My next walk was to Tusculum, which belongs to Lucien Buonaparte; the villa in which he usually resides is called Rufanelli. On the road, I stopt at a convent to see a crucifix painted by Guido; a little figure about six inches long painted upon a cross; and a St. Francis, by Paul Brill, which is uncommonly fine for him. The villa at Rufanelli commands a very fine view, but it is rather too elevated for picturesque beauty. About it are numerous fragments of architecture, which Lucien Buonaparte has dug up in the neighbourhood, but they are not generally in a good style. The excavations at present in hand are at the top of the hill, where the ancient town stood. There are vestiges of an amphitheatre, called by the people the school of Cicero, and some more interesting remains of a theatre, while in every part we see fragments of ancient foundations. The town was destroyed only about the year 1200, which seems almost to bring it into modern times; but these places which continue to occupy for long a period their ancient situations, are not the most favourable for antiquities. Continual changes, adapting the buildings to new purposes, destroy the ancient arrangement. The great rage for altering and renewing everything does not however seem to have taken place in Italy till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when new churches, new convents, and new palaces, consumed the old materials with great rapidity. The ancient columns were then removed to new positions, and what was left either of Roman or Gothic, was buried in new walls, or under new decorations. We trace here the ancient streets, and can fix the position of two gates. Beyond the further gate there is a portion of the ancient city wall, of squared stones, which however divides singularly into two parts, and both parts are afterwards lost among reticulated work. Just at the division there are an ancient reservoir and fountain. The reservoir is covered with two sloping stones instead of a vault. Many curious little particulars have been discovered in these excavations, which are very interesting to a person on the spot, when the mind is excited and directed to the subject. Much of the earth thrown out from them is as complete a cinder, as if it were just ejected from Vesuvius, and the direction of the hills is such, that we might easily fancy them surrounding an enormous crater, from which the present Monte Cavo has arisen. From Tusculum I walked to Mondragone, a vast palace of the princes Borghese, misled by a false report of ancient walls. In the afternoon I visited an ancient fragment in the town, said to be the monument of Lucullus; and they pretend that an inscription was found there to that effect, but where that inscription now is, nobody could tell me. My last object was a large circular monument, the sepulchre of Lucius Valerius Corvinus, below the town, and nearly at the foot of the hill. It seems to have been in the style of the Plautian monument, or of the Cecilia Metella.