Orientation like the Regia’s is an Etruscan practice, and it is with domination by the Etruscans that we should expect Rome’s primitive simplicity to evolve into something more like grandeur. The literary tradition ascribed to the Etruscan, Tarquin the Proud, Rome’s last king, a great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, built by the forced labor of Roman citizens, and decorated by Etruscan artisans like Vulca of Veii, the sculptor of the Apollo (page 52). It took World War I to confirm this literary tradition archaeologically. The Italians, on the Allied side in that war, ousted the Germans from their Embassy, splendidly situated on the Capitoline Hill in the Palazzo Caffarelli, and remodelled the palace into a museum. In the process was revealed a massive podium, sixteen feet high, built without mortar of blocks of _cappellaccio_, the oldest of Rome’s building stones. Fortunately, diagonally opposite corners were found, making it possible to establish how impressive were the podium’s dimensions: roughly 120 × 180 feet. Three corners of the podium having been isolated, archaeologists were able to fit into the plan the remains of a substructure which had been found in 1865 under the Palace of the Conservatori. This substructure, now built impressively into a corridor of the Conservatori Museum, proved to be the support for columns. The platform as a whole, then, was the podium of a temple, the largest of its time, over twice the size, for example, of the one at Marzabotto. Traces of the settings for the columns proved them to be placed too wide apart to be connected by architraves in stone; they must instead have been great wooden beams. The wood would have been revetted or faced with terracotta, and in fact enough fragments of terracotta revetments were found on the site to establish this temple as decorated in the typical Etruscan style. If its sculptures were as striking as the Apollo of Veii, they were masterpieces indeed. The temple, repeatedly and ever more grandiosely rebuilt--in one phase it was roofed with gilded bronze, and the cult statue was gold and ivory--was the center and symbol of Rome’s religious life. Here the triumphal processions ended. Here the triumphing general, surrounded by his spoils of victory, descended from his chariot drawn by four white horses, and passed through the open doors and the clouds of incense to give thanks to Jupiter the Best and Greatest for his victory. From the cliff behind the temple, the Tarpeian rock, traitors were thrown to their deaths; here, in 133 B.C., Tiberius Gracchus, the friend of the people, was murdered. Religion, dignity, pride, greed, pomp, tragedy: all are the stuff of Roman history; all are here, and archaeology illumines their story. Horace boasted that his poetry would endure “so long as, with the mute Vestal, the Pontifex climbs up to the Capitoline Temple.” For him as for us Rome was the Eternal City, and the Capitoline was the symbol of its permanence.