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And at that point the actual faded away, and to Valadier there came a vision. He saw the Piazza del Popolo as the magnificent and adequate antechamber to Rome. He saw it approached by this great highroad which, first skirting the shore of the Adriatic, then traversing the breadth of Italy and the watershed of the Appenines, descends thence to the western slopes of Mount Soracte and, crossing the Ponte Molle, comes all the way to Rome from far-off Ariminum, or Rimini, the Roman fortress and frontier town on the Adriatic - two hundred and twenty miles distant - and the key to Cisalpine Gaul. Down this road, which is but a continuation of the still greater Via Emilia, have come all the northern friends and all
the northern foes of Rome. Other eyes than Valadier's can see that procession. Barbarian invaders and imperial armies have covered all the countryside like swarms of locusts - the progress of most of them marked by burning farms and plundered villages. In quieter times there have come pilgrim hosts and companies of merchants; and travelling scholars, and artists "with hearts on fire" for Rome; also ambassadors and foreign prelates, exiles and penitents, great bridal processions like Margaret of Austria's in 1537, funeral pageants, bandit troops, fugitives of every type, barelegged friars (among them a Luther), soldiers of fortune, and English noblemen in travelling carriages with postilions; every sort and condition of man whom the north has sent forth to the Eternal City. Down this Flaminian Road they came, passed through the Flaminian Gate, and received their first impression of Rome here in the Campus Martius - the modern Piazza del Popolo. Valadier lived in the period of the First Empire, when the shock of change and of contrast quickened even the most formal imagination. He came down from his "mount of vision" and designed the noble and finely proportioned piazza of the present day. He formed the vast and slovenly-shaped piece of ground into a stately ellipse, whose broadly curving ends, made of Roman brick and travertine, ornamented by sphinxes and allegorical figures, become the retaining walls of the terraced gardens at their rear, so that these long retaining walls seem coped by a line of glistening green foliage. On the side of the Pincian Hill the
grass and trees of the Pincian Gardens rise in four tiers of terraces, high against the sky. Behind the retaining wall, opposite the Pincian, the tall cypresses screen the new city which stretches off toward the Tiber. A beautiful small semicircular basin, with a shell-like upper basin, stands in the centre of each of these curving ends.
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