• This pine-cone of bronze, which is now in the gardens of the Vatican, was found in the mausoleum of Hadrian, and is supposed to have crowned its summit. “I have looked daily,” says Mrs. Kemble, Year of Consolation , 152, “over the lonely, sunny gardens, open like the palace halls to me, where the wide-sweeping orange-walks end in some distant view of the sad and noble Campagna, where silver fountains call to each other through the silent, overarching cloisters of dark and fragrant green, and where the huge bronze pine, by which Dante measured his great giant, yet stands in the midst of graceful vases and bass-reliefs wrought in former ages, and the more graceful blossoms blown within the very hour.” And Ampère, Voyage Dantesque , 277, remarks:⁠— “Here Dante takes as a point of comparison an object of determinate size; the pigna is eleven feet high, the giant then must be seventy; it performs, in the description, the office of those figures which are placed near monuments to render it easier for the eye to measure their height.” Mr. Norton, Travel and Study in Italy , 253, thus speaks of the same object:⁠— “This pine-cone, of bronze, was set originally upon the summit of the Mausoleum of Hadrian.