I vecchi santostefanesi raccontano che, quando un giovane del paese partiva per imbarcarsi su una nave o per emigrare, lo portavano in barca sino alla Calagrande per riempirsi gli occhi e la memoria di bellezza

The preceding paragraph appeared for the first time six years ago; meanwhile this bar-relief was acquired by a Roman banker, Arturo Osio, a whimsical man who probably would have stirred the imagination of Stendhal or of Balzac. Signor Osio has lavished upon this fair object the same solicitous attention that he gives to the animals on his property at the edge of Rome, where they run free in their natural state, and to the trees which he has planted by the thousand on his shore estate at Orbetello. A rare virtue, this last, for Stendhal was writing as early as 1828, “The Italians loathe trees” and what would he say today when real estate speculators, trying to pack more and more colossal apartment houses into Rome, are circumventing the city’s laws to protect its handsome umbrella pines? Their method is simply to kill the trees by injections of hot water. A rare luxury, too, though one which many a man of wealth could enjoy, is this landowner’s animation of woods and fields with creatures at full liberty, and that not for the pleasure of hunting them down, but for reconstituting a veritable Eden. The love for statues of classical antiquity, those great peaceful objects which seem so solid and yet are so easily destroyed, is an uncommon taste among private collectors in these agitated times, cut o from both past and future. The new possessor of the basrelief of Antonianos, acting on the advice of experts, has just had it cleaned by a specialist whose light, slow rubbing by hand has removed the rust and moisture stains from the marble and restored its soft glea, like that of alabaster or of ivory.