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Fattori was a leader of the Macchiaioli, a group of Tuscan painters who built their pictures out of blunt patches of light and shade, the macchia or stain that gave them their name. They had come up around a café in Florence, and many of them, Fattori included, had lived through the wars that finally welded Italy into one country. He worked this small panel up from studies he made on a trip to Rome in 1872, the year after Rome became the new kingdom's capital. There is no grand event in it, only ox-drawn carts standing in raw daylight at the edge of the city, caught in the broad flat strokes the group favoured. The whole panel is barely the size of a sheet of paper.