Page:How to See the Vatican, Sladen, 1914.djvu/50

 HOW TO SEE THE VATICAN enter he must be dead of soul whose imagination is not fired.

If it is the gate in the little pavilion, as graceful as a Classical temple, which admits the unprivileged to the Pope's Garden, the Vatican Library and the Museum of Sculpture, the Sistine Chapel and Raffaelle's Stanze and Loggia, he will be met by a procession of the gods of Greece, chiselled out of fair white marble in the workshops of two thousand years ago.

If he stops and enters at the Portone di Ferro—the iron gate at the foot of the hill—he is in the oldest part of the palace, whose dark and frowning towers, more in keeping with the fortress of Avignon, rose in the age of the Borgias and della Roveres; the tall, dour Swiss, who guard them, still wear the motley liveries, and, on occasion, the pikemen's armour of the Middle Ages. On either side, as he passes in, rise the Sistine Chapel and the Palace of the Borgias—all of the fifteenth century; and this is the way by which, in the old days of the temporal power and pomp, the Papal cortège issued.

To the stranger in the gates the chief entrance of the Vatican must always be the great Portone di Bronzo—the Bronze Gate, which opens on the stupendous Piazza of St. Peter's, and the temple-like colonnade Bernini.

Here, too, are the picturesque Swiss, and a 10