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ROME THEN AND NOW.

THE thirty-seven years that have gone by since the twentieth of September 1870, when, by the issue of the skirmish at the Porta Pia, Rome became the capital of Italy, have brought with them changes which can only be fully felt by those who knew Rome well in papal days and who know it well now. The change which has taken place has no analogy with that which has by the steady march of modern invention and modern improvement-I use the word without prejudice-made such a city as London of to-day a very different London from that of the 'sixties. Rome of the 'sixties was still essentially a survival of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, very little encroached upon by the modern spirit. There were many towns in Italy which had retained the outward features of even the earliest of those centuries far more completely-Perugia, San Gemignano, Siena, for example; but the form of government and the social conditions which had made them what they were had long ago departed from them. From Rome they had not so vanished. There still hung about it the flavour of past days, past forms of government, past methods of thought, and past customs which made it unique amongst the important towns of Europe. It was inevitable that these should give way before the needs of a great modern capital. It is safe to say that the last thirty-seven years have more changed the face of Rome than the previous three centuries had done. And yet there were living in Rome even at the end of the papal period plenty of old habitués who told one that the glory of Rome had in their own day departed from it, and that the march of modern invention, the railroad and gas, had already vulgarised the place beyond recognition. Be that as it may, the change from Rome of the Popes to Rome of United Italy has inevitably been such as has had no exact parallel in any other case-a town in itself unique called upon to face a change of circumstance which is also unique in history.

If I am asked whether I would rather live in Rome of that day or Rome of this, I unhesitatingly give the preference to Rome as I knew her first. This I hope is not at all the same thing as condemning the present condition of things, or as depreciating

the recent development of the city. For if I were again asked to make choice amongst all the capitals of Europe as a place to live in, even to-day I should name Rome as the town which combined the greatest number of human interests with quite sufficient machinery for a well-ordered and comfortable life. The fascination of old Rome was bound up to a great extent with a condition of things which went hand-in-hand with the absence of these very machineries. In all probability, even if Rome had not become Italian, many or most of these machineries must have forced their way in before now; but it was inevitable that, from whatever source they came, the ancient city should, in their entry, lose some of its character and of its special flavour.

Rome in the 'sixties had a population, roughly speaking, of about 215,000 souls; to-day it holds nearly 500,000. If a map of the city at that date is laid beside a map of to-day, it is easy to see at what points the increase of building has taken place to accommodate the inhabitants. The older map shows unoccupied ground in the outlying portions of the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, and Celian Hills forming an irregular triangular space with many projections, which lay between the Aurelian Wall and the inhabited quarters in a band whose breadth varied from a quarter of a mile to a mile and a half on the east and south. Further to south and west lay another triangle bordered westwards by the Tiber, which included the Aventine and the void spaces around Monte Testaccio and the Protestant cemetery. By eye measurement these combined tracts of open space, chiefly vineyard and garden, intersected by roads and lanes running between high walls, amounted to one half of the entire area of the city within the walls. And it may be said that in the 'sixties this uninhabited portion of the city-the phrase must not be taken too literally-presented much the same appearance which it had presented for at least twelve hundred years. That is to say, that it had never been populated since the days of Totila. So far back as 1447 Pope Nicholas V. had tried to encourage settlement on the Viminal and Esquiline by promises of complete immunity from taxes. But then, and in the succeeding centuries, the tendency of the population to mass itself on the northern and north-western corners of the city proved irresistible. The Aventine and the district near Testaccio in like manner remained unoccupied all down the centuries, save by a few scattered monasteries. The district has always laboured under a deadly reputation for malaria. Pope Honorius IV.

(1285) had tried to people it in vain. His own experience indeed was no good advertisement for his experiment. The year before his election a conference of cardinals which met upon the Aventine had been attacked by the fatal scourge. Honorius, then Cardinal Savelli, alone had stuck to his post when all the others fled in terror. By keeping up good fires and by other precautions the plucky Cardinal escaped the malaria. But the Romans did not forget the incident, and to this day have not forgotten it. The Aventine and the district between the Baths of Caracalla and the Porta San Sebastiano alone remain to-day to tell the stranger what half Rome was like fifty years ago. It is safe to predict that both these districts will at no distant date be covered with buildings. The Aventine will in all probability then be found to be as healthy and as desirable as any other part of the city.

