the villa, one for the family, the other for the guests. They were begun by Cardinal Riario, and finished by Cardinal Gambara. The great hall has fine frescoes by the Zuccari brothers, and the comfort and elegance of the rooms attest the frequent presence of a Duchess who is of American birth.

Beyond the villa the walks are of indescribable beauty : gigantic plane-trees; terraces, where crystal water is ever sparkling through gray stone channels; mossy grottoes overhung with evergreens; woods of ancient ilexes, which have never known the axe, and which cast the deepest shade in the hottest summer weather; peacocks strutting up and down the long avenues and spreading their tails to the sun; and, here and there, openings towards the glorious mountain distances or the old brown town in the hollow.

Two miles further is the famous sanctuary of La Quercia, In the square before it two fairs are held, which are of great antiquity-the first founded in 1240 by Frederick II., beginning on September 22, and ending on October 6; the second, founded in 1513 by Leo. X., beginning at Pentecost, and lasting for the fifteen days following. The front of the great church of La Madonna della Quercia and its stately tower are splendid works of Bramante. Over the central door is a fine representation of the Madonna surrounded by angels, and over the side doors S. Joseph and S. Stephen, S. Dominic and S. Peter Martyr, by Luca della Robbia. Behind the altar, in a kind of recess, is preserved the famous relic, the Madonna which miraculously grew out of an oak on that spot. The branch of the tree is preserved as evidence! But the great charm of the place is its glorious Gothic cloister and fountain, with the inscription, He who drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but he who drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.' It was in this church that the Père Lacordaire and the Père Requedat made their profession.

A straight road, a mile in length, leads from La Quercia to Viterbo, which we enter by the Porta Fiorentina, outside which is a public garden.

Viterbo, which the old chroniclers called 'the city of beautiful fountains and beautiful women,' is now rightly designated 'the Nuremberg of Italy.' Each street is a study in its sculptured cornices, Gothic windows, and heavy outside staircases resting on huge corbels. A wealth of sparkling water plays around the grand Gothic fountains and washes the carved lions and other monsters which adorn them. In the great piazza, where the houses are hung with stone shields of arms, and two lions on tall pillars guard the way, stands the Palazzo Pubblico, within whose court is one of the most picturesque views of the city and the hills beyond. Here, round the little platform, are five Etruscan figures reclining upon their tombs. In the palace above are preserved the forgeries by which Fra Giovanni Nanni, commonly called Annio di Viterbo, claimed for his native city an antiquity greater than that of Troy, and a marble tablet, inscribed with a pretended edict of Desiderius, the last of the Lombard kings, decreeing that 'within one wall shall be included the three towns, Longula, Vetulonia, and Terrena, called Volturno, and that the whole city thus formed shall be called Etruria or Viterbum.'

Three rooms on the ground floor have been converted into a Museum. Here are some very fine Etruscan sarcophagi and recumbent figures removed from sepulchres at Castel d' Asso and other sites in the neighbourhood. The Pictures, for the most part, are of no artistic value. There are, however, a few gems amongst them.

An early Madonna in fresco, from S. Maria dei Gradi.
A portrait of S. Bernardino da Siena.

Sebastian del Piombo. The Flagellation-a replica of his famous picture in S. Pietro di Montorio at Rome. Removed from the Chiesa degli Osservanti del Paradiso.

Jacopo da Norcia, or the Perugian Orlandi, who was assistant to Sinibaldo Ibi.' The Nativity (attributed to Pinturicchio), from the Chiesa degli Osservanti.

Sebastiano del Piombo. 'The Solitude of the Virgin.' The

1 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, iii. 297.

Madonna is watching the dead body of Christ through the moonlit night-a most striking and thought-inspiring picture.

'The works of Sebastiano having been exalted to great or rather infinite reputation by the praises lavished on them by Michelangelo, to say nothing of the fact that they were in themselves beautiful and commendable, there was a certain Messer, I know not who, from Viterbo, who stood high in favour with the Pope, and who commissioned Sebastiano to paint a dead Christ, with our Lady weeping over him, for a certain chapel which he had caused to be erected in the Church of S. Francesco in Viterbo ; but although the work was finished with infinite care and zeal by Sebastiano, who executed a twilight landscape therein, yet the invention was Michelangelo's, and the cartoon was prepared by his hand. The picture was esteemed a truly beautiful one by all who beheld it, and acquired a great increase of reputation for Sebastiano.' Vasari.

