Yet another Princess Borghese has left her memory within these gates. Canova has portrayed her as Venus Victrix, and she takes her place among the antique marbles by the right of flawless beauty. The flesh-and-blood original of Canova’s masterpiece, Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese, cared but little for her beautiful villa. The ilex groves were gloomy and the fountains were insignificant compared with those of Versailles. She wearied of palace, prince, and villa, and spent as much time as possible with her own kin. It is recorded that the prince, her husband, was far more jealous of Canova’s statue of his wife than of his wife’s person. The Princess Pauline Borghese passed away like a summer cloud, but the Venus Borghese remains. The personality of Cardinal Scipione Borghese is preserved in the two magnificent busts still standing in the picture-gallery of the Casino. It is difficult to believe that such vitality as Bernini has here portrayed could ever have quite faded from the earth, and surely his ghost must at times return to these gardens of his creation. LA BARCACCIA [Illustration] LA BARCACCIA At the foot of the great stone stairway, known in Italian as _La Scalinata_ and in English as the Spanish Steps, which leads down from the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti to the Piazza di Spagna lies the singular fountain called La Barcaccia. The design of this fountain is that of a quaintly conventionalized boat, fast sinking under the water which is pouring into it. To this effect it owes its name; for “barca,” being the Italian for boat, and “accia” a termination of opprobrium, Barcaccia means a worthless boat. The boat is supposed to commemorate an event which occurred during the great flood of 1598. On Christmas Day of that year the Tiber rose to its highest recorded level. All this part of the city was submerged to a depth of from seventeen to twenty-five feet; and here in the Piazza di Spagna a boat drifted ashore, grounding on that slope of the Pincian Hill, which is now covered by the Spanish Steps. For a long time the design of this fountain was supposed to commemorate this event, and it is quite possible that this may have been the case. Still there are other fountains of this design, the work of Carlo Maderno, and as one is in the Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the other in the Villa Aldobrandini, it is also quite possible that Carlo Maderno and the creator of the Barcaccia may have had yet another idea when they constructed their stone boats with a fountain amidships and lying in basins not much larger than the boats themselves. For the Romans of this time knew much and surmised still more about the mysterious boats lying at the bottom of Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, not more than seventeen miles distant from Rome. These boats had been discovered first during the pontificate of Pope Eugenius IV, and had been rediscovered in Paul III’s time, in 1535, or about a hundred years before Carlo Maderno employed this