These things were done at Porta Sole in the past. The Abbot's palaces and covered passages were well-nigh battered to bits by the revengeful citizens, but the charm of the small piazza has not vanished with them. Looking from the bastions one still can trace a portion of the covered passage by which the terror-stricken Abbot fled at sunrise to his palaces at Porta Sant' Antonio; and on winter evenings we have often stood there, watching, with an ever fresh delight, the brown roofs of the slumbering town below--the brown woods of the browner Apennines beyond; and seen them fade and gather into one harmonious whole just as they did five hundred years ago, when Mommaggiore sat at supper and heard the first low hum of revolution. From the piazza of Porta Sole a steep paved road or staircase leads down to the Piazza Grimani, and here one is confronted by what is perhaps the most remarkable point in the whole city, namely, the Arch of Augustus.[73] ARCH OF AUGUSTUS. In Dennis' admirable account of Perugia he gives a full description of this arch:-- "The best preserved and grandest of all the gates of Perugia," he says, "is the _Arco d'Augusto_, so called from the inscription, _Augusta Perusia_, over the arch. It is formed of regular masonry of travertine, uncemented, in courses of 18 inches high; some of the blocks being 3 or 4 feet in length. The masonry of the arch hardly corresponds with that below it and is probably of subsequent date and Roman, as the inscription seems to testify, though the letters are not necessarily coeval with the structure. The arch is skew or oblique; and the gate is double, like those of Volterra and Cosa. Above the arch is a frieze of six Ionic colonnettes, fluted, alternating with shields; and from this springs another arch, now blocked up, surmounted by a second frieze of Ionic pilasters, not fluted. All the work above the lower arch is evidently of later date than the original construction of the gateway.... This gate stands recessed from the line of the city wall, and is flanked on either hand by a tower, projecting about 20 feet, and rising, narrowing upwards, to a level with the top of the wall above the gate. The masonry of these towers, to the height of the imposts of the arch, corresponds with that of the gate itself, and seems to be the original structure, all above that height is of a later period.... The gate still forms one of the entrances to the city, though there is a populous suburb without its walls. Its appearance is most imposing. The lofty towers, like ponderous obelisks, truncated--the tall archway recessed between them--the frieze of shields and colonnettes above it--the second arch soaring over all, a gallery, it may be, whence to annoy the foe--the venerable masonry overgrown with moss, or dark with the breath of ages--form