"After dinner, Bunsen called for us, and took us first to his house on the Capitol, the different windows of which command the different views of ancient and modern Rome. Never shall I forget the view of the former; we looked down on the Forum, and just opposite were the Palatine and the Aventine, with the ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars on the one, and houses intermixed with gardens on the other. The mass of the Coliseum rose beyond the Forum, and beyond all, the wide plain of the Campagna to the sea. On the left rose the Alban hills, bright in the setting sun, which played full upon Frescati and Albano, and the trees which edge the lake, and further away in the distance, it lit up the old town of Labicum."--_Arnold's Letters._ From the further end of the courtyard of the Caffarelli Palace one can look down upon part of the bare cliff of the Rupe Tarpeia. Here there existed till 1868 a small court, which is represented as the scene of the murder in Hawthorne's Marble Faun, or "Transformation." The door, the niche in the wall, and all other details mentioned in the novel, were realities. The character of the place is now changed by the removal of the boundary-wall. The part of the rock seen from here is that usually visited from below by the Via Tor de' Specchi. To reach the principal portion of the south-eastern height of the Capitol, we must ascend the staircase beyond the Palace of the Conservators, on the right. Here we shall find ourselves upon the highest part of "The Tarpeian rock, the citadel Of great and glorious Rome, queen of the earth, So far renown'd, and with the spoils enriched Of nations." _Paradise Regained._ "The steep Tarpeian, fittest goal of treason's race, The promontory whence the traitor's leap Cured all ambition." _Childe Harold._ The dirty lane, with its shabby houses, and grass-grown spaces, and filthy children, has little to remind one of the appearance of the hill as seen by Virgil and Propertius, who speak of the change in their time from an earlier aspect. "Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem, et Capitolia ducit, Aurea nunc, olim, silvestribus horrida dumis, Jam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestes Dira loci; jam tum silvam saxumque tremebant." _Virgil, Æn._ viii. 347. "Hoc quodcumque vides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est, Ante Phrygem Aeneam collis et herba fuit." _Propertius_, iv. eleg. I.