"Nicolovius will remember the Theatre of Marcellus, in which the Savelli family built a palace. My house is half of it. It has stood empty for a considerable time, because the drive into the courtyard (the interior of the ancient theatre) rises like the slope of a mountain upon the heaps of rubbish; although the road has been cut in a zig-zag, it is still a break-neck affair. There is another entrance from the Piazza Montanara, whence a flight of seventy-three steps leads up to the same story I have mentioned; the entrance-hall of which is on a level with the top of the carriage-way through the courtyard. The apartments in which we shall live are those over the colonnade of Ionic pillars forming the third story of the ancient theatre, and some, on a level with them, which have been built out like wings on the rubbish of the ruins. These enclose a little quadrangular garden, which is indeed very small, only about eighty or ninety feet long, and scarcely so broad, but so delightful! It contains three fountains--an abundance of flowers: there are orange-trees on the wall between the windows, and jessamine under them. We mean to plant a vine besides. From this story, you ascend forty steps, or more, higher, where I mean to have my own study, and there are most cheerful little rooms, from which you have a prospect over the whole country beyond the Tiber, Monte Mario, and St. Peter's, and can see over St. Pietro in Montorio, indeed almost as far as the Aventine. It would, I think, be possible besides to erect a loggia upon the roof (for which I shall save money from other things), that we may have a view over the Capitol, Forum, Palatine, Coliseum, and all the inhabited parts of the city."--_Niebuhr's Letters._ Following the wall of the theatre, down a filthy street, we arrive at the picturesque group of ruins of the "Porticus Octaviæ," erected by Augustus, in honour of his sister (the unhappy wife of Antony), close to the theatre to which he had given the name of her son. The exact form of the building is known from the Pianta Capitolina,--that it was a parallelogram, surrounded by a double arcade of 270 columns, and enclosing the temples of Jupiter and Juno, built by the Greek architects, Batracus and Saurus.[91] With regard to these temples, Pliny narrates a fact which reminds one of the story of the Madonna of Sta. Maria Nuova.[92] The porters having carelessly carried the statues of the gods to the wrong temples, it was imagined that they had done so from divine inspiration, and the people would not venture to remove them, so that the statues always remained where they had been placed, though their surroundings were utterly unsuitable.