Outside the walls suburban districts have grown up in the neighbourhood of the chief gates. The quarter near the Porta San Lorenzo is densely populated by a workman class, who are not always on the best of terms with the police. Beyond the Porta del Popolo, the Porta Pia, and the Porta San Giovanni, the open vineyards have given place to factories, warehouses, and dwelling houses. But nowhere is the change more striking than in the Prati di Castello adjoining the Vatican City on the north. In 1870 these were still open fields with hardly even a factor's house upon them, and so they had remained since the day when Cincinnatus tilled them. At the point where the river is now crowned by the Ponte Cavour a ferry boat, of the exact build and appearance of the barchetta which appears in Raphael's 'Miraculous draught of fishes,' plied by a rope and pulley from the Via degli Schiavoni, on the city side, to the Vicolo della Barchetta, a narrow country lane, on the other bank. The ferry and its surroundings were probably little altered in appearance since that night, in the times of the Borgia, when the charcoal burner saw the masked man on the white horse bring the body of the Pope's murdered son down from the Via degli Schiavoni to fling it into the Tiber. Three bridges now lead across to the great new quarter which covers the farmlands of Cincinnatus with its rectangular arrangement of streets and squares. In this neighbourhood, too, all along the city side of the Tiber, the embankment, which has done so much for the health of Rome, has swept away innumerable tenements-some of the most picturesque and interesting, no doubt, which survived in Rome from the sixteenth and even from the

fifteenth centuries. It was here that Vanozza, the mother of Caesar Borgia, owned a hostelry; and here as one wandered in the crowded narrow streets near the Via del Orso one could best realise the appearance of the city in its strange mixture of squalor and magnificence four hundred years ago. The making of the great thoroughfare, the Corso Vittore Emmanuele, which leads from the Piazza di Venezia to the Ponte St. Angelo, also has removed many an ancient landmark. That thoroughfare follows in parts the line of the ancient Via Papalis by which the popes made their transit from St. Peter's to the Capitol, while in other parts blocks of houses have been removed bodily to give a convenient direction to the route. The streets in this part were previously narrow and tortuous, little altered in appearance since the days of Sixtus IV., who, with the aid of his henchman, Cardinal d'Estouteville, about the year 1480, had greatly widened them, and had paved many of them with tiles. It is needless to say that the latter had long given way to the little square blocks of lava from the Capo di Bove quarries. It was difficult sometimes, as one looked at these picturesque but very crowded thoroughfares, to persuade oneself that they could have ever been considered broad and commodious. Yet it is in evidence that before the days of Sixtus it was hardly possible for two horsemen to pass abreast. In the days of Pius IX., when the colossal coach of the Pope was sometimes to be met driving through the streets in this neighbourhood, it was impossible for another carriage to pass it. There is no part of Rome whose appearance has undergone a greater change than this, except the now embanked portion east and south of the Tiber.

The task which the municipality of Rome has had to face since the city has become the capital of Italy has been both vast and difficult. They have performed it perhaps no better, certainly no worse, than other municipalities have performed far less important tasks. To double in thirty to forty years the accommodation of a population, to double also the area over which building extends, to provide suitable means of traffic and adequate measures of sanitation in a city whose natural position has at all times made drainage a difficult problem, would tax the capacities of the most capable Board of Works engaged in developing a comparatively new city. But in Rome the problem has been far more difficult. It has meant the endeavour to turn an ancient city into a modern. At every few hundred yards some fresh problem arose; some memory of classical or mediaeval or Renaissance days stood in the

way of the new thoroughfare or the needed sewer. Moreover, you could not drive a new street in any direction among the older parts of Rome without sweeping away picturesque rookeries beloved by generations of artists. Were none of these to go? Was no sacrifice to be made to the needs of a great modern capital? Mistakes were made in plenty; that may freely be admitted. In the early days which followed on the 'Risorgimento' there were evidences of feverish haste, and the jerry-builder set up his memorial, likely to be all too short-lived, in the Via Nazionale and in a few other streets, the instability of whose houses is as notorious as of those in the fashionable quarters of Kensington, where dancing is forbidden by the terms of the lease. It may be freely owned, too, that sacrifices have been too evidently made to that love of the rectangular which is the first inspiration of the modern city-builder. He who would learn the depths to which dreariness may attain in the hands of the city surveyor pledged to uniformity might do worse than spend an hour or two of a dusty June day in the new quarters between the Lateran and S. Maria Maggiore. Again, with regard to the enormous monument to Victor Emmanuel, without accepting the view of those who declare that that monarch should need no memorial in a national Rome-an argument which, driven to its logical results, would give monuments only to those who are least worth remembering-we may fairly deplore its colossal character and the destruction which has resulted from it. We may still more readily admit that in the carrying out of the Tiber Embankment the modern Roman fell painfully short of his traditions. Here was an opportunity exactly suited, it would have seemed, to the engineering and architectural genius of the race. One asks oneself what the engineers of the days of Augustus and Trajan— even of Sixtus or Julius II.-would have made of it. But to-day the Tiber creeps dismally between its sad and sewer-like walls, a work of incredible dullness. One has to remind oneself, as one's wrath rises, that no more practically useful work has been accomplished since the days of the Cloaca Maxima and of the Roman aqueducts. It would have been not less useful if the architectural opportunities which arose along its line had been better utilised by the descendants of Servius and of Claudius.

But when one has admitted all this and a great deal more, and when one has even exhausted all the charges which architect or engineer, historian or poet, artist or bric-à-brac man may bring against those who have been endeavouring to shape old Rome

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