"There were a number of people," he says, "on the occasion of my second visit gloating over the progressing destruction of the detested walls, as crowbar and pickaxe did their work. I saw one remarkable looking old man, with a long flowing white beard, sitting on a fallen fragment of wall in the sunshine, and never taking his eyes from the workmen who were tumbling down the great masses of concrete as fast as their excessive hardness would permit of their being detached. A gentleman I was with noticed the direction of my look, and said: 'That old man comes here at break of day, and remains till the workmen knock off at night. He was many years a prisoner in the fortress, and was liberated at the fall of the Papal Government.' "I felt that his presence there was fully accounted for, and that I could guess without any difficulty 'of what was the old man thinking?' as he watched the demolition of his prison home." But however great the damage done both to the people and their buildings by the fortress of the great Farnese, it must be admitted that the Pope at least employed a man of taste to carry out his vast designs. In building the new walls and knocking down the old, San Gallo left unharmed some of the finer characteristics of the city. He pulled down all the Baglioni strongholds, he battered down ten churches, and as many as four hundred houses--indeed, he destroyed a little corner of the mediæval town--but he preserved, with a tender carefulness, the church of the patron saint, S. Ercolano, and one of the first Etruscan gates: the Porta Marzia. As it was not possible to keep the latter in the form of a city gate San Gallo used it as a decoration, building it into the west wall of the fortress where, as Dennis rightly says, it still remains, "imprisoned in the brickwork, to be liberated by the shot of the next besiegers of Perugia, and looking as much out of place as an ancient Etruscan himself would look in the streets of the modern city." The Porta Marzia is surmounted by the usual frieze of short pillars, but the statues of four mysterious persons are inserted in the niches. A tradition in Perugia says that these statues are the portraits of a Perugian family who died from eating a large quantity of poisonous _funghi_ (mushrooms). How this myth originated it is not possible to say, but the figures with their inscrutable history add a phantom touch to the already phantom portal. They are probably Roman divinities.[65] It is worth getting the doors of the Porta Marzia opened to see the funny world inside: a whole small town of battered streets, even the fragments of a chapel, and many house-walls still intact. [Illustration: PORTA MARZIA] S. ERCOLANO.