At both ends of the large basin in which the boat stands are long, flat pieces of travertine. These are the stepping-stones on which any one using the fountain stands while dipping up the water. The Marcia Pia now supplies the houses in this part of the city, but the Romans still prefer to drink Trevi, and the stepping-stones are as much in use as they were in the days when Falda and other artists of that period engraved this fountain, placing in the lower basin figures of men or women in the act of dipping up the water. This quarter of Rome, once a part of the Campus Martius of classical days, has been for a long time given over to the interests of the American and English colonies; but for more than three centuries its foreign associations were chiefly French. Urban VIII was in many ways a French Pope, although he came of a Florentine family. As papal nuncio he had spent many years and made many powerful friends at the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII. In the conclave which elected him Pope, France openly and ardently supported his claims. During his residence in France he had known Armand du Plessis, who was to become Cardinal Richelieu. The two great churchmen went up the ladder of preferment side by side. They became, as pope and cardinal minister, respectively, lifelong allies in their tireless and successful efforts to humble the dual power of Austria and Spain, while promoting on the one hand the prestige of France and on the other the stability of the Papal See. At the accession of Urban VIII, Spain and Austria held the passes of the Alps, thus dominating Europe and threatening the existence of the Papal States. At the close of his pontificate, France was rapidly becoming the first Continental power, and the Papal States had reached their utmost limit of territorial expansion. With his death the French influence in papal politics rapidly declined, but its artistic ascendency still lingered on. Thirteen years later a certain French gentleman, attached to the French embassy at Rome, and named Etienne de Guéffier, left in his will a sum of money for the construction of a great stone stairway which should connect the Piazza of the Trinità de’ Monti, in the centre of which lay the Barcaccia fountain, with the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti, standing far above, on the slope of the Pincian Hill. This gentleman, of whom little is known, must have been the friend of more than one of the great French artists who were living in Rome contemporaneously with himself. Possibly the splendid project of the Scalinata was the result of long hours of comradeship, when he, with his fellow countrymen, watched the sunset from the terrace which Sixtus V had placed before the Church on the Hill, or scrambled down the tree-planted slope before it in order to reach the fountain at its base. Certain it is that Rome owes this most distinctive architectural feature of papal times to the imagination and generosity of a Frenchman.