'The figure of Christ, which has, apparently, been drawn from nature, is nearly black; it is extended on a white winding-sheet, with the shoulders raised, and the head drooping back, admirably drawn. The difficulties of the position are completely surmounted. The Madonna, behind, clasping her hands in an agony of grief, strongly expresses the deep, passionate, overwhelming affliction of a mother weeping for her child in a despair that knows no comfort. This is its charm ; there is nothing ideal, nothing beautiful, nothing elevated. She is advanced in life; she is in poverty; she seems to belong to the lower orders of women; but there is nature in it, true and uninvited, though common, and perhaps vulgar-nature, that speaks at once to every heart.'-Eaton's Rome.'

On the opposite side of the piazza, raised high against the wall of the church of S. Angelo in Spata, is the sarcophagus tomb of the fair Galiana, whose beauty made her the cause of a war between Viterbo and the Romans, the latter only consenting to raise the siege of her native city on condition of her showing herself upon the battlements, and allowing the besiegers once more to gaze upon her charms. Her epitaph says :

Flos et honor patriae, species pulcherrima rerum,
Clauditur hic tumulo Galiana ornata venusto ;
Foemina signa polos conscendere pulchra meretur
Angelicis manibus diva hic Galiana tenetur.
Si Veneri non posse mori natura dedisset,
Nec fragili Galiana mori mundo potuisset.
Roma dolet nimium; tristatur Thuscia tota;
Gloria nostra perit; sunt gaudia cuncta remota ;

Though not so old as the mendacious Dominican, Nanni, would make out, there is nothing new, and nothing small, in Viterbo, whose very name, compounded of Vetus Urbs, would indicate its antiquity. Every wall, every doorway, every sculpture, is vast of its kind, and every design is noble. Its ancient name would appear from inscriptions to have been Surrina. The Cathedral (of S. Lorenzo) stands in the lower part of the town, on a rising ground, which was once occupied by a temple of Hercules, and which was called 'Castellum Herculis' as late as the 13th century. Near it is a Bridge with Etruscan foundations in blocks of six

courses. The cathedral stands in a kind of close, and is almost surrounded by different fragments of the half-demolished Palace where the Popes of the 13th century resided. In the great hall which still exists, met the conclaves at which Urban IV. (1261), Clement IV. (1264), Gregory X. (1271), John XXI. (1276), Nicholas III. (1277), and Martin IV. (1277), were elected. The cardinals spent six months over the election of the last pope, and made Charles of Anjou, who was then at Viterbo, so impatient, that he took away the roof of their council chamber to force them to a decision, and they, in a kind of bravado, dated their letters of that time from 'the roofless palace.' This council-hall is surrounded by memorials of all the popes who were natives of Viterbo and its surrounding villages, or who lived there. Adjoining it is another hall, still roofless, in which Pope John XXI. (Pedro Juliani-a Portuguese) was killed by the fall of the ceiling in 1277. This room is supported by a single pillar, standing in the open space below, which projects through the floor so as to form a fountain.

'John XXI. was a man of letters, and even of science; he had published some mathematical treatises which excited the astonishment and therefore the suspicion of his age. He was a churchman of easy access, conversed freely with humbler men, if men of letters, and was therefore accused of lowering the dignity of the pontificate. He was perhaps hasty and unguarded in his language, but he had a more inexpiable fault. He had no love for monks or friars : it was supposed that he meditated some severe coercive edicts on these brotherhoods. Hence his death was foreshown by gloomy prodigies, and held either to be a divine judgment, or a direct act of the Evil One. John XXI. was contemplating with too great pride a noble chamber which he had built in the palace at Viterbo, and burst out into laughter; at that instant the avenging roof came down on his head. Two visions revealed to different holy men the Evil One hewing down the supports, and so overwhelming the reprobate pontiff. He was said by others to have been, at the moment of his death, in the act of writing a book full of the most deadly heresies, or practising the arts of magic.'—Milman's 'Hist. of Latin Christianity.'

'Jean XXI. périt victime d'un accident bizarre. Il avait fait construire dans son palais de Viterbe une vaste chambre à coucher