THE COLONNA GARDENS, 
ROME. 
ONG before the original stronghold of the 
Colonnas was built, almost on the site of 
their present palace, the “ Little Senate” 
was established kere. It was a woman’s 
senate, instituted by Elagabalus, an assembly of 
the fashionable Roman matrons of the day, presided 
over by the mother of the Emperor. They met to 
determine how every matron in Rome might dress, 
to whom she was to yield precedence, by whom 
she might be kissed ; deciding which ladies might 
drive in chariots and which must content themselves 
with carts, whether horses, mules, or oxen were 
permitted, which ladies might wear shoes adorned 
with gold or set with precious stones. We can 
imagine the shrill discussions, the gossip, the 
jealousies of the ‘ Little Senate.” Aurelian swept 
it away fifty years later, when he built his Temple 
of the Sun here to record his triumph over Zenobia, 
Queen of Palmyra. The temple was enriched with 
gems, and with fifteen thousand pounds in weight 
of gold. Much of it was. still standing in the 
seventeenth century, and it is still doubtful whether 
the pieces of gigantic cornice which lie on the 
upper terrace formed part of it, or belonged to a 
portico of a later period. From this spot started 
the long procession, memorable even in the annals 
of Roman triumphs, with the proud and beautiful 
Queen, decked with jewels and chained with golden 
chains to her chariot. From the medieval palace 
of the Colonnas, Isabella d’Este looked down upon 
the sack of Rome, and on these terraces in the late 
years of the Renaissance, the good, the beautiful, 
the learned Vittoria Colonna walked and conversed 
with Cardinal Bembo, with Ariosto and Bernardo 
Tasso, and above all with Michael Angelo. Here 
for five years, in the height of her beauty and 
happiness, and in the heyday of her husband’s 
triumph, she held her court and gathered round 
her all that Italy had of choice to offer, and here, 
too, she came back, a widowed, childless, heart- 
broken woman, to die, with the great Florentine 
painter sitting by her bed, holding her hand, 
helping her to recollect her last prayer, her 
faithful servant to the last, in what Condivi calls 
“that most pure and beautiful friendship.” 
Torquato Tasso ran about these gardens as a 
little boy, for his father writes that he does not 
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wish the children to go into the country in the 
summer as they get too hot, but that the duke 
has lent him the Boccaccio vineyard, as it was then 
called, ““and we have been here a week and shall 
stay all the summer in this good air.” 
There is another woman who is recalled by the 
wide gates, the courtyard, the gardens as they are 
to-day. She who was mistress of the splendours of 
the palace in the eighteenth century—Maria 
Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, and wife of 
Lorenzo Colonna, Grand Constable of Naples. A 
woman whose life was full of romance, stranger 
than fiction. 
When Mazarin went to Paris and became 
the Minister of the young Louis XIV., and the 
adviser and passionate lover of the King’s mother, 
Anne of Austria, he sent for his nieces, Maria, 
Olympe, and Hortense, and proposed to arrange 
good marriages for them. Maria has left an 
account of her life, ‘La vérité dans son jour,” 
which gives interesting and entertaining details of 
her history. 
Less beautiful than Hortense, afterwards 
Duchess of Mazarin, Maria was clever, spirituelle, 
and fascinating in no ordinary degree. Beginning 
by being thin and brown, her looks improved, 
and a miniature by Mignard represents her with 
large, sparkling dark eyes, crisp, curling black 
hair, an espiég/e expression, and exquisite shoulders, 
exposed in the most Aasardé fashion of the day. 
Louis XIV. fell in love with her. He had 
at first been attracted by her sister Olympe, but 
when she became Comtesse de Soissons in 1657, 
his continued visits to the Comtesse were prompted 
by his growing affection for Maria. The young 
girl’s influence over the young King became 
daily stronger. She was even then one of the 
most cultivated women of the time, and she 
made him read and share all her tastes and ideas. 
They met continually in the easiest manner. In 
Paris she was toremost in all the most. brilliant 
fétes, the King always at her side, and when he 
was seized with a dangerous illness in camp the 
following summer, her anxiety and affection could 
not be concealed. During his convalescence they 
rode and walked for hours together, and Maria, 
who had been described in memoirs of the day 
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