The Holbrook news., 1912-07-19

| ments-some of the most interesting and picturesque, no doubt, which sur vived in Rome from the fifteenth and sixteenth 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 realize the appearance of the city and it's strange mixture of squalor and magnificence 400 years ago.
 Ghetto Has Vanished. But nowhere has the modern Roman made a cleaner sweep than in the famous Ghetto, that Jewish quarter which was the most compressed and intricate tangle of lanes in the ancient city, a nest of dirt, disease and pow erty indescribable. The fish market within the portico of Octavia went years ago. It is hard to realize that in this place the Jews of Rome were herded together like hogs, insulted, hated, robbed and persecuted, and yet multiplied and even occasionally grew rich. The Church of St. Angelo, in which once year the Jewish elders were compelled to listen to sermon preached against their religion, still remains, but the entire quarter lying between 1t and the river has vanished You may read in history of the sui fering of the Ghetto folk when the Fiber overflowed it's banks, and how the inhabitants shifted their goods into the upper stories of the houses from boats.
 In other quarters of the city sani- tary methods were conspicuous by their absence. In many of the streets walking was well nigh impossible ow- ing to the habit of casting all domestic refuse into the open street The mar kets of Rome, once the most interest ing of Europe, have fallen into line with the less picturesque but more regulated markets of the great cap itals. The huge cattle market just outside the Porta del Popolo, has mi grated to a corner of Rome not far from the old Protestant cemetery, but nearer to the Fiber. The wild Cam pagna horsemen with their goatsk1n aprons and OK goads no longer form a feature of the Piazza del Popolo, nor do the unwieldy vehicles piled high with the quaking carcasses of pigs and oxen any longer rumble down the Ripetta or the Babuino. A thing of the past, too, Is the peoples mar ket in the Piazza Navona, where every thing that flew or ran or crawled could be purchased. Gone, also, is the mar ket in the Piazza Montanara, under the Theater of Marcellus, where the laborers were hired every Sunday morning at a certain hour. With the spread of education the letter writing scribe who formerly did a roaring trade in the penning of love notes for enthusiastic but illiterate peasants, ha slikewise disappeared.
 Good hotels, boarding houses, and furnished apartments of all sizes, and suitable to all purses, afford that com fortable accommodation which was lacking or far too expensive in Flaw thorne's time Artists are now board ed and lodged like ordinary mortals; they no longer dwell in marble halls surrounded by mediaeval dust and dirt. The foreign visitor is no longer menaced with fever, for malaria thanks to the greater cleanliness, bet ter drainage, more space and higher ground-has practivally vanished. The death rate has been reduced to IS per thousand against TIA for Paris and 15.1 for Berlin. Rome thus ranks among the most healthy of European capitals.