Pressit et inductis membra paterna rotis: 

That nunnery, supported by the arch of Nerva, which is all that is now left standing of that Emperor’s Forum.

I must not however quit the Coliseum, without repeating what passed between the King of Sweden and his Roman laquais de place when he was here; and the fellow, in the true cant of his Ciceroneship, exclaimed as they looked up, “Ah Maesta! what cursed Goths those were that tore away so many fine things here, and pulled down such magnificent pillars, &c.”  “Hold, hold friend,” replies the King of Sweden; “I am one of those cursed Goths myself you know:  but what were your Roman nobles a-doing, I would ask, when they laboured to destroy an edifice like this, and build their palaces with its materials?”

The baths of Livia are still elegantly designed round her small apartments; and one has copies sold of them upon fans; the curiosity of the original is to see how well the gilding stands; in many places it appears just finished.  These baths are difficult of access somehow; I never could quite understand how we got in or out of them, but they did belong to the Imperial palace, which covered this whole Palatine hill, and here was Nero’s golden house, by what I could gather, but of that I thank Heaven there is no trace left, except some little portion of the wall, which was 120 feet high, and some marbles in shades, like women’s worsted work upon canvass, very curious, and very wonderful; as all are natural marbles, and no dye used:  the expence must have surpassed credibility.

The Temple of Vesta, supposed to be the very temple to which Horace alludes in his second Ode, is a pretty rotunda, and has twenty pillars fluted of Parian marble:  it is now a church, as are most of the heathen temples.

Such adaptations do not please one, but then it must be allowed and recollected that one is very hard to please:  finding fault is so easy, and doing right so difficult!

The good Pope Gregory, who feared (by sacred inspiration one would think) all which should come to pass, broke many beautiful antique statues, “lest,” said he, “induced by change of dress or name perhaps our Christians may be tempted to adore them:”  and we say he was a blockhead, and burned Livy’s decads, and so he did; but he refused all titles of earthly dignity; he censured the Oriental Patriarchs for substituting temporal splendours in the place of primitive simplicity; which he said ought alone to distinguish the followers of Jesus Christ.  He required a strict attention to morality from all his inferior clergy; observed that those who strove to be first, would end in being last; and took himself the title of servant to the servants of God.

Well!  Sabinian, his successor, once his favourite Nuncio, flung his books in the fire as soon as he was dead; so his injunctions were obeyed but while he lived to enforce them; and every day now shews us how necessary they were:  when, even in these enlightened times, there stands an old figure that every Abate in the town knows to have been originally made for the fabulous God of Physic, Esculapius, is prayed to by many old women and devotees of all ages indeed, just at the Via Sacra’s entrance, and called St. Bartolomeo.