so pleasing, when on seeing monuments one can immediately determine to what period they belong. The inscriptions, however, are still extant in copies, as for instance, at Pesaro. About a Roman mile from Tivoli, I found an overturned pedestal of a statue of Plancus, with an inscription, which had been quite rudely cut by a common mason, probably an ignorant slave. I was not able to convince a native of Tivoli, who even wrote on the antiquities of his own town, that such inscriptions are genuine. The Forum Augusti is now foolishly called Forum Nervae, probably because it is situated near the latter; while down to the seventeenth century its ruins were regarded as part of the Forum Trajani. The _Forum Nervae_ was very easy to be recognised by a temple built by Nerva and dedicated by Trajan, but the ruins of it were formerly believed to belong to the temple of Mars Ultor. Among these ruins there were six or eight columns, which unfortunately were lying on the ground, in consequence of which they were cut in pieces by Pope Paul V., who made use of the beautiful marble in building an aqueduct (_Acqua Paola_). This circumstance was so quickly forgotten that Nardini, who wrote only about forty or fifty years later, was perfectly ignorant of a temple having ever stood there, and that after him no modern ever even thought of it. All that was known of this temple of Nerva, was transferred to that of Mars Ultor. I discovered this fact from the work of Gamucci, an author of the sixteenth century, who gives a minute account of it, and representations of the ruins in woodcuts. I saw that three columns of exquisite beauty, which were generally referred to the temple of Mars Ultor, could be no other than those which he assigned to the Forum of Trajan. I also found copper-plate engravings of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and made out quite clearly, that those columns were not what they were believed to be, and that the space of the Forum Nervae was covered with houses by Cardinal Alessandrini, under Paul V. By the side of the Forum Augusti, another was built by Domitian, which was called _Forum Nervae_ or _Palladium_, because he erected a temple of Pallas in it; architraves and disfigured columns (_colonnacce_) of it still exist. The Palladium is also seen represented in reliefs. But Domitian’s name, as I have already observed, being detested by posterity, it afterwards obtained the name of Forum Nervae, for Nerva dedicated the temple of which the building had been commenced by Domitian.