The inn was old, as the times of Charlemagne, and was a favorite stopping-place for travellers coming from the north. The quarter was at that time in the hands of the powerful house of the Pierleoni, whose first Pope, Anacletus, had been dead a little over a century, and who, though they lorded the castle and many towers and fortresses in Rome, had not succeeded in imposing their anti-pope upon the Roman people against the will of Bernard of Clairvaux. Francesco wandered through the crooked, unpaved streets, in and out of gloomy courts, over desolate wastes and open places. There was a crisis at hand in the strife of the factions. Every one went armed, and those who knelt to hear mass in a church, knelt with their backs to the wall. At his inn, too, he had noted every one lived in a state of armed defence, against every one, including the host and other guests. And reasons were not lacking therefor, for Rome was in the throes of political convulsions and its walls resounded the battle-cry of Guelph and Ghibelline. Howling and singing, a mob filled the streets southward to the Capitol, or even to the distant Lateran, where Marcus Aurelius on his bronze horse watched the ages go by. Across the ancient Aelian bridge Francesco stalked, under the haunted battlements of Castel San Angelo, where the ghost of Theodora was said to walk on autumn nights, when the south wind blew, and through the long wreck of the fair portico that had once extended from the bridge to the Basilica, till he saw glistening in the distance the broad flight of steps leading to the walled garden court of St. Peter's. Here he rested among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze pine-cone and the great brass peacocks, which Symmachus had brought thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, in which the family of the Crescentii had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years. For a long time Francesco sat there in mournful silence, drinking in the sun-steeped air of evening, and the scent of the flowers that grew here with the profusion of spring-time.