Los Angeles daily herald., 1886-12-02
THE ROME OF TO-DAY.
Transformation During
the last Is Years.
HISTORIC GOTH OF SEPTEMBER
uoaern Rome Magnificent City
Sanitary Transformation
Complete.

To those who, living in Italy, can re-
call the critical moments of the unfold
ing of the kingdom. or who were from
the outside geographically accompanying
n feeling the movements by which Italy
vss made, the 2Oth of September is like
The crisis of the plot Of drama coming
n the fifth act and relieving the tension
Of interest in its conduct by the assur-
ance Of q happy ending. From is4S we
love the gracious land, mother OF our
civilization, nurse of our modern arts, of
romance, kind stepmother OF all the
nuses. and heiress of ell the wealth OF
antiquity, have felt our hearts rise and
siuk in her visissitudes of fortune, as pa
tisnt, persistent, andismayed, she grew
from what Charles Albert found her to
what Victor Emmanuel left her-insult-
ed, oppressed, thwarted by dynastic and
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,
abe rode over the last Of her enemies,
these 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 satis-
fies all the conditions of the drama than
the history of these scarcely forty years.
The visissitudes of war and the labors OF
peace have helped alike to push the plot
to an exciting issue, and those who fol-
lowed il with the passionate interest 1t
merited must have felt, when that day
of triumph came and the Italian troops
entered tie Eternal City and crowned
Victor Emmanuel king OF Italy, that the
drama was certainly worthy the land OF
Virgil and Dante, of Altieri, Geldoni and
Mani, IS well as Ferrucio. Victor En-
manuel and Garibaldi. The little street
from Porta Pia to the Quirinal. then a
suburban lane between the vineyard
walls, in o quarter which only remiaded
one of how great Rome had once been
and how shrunken and vacant after the
lapse of centuries, is now a 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 commemorative process
sion to-day, must feel the change with a
peculiar force, entering by the noble av-
enue, now Via 20 Settembre, into the
transformed 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 gen.
egatiOn is, in the modern sense, a mag
nlticent cty-wide avenues, with mas
sive, lofty houses-too much like Paris,
perhaps, to be 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 tortu0usness was nc
compensation tor 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 filled with modern houses or
with the scaffolding and preparations for
them, so that the Macao and Campo
Pretoria are an expanse of construction
aud preparations for construction and
the city mas overgrown its mural limits,
end outside of the Porta Pia and Porta
Salaria it Is encroaching on the Campag
M. The Piazza de Termini, where
twenty-five years ago the railway sta
tion seemed hardly tolerated intrusion
ON the old order of things, and where
the artists used to plant their easels un.
disturbed to sketch the ruins of the
picturesque baths, is now the center of
. splendid quarter and the head of the
great Via Nationale, which vies with the
boulevards of Paris for splendid struc-
tures, and which, still in progress, is
destined to travel Rome from north to
south.
The works along the Tiber are slowly
Transforming the unruly river into a wa
ter-way of similar character, the plan
menacing entire destruction to the het.
erogeneous and picturesque, if still un-
seemly, aggregations of houses along its
banks. The fields where. when l 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
laid out in building lots and half built
over. A broad Via Reale drives straight
at the gardens of the vatican, and a
whole suburb covers the patrimony of
the great dictator. There is not even a
street named after him.
SANITARY TRANSFORMATION.
But the sanitary transformation is as
complete as the structural. The city is
supplied with water with bounteous.
ness " hich no other capital possesses
the company of the Aqua Marcia even
begs its clients to let the water run into
their houses cont;nuously-it flows ev-
erywhere, and SO cool in the midsummer
that ice is a superauity. Those who, in
in the days of the old government, had
occs sion to visit the ruins in the sum-
mer time will remember the sickening
filthiness in which everything was kept,
as if by legalized custom, now scrupu-
lous neatness replaces it; and, excepting
in the quarters along the northern bank
of the Tiber, in places where the piano
regolatore has not yet reached out its
measuring chain, ones senses need not
be offended as of old by ramble in the
crooked and narrow ways of the old
city. The Ghetto is tumbling down as
fast as pick and crowbar can bring it,
and busy builders are following up the
demolishers with new streets and new
structures.
And, what strikes one as stranger
still, the hoardiags are blazoned with
placards which advertise liberty of the
press which must make the veterans of
the old ecclesiastical wars. soldiers of the
temporal power, shudder at the impiety
of the new order of thing--diatribes
against the church of the old days, scan.
dalous romances of the lives of the
priesthood, the last fruits of modern phi
1osophy indexed and blasphem-
ous to the old regime faunted on pla-
cards and solddn the second-han book
stalls.
All this is the work of fifteen years. |