href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@12770@[email protected]#Footnote_33" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">^[33] More than two irregular courses are to be seen here, and fifteen feet in from the street, forming the back wall of cellars and pig pens, the cyclopean wall, in places to a height of fifteen feet or more, can be followed to within a few yards of the open space in front of Santa Maria del Carmine. And on the other side toward the east the same wall begins again, after being broken by the Via dello Spregato, and forms the foundations and side walls of the houses on the south side of that street, and at the extreme east end is easily found as the back wall of a blacksmith's shop at the top of the Via della Fontana, and can be identified as cyclopean by a little cleaning of the wall.

The circuit of the earliest cyclopean wall and natural ramparts of the contemporaneous citadel and town of Præneste was as follows: An arc of cyclopean wall below the cap of the hill which swung round from the precipitous cliff on the west to that on the east, the whole of the side of the arx toward the mountains being so steep that no wall was necessary; then a second loop of cyclopean wall from the arx down the steep western edge of the southern slope of the mountain as far as the present Porta San Francesco. From this point natural cliffs reinforced at the upper end by a short connecting wall bring us to the beginning of the wall which runs across the town back of the Via del Borgo from Santa Maria del Carmine to within a short distance of the east wall of the city, separated from it in fact only by the Via della Fontana, which runs up just inside the wall. There it joins the cyclopean wall which comes down from the citadel on the east side of the town.

The reasons why this is the oldest circuit of the city's walls are the following: first, all this stretch of wall is the oldest and was built at the same time; second, topography has marked out most clearly that the territory inclosed by these walls, here and only here, fulfills the two indispensable requisites of the ancient town, namely space and defensibility; third, below the gate San Francesco all the way round the city as far as Porta del Sole, neither in the wall nor in the buildings, nor in the valley below, is there any trace of cyclopean wall stones;^[34] fourth, at the point where the cross wall and the long wall must have met at the east, the wall makes a change in direction, and there is an ancient postern gate just above the jog in the wall; and last, the cyclopean wall from this junction on down to near the Porta del Sole is later than that of the circuit just described.^[35]

The city was extended within a century perhaps, and the new line of the city wall was continued on the east in cyclopean style as far as the present Porta del Sole, where it turned to the west and continued until the hill itself offered enough height so that escarpment of the natural cliff would serve in place of the wall. Then it turned up the hill between the present Via San Biagio and Via del Carmine back of Santa Maria del Carmine. The proof for this expansion is clear. The continuation of the cyclopean wall can be seen now as far as the Porta del Sole,^[36] and the line of the wall which turns to the west is positively known from the cippi of the ancient pomerium, which were found in 1824 along the present Via degli Arconi.^[37] The ancient gate, now closed, in the opus quadratum wall under the Cardinal's garden, is in direct line with the ancient pavement of the road which comes up to the city from the south,^[38] and the continuation of that road, which seems to have been everywhere too steep for wagons, is the Via del Carmine. There had always been another road outside the wall which went up a less steep grade, and came round the angle of the wall at what is now the Porta S. Martino, where it entered a gate that opened out of the present Corso toward the west. When at a later time, probably in the middle ages, the city was built out to its present boundary on the west, the wagon road was simply arched over, and this arch is now the gate San Martino.^[39]

It will be necessary to speak further of the cyclopean wall on the east side of the city from the Porta del Sole to the Portella, for it has always been supposed that this part of the wall was exactly like the rest, and dated from the same period. But a careful examination shows that the stones in this lower portion are laid more regularly than those in the wall above the Portella, that they are more flatly faced on the outside, and that here and there a little mortar is used. Above all, however, there is in the wall on one of the stones under the house no. 24, Via della Fontana an inscription,^[40] which Richter, Dressel, and Dessau all think was there when the stone was put in the wall, and incline to allow no very remote date for the building of the wall at that point. To me, after a comparative study of this wall and the one at Norba, the two seem to date from very nearly the same time, and no one now dares attribute great antiquity to the walls of Norba. But the rest of the cyclopean wall of Præneste is very ancient, certainly a century, perhaps two or three centuries, older than the part from the Portella down.

There remains still to be discussed the lower wall of the city on the south, and a restraining terrace wall along part of the present Corso Pierluigi. The stretch of city wall from the Porta del Sole clear across the south front to the Porta di S. Martino is of opus quadratum, with the exception of a stretch of opus incertum^[41] below and east of the Barberini gardens, and a small space where the city sewage has destroyed all vestige of a wall. The restraining wall just mentioned is also of opus quadratum and is to be found along the south side of the Corso, but can be seen only from the winecellars on the terrace below that street. These walls of opus quadratum were built with a purpose, to be sure, but their entire meaning has not been understood.^[42]

The upper wall, the one along the Corso, can not be traced farther than the Piazza Garibaldi, in front of the Cathedral. It has been a mistake to consider this a high wall. It was built simply to level up with the Corso terrace, partly to give more space on the terrace, partly to make room for a road which ran across the city here between two gates no longer in existence.