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Updated: May 25, 2025
This mellow Roman travertine, for instance.... I call to mind those disconsolate places in Cornwall with their chill slate and primary rock, the robust and dignified bunter-sandstone of the Vosges, the satanic cheerfulness of lava, those marble-towns that blind you with their glare, Eastern cities of brightly tinted stucco or mere clay, the brick-towns, granite-towns, wood-towns how they differ in mood from one another!... Here I pace up and down, rejoicing in the spacious sunlit prospect, and endeavouring to disentangle from one another the multitudinous street-cries that climb to this hanging garden in confused waves of sound.
He made, also, in the first cloister of S. Pietro a Montorio, a round temple of travertine, than which nothing more shapely or better conceived, whether in proportion, design, variety, or grace, could be imagined; and even more beautiful would it have been, if the whole extent of the cloister, which is not finished, had been brought to the form that is to be seen in a drawing by his hand.
He never made a plan without taking them into consultation. Then, too, Calder, acting head of the Department of Sculpture, and Denneville, the inventor of the particular kind of imitation Travertine marble used on the grounds, were active in all the planning. In fact, very little was done without the co-operation of Guerin, Calder, Denneville and Kelham, chief of the Architectural Board.
Within its penthouse eave an oil-lamp flickered before the frescoed Madonna and Child; the shelf in front of the picture was heaped with flowers just beginning to fade. Manisty stayed the horse a moment; pointed first to the shrine, then to the bit of road beneath their feet. 'Do you see this travertine these blocks? This is a bit of the old road to the temple.
It was a pretty fancy which at a later date formed the island into the likeness of a boat by building a prow and stem of travertine at either end, the traces of which may still be seen; and it is a curious instance of the many survivals of ancient Rome in the modern city, that the Hospital of S. Bartolommeo stands on the site of the old Aesculapius sanctuary, and so far as we can tell, twenty-two centuries of suffering humanity have had the burden of their pain lightened there, in uninterrupted succession since that new year's day, above three hundred years before Christ, when the hospital of Aesculapius of Epidauros was formally opened.
The subterranean drains still existing at the present day, composed of magnificent square blocks, which excited the astonishment of posterity as a marvellous work of regal Rome, must rather be reckoned to belong to the following epoch, for travertine is the material employed and we have many accounts of new structures of the kind in the times of the republic; but the scheme itself belongs beyond doubt to the regal period, although presumably to a later epoch than the designing of the Servian wall and the Capitoline stronghold.
So far as can be ascertained, the original appearance of the Casale Rotondo seems to have been that of an enormous circular tower, cased with large blocks of travertine, covered with a pyramidal roof of the same material carved into the semblance of tiles, and surmounted with appropriate sculpture.
Marble Tint, spread over the travertine in places with a transparent glaze. Verde-Antique, really one of the many shades of green a combination of the copper-green and a soft gray, and therefore not to be counted as one of the nine cardinal colors. It simulates corroded copper, and has faint yellow and black lines.
Conspicuous on the next block are Lord and Taylor's, and Vantine's, the former Italian Renaissance, with vestibules finished in Bitticino marble and Travertine stone, ceilings of Guastavino tile, and aisles bordered with black Egyptian marble. Today this establishment represents the last cry in construction and administration.
In these lakes were formed two kinds of fresh-water strata the first composed of sand and marl; and the second, where mineral springs gushed forth through the volcanic rock, of travertine a peculiar reddish-brown or yellow calcareous rock, of which St. Peter's and many of the buildings of modern Rome are composed.
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