Standing on the brow of the hill, from which is obtained the incomparable view of St. Peter’s at sunset, Valadier looked down upon the Piazza del Popolo as Piranesi had engraved it in his time (1720–1778). A somewhat shapeless area of flat ground stretching in an indeterminate way westward from the base of the Pincian Hill, it seemed to be only the debouchment of the three great thoroughfares running into it from the heart of the city. The twin churches standing one on either side of the Corso, the centre thoroughfare, were the chief architectural features on the south side, while on the north side ran the city wall and the Church of St. Mary of the People. In the centre of this area stood the obelisk as it stands to-day, placed there by Sixtus V in 1589, and with a single fountain at its foot--a huge basin carved by Domenico Fontana out of one solid block of marble taken from the ruins of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. The water supplying this fountain was the Acqua Trevi, the same which fills the fountains of the present day. Such was the Piazza del Popolo as Valadier’s eyes beheld it, but at that point where the Aurelian wall is pierced by the Porta del Popolo (the old Flaminian Gate) he saw something else: He saw the end of the Flaminian Way--the great highroad leading directly from the north. And at that point the actual faded away, and to Valadier there came a vision. He saw the Piazza del Popolo as the magnificent and adequate antechamber to Rome. He saw it approached by this great highroad which, first skirting the shore of the Adriatic, then traversing the breadth of Italy and the watershed of the Appenines, descends thence to the western slopes of Mount Soracte and, crossing the Ponte Molle, comes all the way to Rome from far-off Ariminum, or Rimini, the Roman fortress and frontier town on the Adriatic--two hundred and twenty miles distant--and the key to Cisalpine Gaul. Down this road, which is but a continuation of the still greater Via Emilia, have come all the northern friends and all the northern foes of Rome. Other eyes than Valadier’s can see that procession. Barbarian invaders and imperial armies have covered all the countryside like swarms of locusts--the progress of most of them marked by burning farms and plundered villages. In quieter times there have come pilgrim hosts and companies of merchants; and travelling scholars, and artists “with hearts on fire” for Rome; also ambassadors and foreign prelates, exiles and penitents, great bridal processions like Margaret of Austria’s in 1537, funeral pageants, bandit troops, fugitives of every type, bare-legged friars (among them a Luther), soldiers of fortune, and English noblemen in travelling carriages with postilions; every sort and condition of man whom the north has sent forth to the Eternal City. Down this Flaminian Road they came, passed through the Flaminian Gate, and received their first impression of Rome here in the Campus Martius--the modern Piazza del Popolo.