Rock Island daily Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1886-1893, 1886-12-06
THE ROME OF TODAY.
COMPLETE TRANSFORMATION DUR
ING THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS.


The Noble Work Whose beginning Dated
the Historic goth of September-Mod-
ern Rome a Magnificent City-Sanitary
Transformation Complete.
To those who, living in Italy, can recall the
critical moments of the unfolding of the king
dom, or who were from the outside geo
graphically accompanying in feeling the
movements by which Italy was made the
goth of September is like the crisis of the
plot of drama coming in the fifth act and
relieving tho tension of interest in its conduct
by the assurance of happy ending. From
1913 we who loved the gracious land. mother
Of our civilization, nurse Of our modern arts,
Of romance, kind stepmother of all the muses.,
and heiress of all the wealth of antiquity,
have felt cur hearts rise and sink in her Wis
cissitudes of fortune as, patient, persistent,
undismayed, she grew from what Charles AL
bert found her to what Victor Emmanuel
left her-insulted, oppressed, thwarted by
dynastic and imperialistic greed, leaving her
martyrs by the way, and winning every day
more and more the sympathy of the liberal
and liberty loving of all lands, until, on the
day of which this is the anniversary, she rode
over the last of her enemies, those of her own
household and in at the breach of the Porta
Pia to take final and indisputable possession
of her crown
No romance of war or love ever built by
human imagination more fully satisfies all the
conditions of the drama than the history of
these scarcely forty Years. The vicissitudes
of war and the labors of peace have helped
alike to push the plot to an exciting issue, and
those who followed it with the passionate in
tcrest it mer1ted must have felt, when that
day of triumph came and the Italian troops
entered the Eternal City and crowned Victor
Emmanuel king of Italy, that the drama was
certainly worthy the land of Virgil and
Dante, of Alfieri, Goldoni and Manzoni, as
well as FeiTuciO, Victor Emanuel and Carl
baldi. The little street from the Porta PA to
the Quirinal, then a suburban lane between
vineyard walls, in quarter which only re-
minded one of how great Rome had once been
and how shrunken and vacant after the lapse
of centuries, is now magnificent avenue,
along which splendid palaces have risen and
are still rising. And those who entered by the
POrta Pia on that memorable day and arc
favored to march with the commemorative
procession to-day, must feel the change with
a peculiar force, entering by the noble ave
nue. now Via ~ Settembrc into the trans
formed city.
MAGNIFICENT CITY.
The new Rome which lies on those hills and
on the plateau to the north and northeast of
the Rome of the last generation is, in the
modern sense, magnificent city wide ave
nues, with massive, lofty houses-too much
like Paris, perhaps, to he appropriate to
Rome, but far filter for modern uses than the
gloomy and romantic palaces which form the
old city Reared along narrow streets, whose
picturesque tOrtuousness was no cOmpensation
for the want of air and light, they condemned
their inhabitants to the entire circuit of the
old wall called of Belisarius, which is on that
side now filed with modern houses or with
the scafolding and preparations for them, SC
that the Macao and the Campo Pretoria arr
an eXpanse Of construction and preparations
for construction, and the city has overgrown
its mural limits, and outside of the Porta Pia
and Porta Salaria it is encroaching on the
Campagna The Piazza de Termini whert
twenty five years ago the railway station
seemed hardly tolerated intrusion on the old
order of things, and where the artists used &c
plant their easels undisturbed to sketch the
ruins of the picturesque baths, is now the
center of a splendid quarter and the head OF
The great Via Rationale which vies with the
boulevards of Paris for splendid structures
and which, still in progress, is destined tC
traverse Rome from north to south.
The works along the Tiber are slowly
Transforming the unruly river into O water
way Of similar character, the plan menacine
| entire destruction to the heterogeneous ant
| picturesque, if still unseemly, aggregations Of
houses along its banks. The fields where
when | first went to Rome, we used to wan
| der, in the full belief that we were pilgrim.
to the farm where Cincinnatus left his pillow
| to cross the Tiber and drive the Gauls away
| the Pratt del Castello-are now laid out IL
| building lots and half built over A broad
| Via Reale drives straight at the gardens o.
| the vatican, and whole suburb covers thu
| patrimony of the great dictator. There is no
| even a street named after him.
SANITARY TRANSFORMATION.
But the sanitary transformation is as com
pete as the structural The city is supplied
with water with a bounteousness which NJ
other capital poSsesses-the company of tn,
| Aqua Marcia even begs its clients to let th,
water run in their houses continuously
flows everywhere, and so cool in the midsum
mer that ice is a supcrtiuity. Those who, il
the days of the old government, had occasion
10 visit the ruins in the summer time will re
member the sickening filthness in which
| everything was kept, rs il, by a legalized Gus
| tom, now scrupulOus neatness replaces it
and, except in the quarters along the north
ern bank of the Tiber, in places where tn
piano rrgolatore has not yet reached out it
measuring chain, ones senses need not be of
Tended as of old by ranble in the crooked
and narrow ways of the old city The Ghett,
is tunbling down as fast as pick and crowbal
can bring it, and busy builders are following
DID the demOlishers with new streets and new
structures
And, what strikes one US stranger still, tn
hoardings are blazoned with placards which
advertise liberty of the press which mus
make the veterans of the old ecclesiastical
wars, soldiers of the temporal power, shudde
at the iInpiety of the new order of things
diatribcs against the church of the old days
scandalous ronances of the lives of the priest
hood, the last fruits Of modern philosophy
books indexed AMI blasphemous to the Of,
regime Haunted on placards and sold in tb
second hand book stalls
And this Is the work of fifteen years Evel
a foreign conquest could hardly efface tn
tsori of that goth of September. In anothe
fifteen years of this progress the pilgrim =
Rome will hardly find, except st. Peters an'
the Coliseum, stone that he will remembc
if he knew the city i'll 1869,
And with it all Rome las become, from on
of the most insalubrious cities of Italy-next
| believe, in order after Naples forty year
aSo-ona of the most healthful; and while
under the popcs, the death record was heavie
than that of the births. the latter is now con
siderabIy the Larger; and when the sanitation
of such Of the outlying districts near Rom
is complete, as now planned for the city wi
be. season in and season out, probably tb
healthiest in Europe-unsess Florence Shout
take some day TO sanitation. Rome Cor
London Times.
| Very kind, Indeed.
An Engiishman thus writes TO u Frenc
| al Il. IL.