Porta San Lorenzo - Ettore Roesler Franz. A wonderful view, unquestionable charm, the artist has made it even more "picturesque". At least comparing the watercolor with photographs by himself performed. And the disappearance of the tram tracks, as we have seen elsewhere, it is a symptom.

We are on the Via di Porta S. Lorenzo, which is then embraced also the current Via Marsala, and this is awesome tucked perspective of walls and towers, not yet interrupted here and there through the gaps imposed by the immediate needs of the traffic capital of Rome. On the right, barely glimpsed, runs the embankment of the railroad tracks that depart from Termini. Will soon be sottopassati the so-called Arco di S. Bibiana, who became a real tunnel.

The chariots and horses, themes particularly favored by the Roman painter, populate the scene. From that door, Porta Tiburtina, out in the street corner who went to Tivoli. A first section of the road, still remembered today by a Via Tiburtina Antica. The Tiburtina start then in a straight line from Piazzale Tiburtino, between the two towers that can be seen in the distance. Between the old and the new Tiburtina, since July 1879 had meanwhile gone to nest station "Tramway steam Roma-Tivoli." A line will be in operation until 1932 and the Franz has erased any trace even of those systems, which had to be chiaramen-yourself visible through the compartment door.

Just this compartment, reduced to only the upper arch, denounced in turn the elevation of the land also occurred in this area over the centuries. Later archaeologists, with an excavation made under and around the door, make visible the entire monument. It is connected to a legend, better yet a motivated "instruction", once well known. Who came to the door he noted, and still known, a bucrano (ox skull), to place ornament of the keystone. When it came, however, could not find carved on the inside of the arch, the usual bucrano, but a real head cattle, meat and bones. As if to say that strangers, the "hillbillies", entered Rome "died of hunger", and I could plump beautiful. It could also be a small malignancy interpretation of the Romans, but not for nothing that Rome had also been renamed for some time as "the vineyard of them idiots."

In a magnificent location, in the eighteenth century had come to bloom here, within the walls of the villa Gentiles, then Dominici, attributed by some to Raguzzini. A continuous balcony, between walls and the street. A narrow triangle, and very elongated, which still has its tip acute almost stuck against the Porta Tiburtina, said door Taurine also a time, due to quell'emblematico ornament.