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 Praeneste 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