III.
Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery, were bright with the loveliest green. A dazzling sunlight fell on the red tiles of the gallery; an old fountain, loaded with little columns and heads of animals, murmured near to a bench of rose-veined marble. A statue of a young man was seen amidst the branches; stems of green hops climbed up around broken columns.
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This mixture of rustic objects and objects of art, these wrecks of two dead civilizations and the youth of flowery plants, the joyous rays on the old tiles, united in their contrasts all that I had seen for two months.