Rome — The scene of the crime is behind the museum. That’s where Nathaniel Hawthorne put it, and where he has one of his characters shove another off a cliff. “What have you done!” cries a third. As the two survivors look down from the precipice, Hawthorne describes what they see: “On the pavement, below, was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance.”
The museum is the Capitoline, atop one of Rome’s famous seven hills and the namesake of our own Capitol Hill in the United States. The cliff is the Tarpeian Rock, from which ancient Romans once tossed traitors. The fall is about 80 feet. The sudden stop delivers what Shakespeare calls, in Coriolanus, “the steep Tarpeian death.” The site is best observed from the doorway of a nearby church, Santa Maria della Consolazione, at the spot where, according to legend, a picture of Mary offered the condemned a final consolation.
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