for the sake of ornament. But if we look for originality here we are disappointed. Undoubtedly hundreds of magnificent villas were being run up all over Italy from Como to Sorrento, but a Roman villa was more an affair of landscape gardening than of architecture. It consisted mainly of a series of courts and colonnades sprawling at large over the ground. The walls were built of coarse tufa or peperino; they were only just beginning to be incrusted with marble slabs. As a city Rome was still contemptible--a huddled mass of narrow, tortuous alleys. Augustus swept away as much of it as he could afford to demolish, and his historians remark that “he found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble.” There were of course ancient temples, venerable with dignity, and no doubt to us they would have seemed beautiful with the picturesqueness of antiquity. But with Gracchans and Marians and Clodians rioting at large through the city, many of these venerable shrines were destroyed by fire. The Roman ruins as seen by the modern traveller are almost all of Imperial times. The great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol was rebuilt four times. The round temple of Vesta was frequently destroyed and restored. Although for religious reasons the plan of the original was generally preserved in these rebuildings, the details were in accordance with the style of the day. Nevertheless the plans are interesting. The round shrines of Vesta and Mater Matuta[30] are clearly an architectural development from a round hut constructed of wood with a thatched roof. Indeed the Temple of Vesta is said to have been modelled on the hut of Romulus. It was perhaps originally the king’s house in which the princesses tended the sacred fire. The Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus also was, if we may trust the coins, built on an un-Greek plan with three naves instead of a single nave with aisles.