Passing beyond the Propaganda, we come to a lofty pillar of the
Corinthian order, situated at the commencement of the Piazza di
Spagna. It is composed of a kind of gray Carystian marble called
_cipollino_, distinguished by veins of pale green rippling through it,
like the layers of a vegetable bulb, on account of which it is
popularly known as the onion stone. It is one of the largest known
monoliths, being forty-two feet in height and nearly five feet in
diameter. It looks as fresh as though it were only yesterday carved
out of the quarry; but it must be nearly two thousand years old,
having been found about a hundred years ago when digging among the
ruins of the amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus, constructed in the
reign of Cæsar Augustus on the site now called, from a corruption of
the old name, Monte Citorio, and occupied by the Houses of Parliament.
When discovered the pillar was unfinished, a circumstance which would
indicate that it had never been erected. It was left to Pope Pius IX.,
after all these centuries of neglect and obscurity, to find a use for
it. Crowning its capital by a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary, and
disfiguring its shaft by a fantastic bronze network extending up
two-fifths of its height, he erected it where it now stands in 1854,
to commemorate the establishment by papal bull of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception. It was during his exile at Gaeta, at a time
when Italy was torn with civil dissensions, and his own dominions were
afflicted with the most grievous calamities, which he could have
easily averted or remedied if he wished, that this dogma engrossed the
mind of the holy father and his ecclesiastical court. The
constitutionalists at Rome were anxiously expecting some conciliatory
manifesto which should precede the Pope's return and restore peace and
prosperity; and they were mortified beyond measure by receiving only
the letter in which this theological fiction was announced by his
Holiness. The people cried for the bread of constitutional liberty,