of her masters were, of course, Romanino and Moretto, but they were not the first. The school was really founded by Foppa, or at least he was the master of the two painters who may be said to have founded Brescian painting: Civerchio (c. 1470-1544) and Ferramola, whose pupils were the two great artists whose names stand for Brescia through the world to-day. We shall come to the works of these men scattered everywhere through the city, like flowers on our way.

Let us first turn to the Roman work left here and then to the Cathedral. If we do so, we shall come first quite through the city to the Museo Civico in the old Temple or Basilica on the hillside, which was excavated in 1822, and which inscriptions tell us was erected by Vespasian in A.D. 72. Beautiful and picturesque in its ruin, it is built upon a lofty crypt, and must once have been a great and formidable piece of work. Even to-day, eighteen hundred years after its foundation, it astonishes by its size and the beauty of its columns. Within we may see something of its original pavement; but its great treasure is the magnificent statue of Victory in gilded bronze, nearly seven feet in height, which was found here in 1826. This is undoubtedly, for its beauty of form, for its grace and its majesty, one of the most perfect reproductions ever contrived from a great original. It stands there like a Deity; may it be the Divine Genius of a restored Italy.

Not far away from these ruins are others of the Curia and a few traces of the Theatre, but that marvellous statue has put us out of sympathy with mere curiosities; we seek beauty, and we shall find it in the other Museum of the town, the Museo Medioevale. This was of old two, or rather three churches, one, S. Salvatore of the eighth, the other, S. Giulia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We come first into the sixteenth-century building, which contains a host of curious relics of Lombard times and a few beautiful things, notably the

Cross of Galla Placidia, certainly of eighth-century workmanship, decorated with gems and with portraits of the Empress herself and of her brother Honorius and her son Valentinian. Close by, however, we see something older, indeed of the fifth century, in those ivory reliefs which recall to us the names of Boëthius and Lampadius; and in the sides of a reliquary, arranged in the shape of a cross, we seem in truth to have work of the fourth century. The fifteenth-century church, with its sixteenth-century tombs, from the Church of S. Cristo, and its beautiful lectern, is worth seeing, as is certainly the eighth-century S. Salvatore, which lies below and beyond it, with its lovely capitals and carvings.

These two museums, a temple and three churches, will be enough to make any traveller in love with Brescia; yet the city still remains to be seen, and if these have enticed him to remain, Brescia herself shall entrance him.

The centre of Brescia is the Piazza del Comune, where stands the beautiful Loggia of Fromentone of Vicenza (1492), finished by Palladio and Jacopo Sansovino, who completed it with a lovely frieze of putti. The octagon above is a work of the eighteenth century. Fromentone is also due the Archivio close by.

To

Opposite La Loggia, over an arcade, stands the Torre dell' Orologio, almost a copy of that at Venice; and to the front of it a little to the right in the Piazza stands the memorial to those Martyrs of Liberty who fell in the rising of 1849.

The Piazza is closed on the south by the Monte di Pietà, a lovely building of the later fifteenth century. We leave the Piazza by the Via de' Spadaji to the south, and, taking the first street on the right, come at once into the Piazza del Duomo. Before us stands on the far left the Broletto, a heavy building dating originally from the twelfth century, and until the fifteenth the Municipio; and above it the Torre del Popolo, which has soared there for seven hundred years; and

the two Cathedrals, the Duomo Nuovo and the Duomo Vecchio of S. Maria or La Rotonda. Here in this massive round church we see united three distinct buildings, the Rotunda, the Crypt and the Presbytery. The Crypt is certainly of the ninth century, the Basilica di S. Filastro. It is upheld by forty-two columns, and consists of five naves with three apses. It is a building of the eighth or ninth century; and we know that in 838 the Bishop Ramperto transported hither the body of S. Filastro. The Rotunda itself is a building of the early years of the twelfth century, and probably stands on the site of a building we hear of as burnt in 1097. The question remains whether we are to account for its shape by the Crusades, that is to say, whether it was built in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or, as seems much less likely, whether it was a copy of the Pantheon in Rome.

The interior of the Rotunda has been much modernised; the choir was added in the fifteenth century and the chapels in the sixteenth; much, too, has been changed even of these additions in modern "restoration." Nevertheless, we may get a general idea of the church. even as it is. The nave was circular, formed by a colonnade of eight pillars, which uphold the round arches which, with the vast walls, bear the dome. The medieval tombs of four Bishops of Brescia also remain. In the choir is a fine picture of the Assumption by Moretto, painted in 1526, and at the sides a Presentation in the Temple and a Visitation by Romanino.

The Duomo Nuovo, from which one generally enters La Rotunda, is a great church of the seventeenth century, built in the form, then so popular, of a Greek cross, with a lengthened choir. In a tomb by the third altar on the right now lie the remains of S. Filastro, with those of S. Apollonio, brought here from the crypt of La Rotunda in 1674.

We now set out to see the churches and the many