"Few buildings," he says, "have been laden with a heavier amount of long-accumulated popular hatred than this; and few have more richly merited it. The Perugians were for many ages--nay, it may pretty well be said that they never ceased to be--a hard nut for the grinding teeth of papal tyranny to crack, and this huge Bastille was, at the time of its erection, a symbol of the final destruction of liberty in Perugia. "When I had last been in Perugia the entire building was open to the curiosity and free examination of the public. There was no crowd when I wandered over the labyrinths of its stairs and passages, guard-rooms, barracks, casemates, and prisons of every sort and size. I had the foul place then all to myself, with the exception of a few workmen, who were beginning to take the roof off one of the upper buildings; for the public of Perugia had already satiated their curiosity. I saw the large dungeons, accessible only by a circular opening in the pavement of the less dreadful dungeons above them; I saw the fearful cells, constructed in the thickness of the colossal masonry, in such devilish sort, that the wretches who had dared to question the deeds of Christ's Vicar on earth, once introduced into the cavity through apertures barely sufficient to admit a crawling figure, could neither stand nor sit in them. I paced the lofty battlements, which commanded such a panoramic view as can hardly be matched, over the beautiful country and the many cities within its circuit, all priest-trampled and poisoned; and I marked the narrow light-holes in some of the less dreadful prisons, through which a miserable, tantalising strip of far distant sunlit horizon was dimly visible to the immured victim, who knew too well, that he should never, never return to the light of day." On Trollope's second visit, that is to say, in 1862, the work of demolition was progressing, and an inscription had been placed on the wall of the piazza fronting the former main entrance to the fortress, which struck him as ironically satirical in its simplicity. It stated that the magistrates of Perugia were removing the fortress raised for the oppression of the citizens "_for the improvement of the prospect from the Piazza_"! Some time later Trollope returned to Perugia. The fortress was then being quickly pulled to pieces.