<S8 
THE GARDENS OF ITALY. 
Cardinal Scipione, the stately, genial art patron, lived and died here, and many others of 
his house ; but, perhaps, the vision that comes most clearly before English eyes is of the lovely 
and beloved Princess Gwendoline, a daughter of the noble house of Talbot, wedded in 1835 
to Prince Camillo Borghese, who died five years later, after three days’ illness, of diphtheria. 
She was buried in the Borghese Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore, and half Rome followed her to 
her grave. The piazza outside the palace could hardly contain the crowd assembled when 
at midnight the great gates were thrown open and the funeral procession issued. Forty young 
Romans in deep mourning took the horses from the funeral car and, yoking themselves to it, 
drew it up the hill. A great cortege of rich and poor followed, “ so that it seemed as though 
a whole people were bearing her to her last resting-place,” and from all the windows, as she 
passed fiowers were 
showered down upon 
her. The mourning was 
universal ; but the horror 
and pity redoubled when, 
within a few days, three 
of her children were laid 
beside their mother, 
leaving only one little 
girl. Poor husband, poor 
father, poor motherless 
babe, left alone in the 
splendour of the palace. 
The recollection seems 
but to make its vast 
dreariness the vaster and 
more dreary. 
Long before the ori- 
ginal stronghold of the 
Colonnas was built, 
almost on the site ot 
their present palace, the 
” Little Senate ” was 
established here. It was 
a woman’s senate, insti- 
tuted by Elagabalus, an 
assembly of the fashion- 
able Roman matrons of 
the day, presided over 
by the mother of the 
Emperor. They met to 
determine how every 
q8. — VIEW IN THE ENCLOSED GARDEN OF THE PALAZZO BORGHESE, matron in Rome might 
ROME, SHOWING TWO OF THE FOUNTAINS. dress, to whom shc 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 on this spot to record his triumph over Zenobia, the fallen 
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 
