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Finally, under Clement VII, the great sack of the city caused him to fly to the Castle of St. Angelo. As in the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew, fortyseven years later, only those Huguenot gentlemen survived who were kept in the King's closet, so during
the horrors of the sack only those cardinals escaped outrage who were sheltered with the Pope in the Castle of St. Angelo.
Farnese by this time ranked next to the Pope in importance, and he was, of course, among these. From the Castle he witnessed,
with the terrified Clement, the devastation inflicted upon the latter's exquisite pleasure - house on Monte Mario, an act of
wanton vandalism committed by the Colonna to spite the Pope. Some ten years later Cardinal Farnese bought this wrecked palace,
restored it, and presented it to his daughter -in - law, Margaret of Austria, who rested there on her triumphal wedding
procession into Rome. It is called after her to this day the Villa Madama.
In 154o, when the old Palazzo Ferriz was destroyed to make room for the Palazzo Farnese, the workmen came as usual upon
traces of earlier times. Modern archaeologists have discovered that the mosaic pavement under the right wing of the palace
was a part of the flooring of the Barracks of the "Red Squadron of Charioteers." It has been generally supposed that the new
palace was built of stone from the Coliseum, but its materials came from numerous and varied sources. The great travertine blocks
were quarried at Tivoli; and Paul III obtained permission to demolish and use for his building the partly ruined battlemented
monastery of St. Lorenzo Outside the Walls.
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One of the fountains in the Piazza Famese
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After this quarry was exhausted, his nephews obtained the ruins of Porto, the
Baths of Caracalla, and what was still more important the remains of the greatest temple of imperial Rome - Aurelian's Temple
of the Sun, which, at that date still towered one hundred feet above the Colonna gardens.
Contemporary artists sketched these various structures as the masons destroyed them, so that students
of the present day can form some idea of their classic grandeur, and can judge for themselves the value of the Farnese
Palace on the one hand and on the other that of the imperial baths and temple, and the mediaeval monastery, out of
which it is built.
The great new palace made necessary the great new square in front of it; but years before this the Pope had begun that
regeneration of Rome for which he is so gratefully remembered.
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