Of all the monuments to Bacchus, in Rome, the one near the pyramid of Caius Cestius, and still nearer the Protestant burying-ground, is by far the most noticeable.  Jealous of the lofty manner in which it lifts its head above the surrounding fields and walls of the city, the church has seen fit to crown its head with a cross, which it seems inclined to shake off.  This small mountain of a monument is conical in shape, and is composed entirely of broken crockery; hence its name, Testaccio.  In its crockery sides, they have found a certain coolness and evenness of temperature exactly suited to the storage of wine, and to maturing it; hence, all around the mountain are deep vaults, filled with red and white wines, working themselves up for a fit state to enter into the joy and the gullets of the Roman minenti.

If the reader of this sketch is at all of a philosophical frame of mind, and should ever visit Rome, it is the writer’s advice that, in the first place, having learned Italian enough, and in the second place, having his purse fairly filled—­silver will do—­he should, during the month of October, on a holyday, go out to Monte Testaccio alone, or at least in company with some one who knows enough to let him he alone when he wants to be with somebody else, and then and there fraternizing for a few hours with the Roman plebs, let him at his ease see what he shall see.  Then shall he sit him down at the door of the Antica Osteria di Cappanone, at the rough wood table, on a rougher wooden bench; talk right and left, with tailors, shoemakers, artists, soldiers, and God knows what, drinking the cool, amber-colored wine of Monte Rotonda, gleaming brightly in the sunlight that dashes through his glass, and so cheerfully winning the good-will of them all—­and of some of the young women who are with them—­that he shall find himself at some future time either the sheath for a Roman knife, or the recipient of a great deal of affection, and the purchaser of indefinite bottiglie of vino nostrale.

In his ardent pursuit of natural art, Caper believed it his duty to hunt up the picturesque wherever it could be found, and it was while pursuing this duty, in company with Rocjean, that he found himself at Monte Testaccio, one October day, and there made his debut.  After a luncheon of raw ham, bread, cheese, sausage, and a bottiglia of wine, they ascended the mountain, and sitting down at the foot of the cross, they quietly smoked and communed with nature unreservedly.

Crumbling old walls of Rome that lay below them; wild, uncultivated Campagna; purple range of mountains, snow-tipped; thousand-legged, ruined aqueducts; distant sea, but faintly revealed through the vail of haze-bounded horizon; yellow Tiber, flowing along crumbling banks; dome of St. Peter’s, rising above the hill that shuts the Vatican from sight; pyramid of Caius Cestius; Protestant burying-ground, with the wind sighing through the trees a lullaby over the graves of Shelley and Keats; distant view of Rome, slumbering artistically, and not manufacturingly, in the sunlight of that morning—­ye taught one man of the two wild hopes for Rome of the future.