the church and priory of the Knights of Malta—­nothing but a chapel and small villa as abandoned as the rest.  After toiling up a steep and narrow lane between two walls, our carriage stopped at a solid wooden gateway, and the coachman told us to get out and look through the keyhole.  We were aghast, but he insisted, laughing and nodding; so we pocketed our pride and peeped.  Through an overarching vista of dark foliage was seen, white and golden in a blaze of sunshine, the cupola of St. Peter’s, which is at the farthest end of the city, two miles at the least as the crow flies.  When the gate was opened we entered a sweet little garden full of violets, traversed by an alley of old ilex trees, through which appeared the noble dome, and which led from the gate to a terrace overhanging the Tiber—­I will not venture to guess how far below—­more like two than one hundred feet; perhaps still farther.  On the edge of the terrace was an arbor, and here we sank down enchanted, to drink in the view of the city, which spread out under our eyes as we had never seen it from any other point.  But the custodino’s wife urged us to come into the Priorato and see the view from the upper story.  We followed her, reluctant to leave the sunshine and soft air, up a stiff winding staircase, through large, dark, chilly, long-closed apartments, until we reached the top, where there was a great square room occupying the whole floor.  She flung open the windows, and never did such a panorama meet my eyes.  There were windows on every side:  to the north, one looked across the city to St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Tiber with its great bends and many bridges, and to lonely, far-away Soracte; westward, on the other side of the river, rose the Janiculum with its close-wedged houses, grade on grade, and on its summit the church of San Pietro in Montorio and the flashing cataract of the Acqua Paola fountain, the stone-pines of the Villa Dolia cresting the ridge above; eastward, the Palatine, a world of ruins in a world of gardens, lay between us and the Coliseum, and over them and the wall, the aqueducts, the plain, the eye ranged to the snow-capped Sabine Hills, on whose many-colored declivities tiny white towns were dotted like browsing sheep; southward, we gazed down upon the Pyramid of Cestius, upon the beautiful Protestant cemetery with its white monuments and dark cypresses where lie Shelley and Keats, upon the stately Porta San Paolo, a great mediaeval gateway flanked with towers, and beyond, the Campagna, purple, violet, ultramarine, oceanic, rolling out toward the Alban Hills, which glittered with snow, rising sharply like island-peaks and sloping down like promontories into the plain; and over all the sun and sky and shadows of Italy.

[Illustration:  Cupola of st. Peter’s.]

[Illustration:  The PINCIO, from the villa Borghese.]