The incident may be legendary, but it reminds me of a later and more authentic one connected with the obelisk which stands in the centre of the Piazza of St. Peter’s. This huge monolith of red granite was brought by Caligula from Heliopolis—the scene of General Kléber’s victory and violent death on the 14th of June, 1800, while Marengo was being fought and won. Its arrival caused great excitement in the imperial city and crowds went out to see it as it lay at Ostia in a ship built on purpose to carry it and, as Pliny informs us, “almost as long as the left side of the port of Ostia.” Unlike most of the Egyptian obelisks, it bears no inscriptions of any kind on its polished sides. It first stood in the Circus of Nero, on ground now covered by the Sacristy of St. Peter’s, and it was only under Sixtus V, in 1586, that it was placed in its present position. Its enormous size and weight (about three hundred and twenty tons) made the moving and erection a labour of the greatest difficulty. The work was superintended by Fontana, the eminent architect, who employed eight hundred men and one hundred and fifty horses to drag it the short distance to the centre of the Piazza. Then came the raising and placing on the pedestal prepared for it, a task so delicate and anxious that Sixtus forbade any one, under pain of death, to utter a single word during the process. Slowly and unwillingly the huge thing submitted to be raised from the ground, but, before it had reached the perpendicular, that happened which the architect had not foreseen—the enormous cables began to stretch. The strain dragged on them so fearfully that in a few minutes they must have parted—and the obelisk would have thundered to the ground; but a brave sailor man, casting self-preservation to the winds, shouted, “Water on the ropes.” Instantly he was obeyed; a thousand hands sent the buckets flying along, the cables were drenched, and they held till the giant rose obediently in air and settled squarely on its base. The grateful Pope sent for the brave sailor and asked his name and birthplace. “Bresca of Bordighera,” was the answer. What he gave to Bresca, the chronicler has left to our imagination—probably enough to keep him in fat comfort to the end of his days; but to Bordighera, that garden of the Mediterranean shore, he gave the privilege of furnishing forever the palms used in the Church on Palm Sunday; and down to 1870 there came, every year, a ship to the mouth of the Tiber, full to the gunwale with the Bordighera palm branches, which the nuns of Sant’ Antonio wove and plaited into a thousand fanciful shapes, for use in the Palm Sunday procession at St. Peter’s.