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[171]

Chapter 8:


Mr. Ticknor arrived in Rome on the 2d of November, 1817, and left it for the North the 22d of March, 1818. Of these five months, one was passed in Naples and four in Rome, the latter devoted to the study of Italian and the ancient and modern treasures of that wonderful city. To do this systematically and profitably he engaged Professor Nibby, a well-known archaeologist, to visit with him the different portions of ancient Rome and their ruins, and he gives nearly one volume of his Journal to the results of these walks and studies, availing himself of materials he collected in Germany the year before and the many books he carried with him. The following passage shows the thoroughness of his plan, which he fully carried out:—
On coming to Rome, the first questions that occurred to me, after the earliest reveries of wonder and delight were over, were, how the city gradually came to occupy the ground it does now, and how this ground has been covered with the ruins, palaces, and churches we now admire.

The first question relates essentially to the history of its walls from the time of Romulus to that of Pius VII.; and the second to the history of architecture and its luxuries in ancient Rome, with some notices of the circumstances that have reduced them to such ruins, and of the modern palaces and churches that have risen up around them. The whole is a sort of introduction, without which it does not seem possible easily to form a clear idea of the present situation of Rome, and which I now make to serve as a kind of thread to which I can attach the miscellaneous researches and inquiries I may make hereafter.

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