"Les étrangers se donnent parfois l'amusement d'éclairer le Colisée avec des feux de Bengale. Cela ressemble un peu trop à un finale de mélodrame, et on peut préférer comme illumination un radieux soleil on les douces lueurs de la lune. Cependant j'avoue que la première fois que le Colisée m'apparut ainsi, embrasé de feux rougeâtres, son histoire me revint vivement à la pensée. Je trouvais qu'il avait en ce moment sa vraie couleur, la couleur du sang."--_Ampère, Emp._ ii. 156. CHAPTER V. THE VELABRUM AND THE GHETTO. S. Teodoro--Sta. Anastasia--Circus Maximus--S. Giorgio in Velabro--Arch of Septimius Severus--Arch of Janus--Cloaca-Maxima--Sta. Maria in Cosmedin--Temple of Vesta--Temple of Fortuna Virilis--House of Rienzi--Ponte-Rotto--Ponte Sublicio--S. Nicolo in Carcere--Theatre of Marcellus--Portico of Octavia--Pescheria--Jewish Synagogue--Palazzo Cenci--Fontana Tartarughe--Palazzo Mattei--Palazzo Caetani--Sta. Caterina dei Funari--Sta. Maria Campitelli--Palazzo Margana--Convent of the Tor de' Specchi. The second turn on the right of the Roman Forum is the Via dei Fienili, formerly the _Vicus Tuscus_, so called from the Etruscan colony established there after the drying up of the marsh which occupied that site in the earliest periods of Roman history. During the empire, this street, leading from the Forum to the Circus Maximus, was one of the most important. Martial speaks of its silk-mercers; from an inscription on a tomb we know that the fashionable tailors were to be found there; and the perfumers' shops were of such abundance as to give to part of the street the name of Vicus Thurarius. At its entrance was the statue of the Etruscan god, Vertumnus, the patron of the quarter.[74] This was the street by which the processions of the Circensian games passed from the Forum to the Circus Maximus. In one of the Verrine Orations, an accusation brought by Cicero against the patrician Verres, was that from avaricious motives he had paved even this street--used for processions of the Circus--in such a manner that he would not venture to use it himself.[75] All this valley was once a stagnant marsh, left by inundations of the Tiber, for in early times the river often overflowed the whole valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline hills, and even reached as far as the foot of the Quirinal, where the Goat's Pool, at which Romulus disappeared, is supposed to have formed part of the same swamp. Ovid, in describing the processions of the games, speaks of the willows and rushes which once covered this ground, and the marshy places which one could not pass over except with bare feet: