Western Kansas world. [volume] (WaKeeney, Kan.) 1885-current, 1886-11-06
MODERN ROME.
Complete Transformation In the Eternal
CITY Duriue the List Fifteen Years.

Template Transformation in the Eternal
CITY During the List Fifteen Years.
To those who, living in Italy, can re-
call the critical doments of the unfolding
OF the kingdom, or who were from the
outside geographically 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 { . fifth act and relieving the tension
of interest in its conduct by the assur-
ance of happy ending. From 1S4S,
we who loved the gracious land, mother
of our civilization, nurse OF our modern
arts, OF romance, kind stepmotber of all
the muses., and heiress of all the wealth
of antiquity, have felt our hearts rise
and sink in her vicissitudes of fortune,
as, patient, persistent, undismayed, she
grew from what Charles Albert found
her to what Victor Emanuel left her
insulted, oppressed, thwarted by dynas-
tic and imperialistic greed leaving her
martyrs by the way, and winning every
day more and more the sympathy of the
liberal and iberty-loving of all lands,
until, on the day of which this is the an
niversary. 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 full
ly 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 FREEDOM
mate interest it merited 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 wor-
thy the land of Virgil and Dante, of At
fieri, GoldoDi, and Manzoni, as well
Ferrucio, Victor Emmanuel, and Gau
baldi. The little street from the Port
Pia to the Quirinal, then suburban lane
between vineyard walls, in a quarter
which only reminded 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
are favored to march with the commena-
orative procession to-day, must feel the
change with peculiar force, entering
by the noble avenue, DOW Via 20 Set
tembre, into the transformed CITY.
The new Rome which lies on those
hills and on the plateau to the north and
northeast of the Rome of the last gener-
alton is, in the modern sense, a magni-
fcent city-wide avenues, with massive,
lofty houses-too much like Paris, per-
hsps, to be appropriate to Rome, but far
filter for modern uses than the gloomy
and romantic palaces which forms the
old city. Reared along narrow streets
whose picturesque righteousness was no
compensation for the want of air and
light, they condemned their inhabitants
to the entire circuit of the old wall called
Belisarius, which is on that side now
filled with modern houses or with the
scaffolding and preparations for them,
so that the Macao and the Campo Pre-
torio are an expanse Of construction and
preparations for construction, and the
city has overgrown its mural limits, and
outside of the Porta Pia and Porta Sala-
ria it is encroaching on the Campagna.
The Piazza de Termini where twenty five |
years ago the railway station seemed a
hardly tolerated intrusion on the old |
order of things, and where the artists |
used to plant their easels undisturbed to
sketch the ruins of the picturesque baths,
is now the center of splendid quarter
and the head of the great Via Rationale,
which vies with the boulevards of Paris
fol splendid structures, and which, still |
in progress, is destined to traverse Rome
from north to south.
The work along the Tiber is slowly
the unruly river into a
waterway of similar character, the plan
entire destruction to the hete-
and picturesque, is still an un-
seemly aggregation of houses along its
banks. The fields where, when I first
went to Rome, we used to wander, in the
full belief that we were pilgrims to the
farm where Cincinnatus left his pillow to
cross the Tiber and drive the Gauls
away the Pratt del Castello-are now
aid put in building lots and half built
over. A broad Via Reale drives straight
It the gardens of the Vatican, and a
whole suburb covers the patrimony of
he great dictator. There is not even
! street named after him.
But the sanitary Transformation is as
complete as the structural, The city is
supplied with water with a bounteous.
less which no other capital possesses
he company of the Aqua Marcia even
,egs its clients to let the water run in
heir houses contiuuously-it flows every
where, and SO cool even liz midsummer
hat ice is superhuity. Those who. in
he days of the old government, had oc-
aston to visit the ruins in the summer
ime will still remember the sickening
Ilthiness in which everything was kept, /,
s if by legalized custom, now scrupu-
ous neatness replaces it; and, except in {
he quarters along the northern bank OF l
be Tiber, in places where the piano {
egold ore has not yet reached out its I
chain ones senses need not {
9 offended as of old by a ramble in the
rocked and narrow ways of the old city. |
he Ghetto is tumbling down as fast as t
lick and crowbar can bring it, and busy Z
uilders are following up the demolish-