while a guest in the house of Aquila and Prisca. Another, no less perfect in its carvings, was found by Jacobus, son of Lawrence, amidst the materials collected for the rebuilding of San Saba. He simply threw it as common stone into one of the foundation trenches, in the manner shown by the following illustration. The Torre delle Milizie, which I have named above as the best existing specimen of a medieval baronial tower, was probably built by Pope Gregory IX, of the Conti family, between 1227 and 1241, on the remains of Trajan's buildings, known in the middle ages by the name of Balnea Pauli (Magnanapoli). Boniface VIII bought it from the sons of Pietro d' Alessio, in 1294, and restored it to its full height after it had Another capital, thrown into a foundation trench of the church of San Saba been mutilated by Brancaleone Andalo in 1257. Popular tradition, ignoring all these particulars, connects it with the burning of Rome at the time of Nero, and points it out to the unsuspecting tourist as the point of vantage from which the wicked emperor witnessed the calamity. It is perhaps on account of this tradition that the tower obtains a place of honor in all the medieval views of the city, such as the one by Nicola Polani (1459), published by Geffroy in 1892; a second by Taddeo di Bartolo (1413), published by Stevenson in 1881; a third by Ghirlandajo in the "Rape of the Sabines," etc. I have selected for my own. illustration a hitherto unpublished view by Paolo Uccello, forming part of a panorama of Rome in the background of a battle-piece now in the Galleria Reale of Turin. The Torre delle Milizie, three stories high, is coupled as usual with other characteristic landmarks of the city, the Coliseum, the Aracœli, St. John the Lateran, etc. Comparing Uccello's design with the present state of the tower, we see that the third and highest section is missing. When and by whom and for what purpose the mutilation was done still remains a mystery. No clue is to be found in Valesio's dissertation "De Turri Comitum," which deals exhaustively with this subject,' nor in Cancellieri's account of Roman towers inserted in his volume "Sulle Campane di Campidoglio." It may have been destroyed by Giacomo Arlotto de' Stefaneschi in his attempt to pacify the city in 1313, or it may have fallen, like the upper part of the Torre de Conti, in the great earthquake of January 25, 1348. The house of the Anguillara in the Trastevere, opening on the Via della Lungaretta and facing the church of San Crisogono, has been described by Prince Camillo Massimo, in a memoir published in 1847 under the title "Cenni storici sulla torre degli Anguillara." The Anguillara branch of the Orsini family was already in possession of power and wealth at the time of the death of St. Francis of Assisi (1225). A rude painting in the church of San Francesco à Ripa, now lost or whitewashed, represented Count Pandolfo, the head of the family, in the garb of a Tertiary monk, offering to the saint the model of this church and of the adjoining convent, both of which he had rebuilt at his own cost. In the contests which followed the advent of the Emperor Henry VII in 1312, the tower formed a rallying point for the Orsini faction, while the Colonna had selected the Torre delle Milizie for their headquarters. None of the contending parties won the con1 Published by Calogerà, Opuscoli, vol. xxviii, p. 45. |