None but a bigoted mediævalist can refuse to acknowledge the warmth of tone, the repose, the stateliness, of the churches of modern Rome; but even in the midst of admiration the sated eye turns away from the wealth of ponderous ornament, and we long for the clear pure colour, the simple yet grand proportions that give a charm to the buildings of an earlier age. [Sidenote: Existing relics of the Dark and Middle Ages.] [Sidenote: The Mosaics.] [Sidenote: The Bell-towers.] Few of the ancient churches have escaped untouched; many have been altogether rebuilt. There are also some, however, in which the modernizers of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries have spared two features of the old structure, its round apse or tribune and its bell-tower. The apse has its interior usually covered with mosaics, exceedingly interesting, both from the ideas they express and as the only monuments of pictorial art that remain to us from the Dark Ages. To speak of them, however, as they deserve to be spoken of, would involve a digression for which there is no space here. The campanile or bell-tower is a quaint little square brick tower, of no great height, usually standing detached from the church, and having in its topmost, sometimes also in its other upper stories, several arcade windows, divided by tiny marble pillars[347]. What with these campaniles, then far more numerous than they are now, and with the huge brick fortresses of the nobles, towers must have held in the landscape of the mediæval city very much the part which domes do now. Although less imposing, they were probably more picturesque, the rather as in the earlier part of the Middle Ages the houses and churches, which are now mostly crowded together on the flat of the Campus Martius, were scattered over the heights and slopes of the Cœlian, Aventine, and Esquiline hills[348]. Modern Rome lies chiefly on the opposite or north-eastern side of the Capitol, and the change from the old to the new site of the city, which can hardly be said to have distinctly begun before the destruction of the south-western part of the town by Robert Guiscard, was not completed until the sixteenth century. In A.D. 1536 the Capitol was rebuilt by Michael Angelo, in anticipation of the entry of Charles the Fifth, upon foundations that had been laid by the first Tarquin; and the palace of the Senator, the greatest municipal edifice of Rome, which had hitherto looked towards the Forum and the Coliseum, was made to front in the direction of St. Peter's and the modern town. [Sidenote: Changed aspect of the city of Rome.] [Sidenote: Analogy between her architecture and her civil and ecclesiastical constitution.] [Sidenote: Preservation of an antique character in both.]