You remember the Piazza della Bocca della Verità at Rome? No? Perhaps it is too far away from the Piazza di Spagna and the stairs of the Monte di Trinità, which may be taken to be the central points of English or American Rome. Yet you must have passed by the Bocca della Verità on your way to your drive on the Via Appia and the tomb of Caecilia Metella. Do you not remember a large, shambling, unkempt-looking open space, a sort of cross in appearance between the _piazza_ of a city and a farmyard, a little after passing the remains of the Teatro di Marcello, the grand old arches of which are now, in the whirligig of Time's revenges, turned into blacksmiths' shops? The piazza in question is nearly open on one side to the Tiber, on the immediate bank of which stands that elegant little round temple, with its colonnade of charming fluted pillars, which has from time out of mind been known as the Temple of Vesta, though the designation, as modern archaeologists tell us, is probably erroneous. All the world, whether of those who have been at Rome or not, knows the Temple of Vesta, for it is the prettiest, if not the grandest, of the legacies to us of old pagan Rome, and it has been reproduced in little drawing-room models by the thousand in every conceivable material. Close to it, at one corner of the piazza, is the ancient and half-ruinous house which is pointed out as the habitation of Cola di Rienzi. It is altogether a strange-looking spot, that Piazza della Bocca della Verità, standing as it does on the confines of what may be called the inhabited part of Rome and that portion of the huge space within the walls which still remains sacred to the past and its memories and remains. But not the least strange thing about it is its name--the _Piazza of the Mouth of Truth_! There is a story of some one of the great doctors of the early ages of Christianity having taught in the very ancient church which stands on the side of the piazza farthest from the Tiber. Ay, to be sure, the name must come very evidently thence. The "mouth of truth" was the mouth of that seraphic or angelic or golden-tongued or other "doctor gentium," and the old church and the piazza still preserve the memory of his eloquence. Not a bit of it! Under the venerable-looking portico of this church there is a huge colossal marble mask, with a gaping mouth in the middle of it. There it lies, totally unconnected in any way with the various other relics of the past around it--tombs and frescoes and mosaics--and the stranger wonders what it is, and how it came there. To the last question there is no reply. But in answer to the former, tradition says that the Roman populace when affirming anything on oath were wont to place their hands in the mouth of this mask as a form of swearing, and hence the stone was called the "Bocca della Verità," and has given its name to the piazza.