Ave Roma Immortails, Volume 1 by F. Marion Crawford

Here and there, in out-of-the-way places, overlooked in the modern rage for improvement, little marble tablets are set into the walls of old houses, bearing semi-heraldic devices such as a Crescent, a Column, a Griffin, a Stag, a Wheel and the like. Italian heraldry has always been eccentric, and has shown a tendency to display all sorts of strange things, such as comets, trees, landscapes and buildings in the escutcheon, and it would naturally occur to the stranger that the small marble shields, still visible here and there at the corners of old streets, must be the coats of arms of Roman families that held property in that particular neighbourhood. But this is not the case. They are the distinctive devices of the Fourteen Rioni, or wards, into which the city was divided, with occasional modifications, from the time of Augustus to the coming of Victor Emmanuel, and which with some further changes survive to the present day.

The tablets themselves were put up by Pope Benedict the Fourteenth, who reigned from 1740 to 1758, and who finally brought them up to the ancient number of fourteen; but from the dark ages the devices themselves were borne upon flags on all public occasions by the people of the different Regions. For 'Rione' is only a corruption of the Latin 'Regio,' the same with our 'Region,' by which English word it will be convenient to speak of these divisions that played so large a part in the history of the city during many successive centuries.