognomy of the Pope himself.”