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Up and down the shaded alleys, Unking the present to the great past, stretch the long rows of portrait busts placed there by order of Mazzini during the short-lived Mazzinian
Republic of 1849. This is what has been called "The Silent Company of the Pincio." No happier fate can befall an imaginative child from northern lands than to wander at will through this Roman playground. All unconsciously the classic beauty is woven into his spiritual fibre, and with that strange sensation of coming into his own - peculiar to such children - he finds, in these seemingly endless rows of white marble heads, faces which stimulate his fancy or fit the names of heroes already known to him.
In the centre of the garden stands an obelisk the history of which brings back the memory of a beautiful pagan youth who lived more than eighteen hundred years ago, and of another story of Old Nile, more pitiful, if less important, than the story of Moses. This is the obelisk which the Emperor Hadrian and his Empress Sabina raised to the memory of their beloved Antinous - the most beautiful youth the world has record of - who drowned himself in the Egyptian river, under the impression that his voluntary death would avert calamity from his benefactor the Emperor. After all these eighteen hundred years it is still possible to feel the passion of Hadrian's grief. His biographer calls it "feminine"! Rut the gifted Emperor, lover of all things beautiful in art and nature, and a student of men and character, understood the value of his treasure and knew full well the irreparableness of his loss. He brought back to Rome all that was left of that beauty - an urnful of ashes - and placed it in the Emperor's own tomb, now called the Castle of St. Angelo;
and on the spina of the circus by the tomb, Hadrian and Sabina erected this obelisk whose hieroglyphics, only quite recently deciphered, relate the deification of their favorite and give the information concerning his place of burial. The obelisk must have been removed by a later Emperor, probably Heliogabalus, for it was found in 1670, near Santa Croce in Gerusa-lemme, in the gardens of the Varian family, to which family that Emperor belonged. Bernini, in the century following its discovery, moved it to the Barberini Palace, which he was erecting and beautifying for the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII.
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