‘IN perpetual quiet, Oxford, I believe, is the only city that resembles Rome,’ wrote Aubrey de Vere in the Spring of 1839, words that sound strangely in 1933. Even the Rome of Leo XIII was strangely noisy to those who remembered the dignified peaceful Rome of Pius IX before 20th September, 1870. All artists, many of them foreigners and Protestants, deplored and denounced the change that followed the invasion, among them Augustus Hare, Ruskin, and countless others, including Gregorovius, who hated the Temporal Power and yet thus scathed, in a letter of 1885, its destroyers.

‘The violent transformation which Rome has undergone affords me no pleasure; the city appears to me like a carpet of ancient date, which during the process of beating goes to pieces amid clouds of dust. All the traces of my past life have been obliterated, destroyed, and built over; and the majestic city of former days has been superseded by the tumult of modern life, which is still seeking definite shape, but will hardly succeed in attaining it for a generation to come.’