Connecticut western news., 1872-03-15
SALISBURY, CONN. Friday Morning, March 15, 1872
OUR EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENCE.

1872, and 1 am rejoiced that 1t ls, During it's continuance, galleries ef pictures and statuary have been closed in some parts of the city, shops that We have sought out with some care have also been found shut and we have. not 0afeQuently been disap- pointed at one or the other of these places, being denied an entrance on account of the festivities of the week. It has been a sort of half business and half pleasure season, and ansatlsfy tug for either. But tho fun, frolic and buffoonry must be gone through with, and the young ladies gave their afternoons to it, while one sufhced for the gray heads. A word or two de-
 scriptive, may not be out Of place here. The Corso, the principal street in the city is cleared every afternoon for ten or twelve days, of ail business operations and given up to fun and frolic. Thousands of people on foot and on horseback, or in carriages, with not less than two horses, are constantly moving from one end of street to the other. less than mile in length. Multitudes of balconies are erected along the street on the house fronts, and rented to parti from 50 to 500 francs each. No carriages that are not designed to take part in the per formances are permitted to drive through or across the street during their continu- ance, each afternoon. These consist chiefly in throwing bouquets of flowers bon-bons and confetta back and iforth from street to balcony, and to and upon each other in the streets, and in dressing men, women and children, horses, carriages and donkeys in all manner of grotesque form and mas ques. The confetta is 8 preparation of lime and white clay, in appearance like comfits of candy, of about the size of small peas, and is constantly thrown back and forth until bushels and bushels of it are thrown away each afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen in the streets and in carriages are incessently pelted with it, until streets and carriages are white with it, and whoso- ever does not receive it good naturedly gets pelted with double portions. The young men send up beautiful boquets to the ladies who return boquets or confetta, as the humor takes them. There can scarcely be stronger contrast than that which ex- ists between the puerile amusements, and the obsequious devotion of modern Rome to Pope and priests, and the grand achieve. ments in arts and arms, and the triumphal marches of old Rome in the ages of its power and glory. Achievements which will both brighten and darken the pages ol history through ages to come, and whether the one or the other, both were wrought upon gigantic scale.
 Well here we are in Rome; the Rome of five and twenty centuries ago; the Rome of all intervening ages and the Rome of to day, in the sense of its locality and its surroundings, but in neither except the latter in any other sense. My acquaintance with, uDsets all my preconceived notions of it, and what school boy or any other person that has ever looked into history, has not pictured Rome in his minds eye a thousand times. What shall say of it? It is too old and too vast in all its historic associations to talk about within the limits of an ordinary letter. Instead of finding Rome confined within the limits of mod crate sized valley, and possibly climbing up and crowning the tops of the far famed seven hills. l find it a city filling an ample space, and that in her palmy days, she not only covered these hill sides, and crowned their summits, but overf1owed with her population and her wonderful works, into fields as ample as any of our wes ern prai- ries, and as rich as tho most ardent agri- culturalist could desire. Instead of finding it necessary that the visitor should stumble over broken thrones and decaying columns, and find the inhabitants of modern Rome doniciled among these ruins as best they might be and as my imagination had pie tured them. l find they have ''ample room and nerve enough" albeit we know that a city prouder than they can boast lies buried in its splendor under their feet. This is attested by the fact that no structure of any magnitude, and that requiring deep foundation has been erected in modern times, that has not exhumed from such foundations, tons and tons of broken col umns, corniccs, capitals and statuary. The hotel in which I write, has, lying in its court several tons of highly wrought frag ments of marble in the various forms above indicated. Another thing that disappoints me in Rome is the great number and mag nitude of its ruins. We have all read oi these, and had their dimensions given to u! in plans and figures, but no adequate i'm nf nj of the splendors with which they were environed can be acquired Ill any othel way so we'll as by personal observation Take for instance the Colosseum, com menced in the year 72 of our era, an( only finished until nearly 800 years after ward. Nearly one half of the origina structure is standing while the other hal has not only been used as quarry fo many years, and as lime bed, but churche and palaces have been constructedifrom it rougher materials, and ornamented with it more elaborate columns, pilasters and stat uary both in Rome and in Naples. At it completion it would seat from 80 10 100, 900 people, leaving central and circula oLCU, tuot NOuAA AOlA OoV WAO OCoSto 5000 were said to have been sacrifice
 therein at its dedication. The latter wa carnival for nearly hundred days.
 stood upon one of its remaining walls, an cast my eye down to it's base hundre feet below me. It is awe inspiring even its ruins. So with the ruins of the baths c Carracalli, Titus, HadIian and Deocletiar The former still cover seven or eight acre! many of which are now cultivated, an on others stand walls from 60 to 80 fet high and hundreds of feet in length, wit broken arches, columns and cornices ths