The Cortina Terrace (VI), nearly 400 feet deep, was a hollow square, open to the south except for a balustrade, closed to the east and west by a three-columned portico, connected at the back (north) with a _lithostroton_-paved vaulted corridor, called a cryptoporticus, which runs under the stair to the semicircular Terrace VII. Again, similarity of plan and décor ties the whole ensemble together. (Nowadays, the approach to Terrace VII is by a double-access stair, but this is of the seventeenth century.) At the back of the terrace, six arches, three on either side of the central stair, gave access to the cryptoporticus. At either end of the three-arch sequence is an arched projecting fountain house in appearance not unlike a Roman triumphal arch, with a pair of narrow windows in its back wall, opening on the cryptoporticus. Heavy deposits of lime on the back wall suggest an arrangement whereby persons passing through the cryptoporticus could look out through a thin sheet of water onto the Cortina Terrace. Enough traces remain to restore on paper the three-columned portico on the east and west. It was roofed with a pair of barrel vaults, coffered like the ones in the hemicycles of Terrace IV (another aesthetic link), and roofed like the great east-west ramps which connect Terraces III and IV. The portico’s outer walls were buttressed, and the north-south ramps from the Hemicycle Terrace also helped to counter the outward thrust. And so we come to the exedra, the seventh of the superimposed terrace levels, a most holy place, where the priests could appear and offer sacrifice on an altar in full view of the faithful assembled on the semicircular steps. At the top of the exedra there now rises the splendid semicircle of the Barberini Palace, but plate glass let into the museum’s ground floor paving shows the tufa footings of a semicircular series of columns, which must have been the middle set of another double portico answering to the one on the Cortina Terrace below, and, like it, double-barrel-vaulted and pitch-roofed, but of course semicircular in plan instead of U-shaped. Access to the porticoes was not on the central axis of the whole complex, but by a short narrow stair at either end of the exedra. (We shall see how Hadrian, too, centuries later, liked these split-access arrangements.) But, though there is no direct approach, the distance between the columns on either side of the main axis is extra-wide, to give a better view of the circular building (_tholos_) above and behind, the culminating point of the whole plan, where the cult statue was placed. [Illustration: FIG. 5.5 Palestrina, Museum. Sanctuary of Fortune, model. (J. Felbermeyer photo)]