eBooks Base 2000

A circle of white marble pillars, much time-worn and
a little battered, though but one of them broken, surround the solid
structure of the temple, leaving a circular walk between it and the
pillars, the whole covered by a modern roof which looks like wood, and
disgraces and deforms the elegant little building. This roof resembles,
as much as anything else, the round wicker cover of a basket, and gives a
very squat aspect to the temple. The pillars are of the Corinthian
order, and when they were new and the marble snow-white and sharply
carved and cut, there could not have been a prettier object in all Rome;
but so small an edifice does not appear well as a ruin.
Within view of it, and, indeed, a very little way off, is the Temple of
Fortuna Virilis, which likewise retains its antique form in better
preservation than we generally find a Roman ruin, although the Ionic
pillars are now built up with blocks of stone and patches of brickwork,
the whole constituting a church which is fixed against the side of a tall
edifice, the nature of which I do not know.


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