This is a view of the vernacular structures occupying what had once been Ancient Rome's most glorious hill, The Capitoline, made by Herman Armour Webster, an American expatriate artist who toured Europe in 1910. Webster's interpretation shows the area as it must have looked in the 16th Century, when it became known as Monte Caprino, or Hill of the Goats. The center of Rome fell into disrepair early in the Middle Ages, and by the time of the Medici Popes this area had become so inhospitable it was considered fit only for grazing goats.

Webster's staging of the scene is operatic: a grand urban space populated with principal singers, a wild and boistrous chorus, and a tumultuous company of onlookers of all sizes and kinds. The open piazzas teem with the busy public lives of the local inhabitants, and there is energy and purpose in every line. The architecture in this case is the context, not the principal content.

Webster was gassed during World War I, causing him to lose his eyesight between 1917 and 1926.  Before the war his prints were literal, declarative, and factual - he struggled for precision and clarity. This print, which dates from 1931, shows his drawing style after the war, when his eyesight was restored. His lines, now those of a mature artist, have become hurried, fluid scribbles, quick, expressive sketches as opposed to careful, forensic renderings. Perhaps in some strange, unexpected way his blindness untethered his sight, and freed up his line, enabling him to imagine a more evocative, and less self-conscious, way of expressing his aesthetic vision.