A few paces beyond the Palazzo Braschi I suddenly come upon one of the most attractive and alluring piazzas in Rome, the Piazza Navona, or, as it is sometimes called, the Circo Agonale. By its oblong form, its seductive symmetry, its elaborate decorations--three beautiful fountains, the central one surmounted by an Egyptian obelisk which once stood in the Circus of Maxentius; by its boundaries, which include the Palazzo Pamfili, the Church of S. Agnese, and the Church of S. Giacomo of the Spaniards, and innumerable small and large houses--it succeeds in conveying to the observer, who is susceptible to æsthetic impressions, sensations which are as purely pleasurable as anything can possibly be. Were it not for the distinctively Italian architecture one might easily imagine that he was in the centre of some provincial large city of France. It has, more than any other public square that I have ever been in, that quality which we speak of as foreign. No two buildings are alike, and, mean though many of them are, and especially toward the northern end, they blend in such a way as to produce a perfect harmony of color and architectural effect. In olden times they held races here, and I can imagine how marvellous a sight it must have been with the palaces and houses gayly decked with flags and drapery, rich rugs hanging from the window-sills, on which leaned beautiful ladies, frail and strong, attended solicitously, perhaps watchfully, by cavaliers and admirers, and the square below filled with the pleasure-loving crowd whose conduct betrayed nothing else save a desire to be amused and diverted. During the summer I often sat for a half-hour on my way home in this square, and, while watching the countless children from the surrounding tenements in those simple indulgences which they call play, tried to fancy some of the events that had taken place in the square and in the palaces and churches bordering it. It was in the Pamfili Palace, built by Innocent X in 1650 for his predatory and dissolute sister-in-law, Olympia Malacchimi, that the fortunes of the Pamfili family began. Here she sold bishoprics and beneficences, and here she externalized that conduct which brought infamy on her name. What a story an account of the intimate doings of that family would make! Their palace in the Corso is one of the most beautiful Renaissance residences in the world, and their villa on the Janiculum is an approximation to a rural paradise. All that is left of the family is a faded, sad, suggestible, middle-aged princess, whose English appearance and manner betray a lifelong habit of emotional suppression, and one son who is eking out his miserable days in the mountains of Switzerland.