The Holbrook news., 1912-07-19
PW WHAT shall we say of Rome? AAH What can we say? She Is
 H the worlds city of the ages, VI and it is improbable that

WW the worlds city of the ages, and it is improbable that
 any conceivable combination of advantages can ever produce a rival to her supreme charms. The capital of the greatest empire of an- tiquity, and in more modern times the metropolis of Christendom, she is un- like any great city in the world. The whole of Rome Is one vast museum, in which the very galleries, palaces, churches-which contain the finest of its treasures-are themselves but sin gle items in that museum which is Rome. What gives to all this Its spe- cial charm is that Rome is still a liv- ing city, the capital of a nation, and with an actual life of its own, which often enough can be seen in its direct descent from antiquity.
 When Hawthorne wrote his fas- cinating tale of the Transformation, in the early sos, Rome was a maze of narrow, unclean lanes, a congeries of evil smelling, squalid dwellings inter- spersed with gloomy mediaevaI pal aces in sad disrepair In short, an ill., drained, il-lit, unsavory old city, teem- ing with beggars, models, thieves and cutthroats, and, to cap all, the ac- knowledged headquarters of the malig- nant malarial fever. But the sQualid city of Hawthorne's time has now giv- en place to the fine, well?built capital of United Italy. We must look to the most utilitarian reasons for any inter- est we may feel in Rome today; to health statistics, to sanitary reform, to building laws. All these seem prosaic when done under our eyes, but the same things were full of poetry when done in the time of Augustus and Trajap. Let us rid ourselves of the illusions of time and admit that to have driven out dirt, brigandage. and pestilence, and to have diminished crime. is a not unworthy tribute to the glory of Rome as a modern capital, writes Harvey Middleton in Grit
 Area Has Increased.
 When the Italian troops entered the city through the Porta Pia on the memorable goth of September, 1870, and papal Rome became the capital of the reconstituted kingdom of Italy, a new era dawned. Since that day the area covered by houses has been in- creased one-fourth, and the face Of Rome has changed more in the past 40 years than in the previous three centuries. Rome in the sos had a population of about 215,OOO In 1911, when Rome celebrated the f1ftieth an niversary of the Proclamation of the Italian Kingdom with three great ex- hibitions, the population had grown to nearly half a million. If a map Of the city of 1870 Is placed opposite a map of today 1t is easy to see at what point the increase of building has talk en place. The space once covered by the beautiful Ludovici Gardens is now filled by wide streets, lined by tall, handsome and perfectly dull but healthy houses. Other streets have arisen on the gardens and fields which lay on the Esquiline and Celian hills between Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran. A still larger mass of houses-partly detached or semi detached vtlla-like residences, partly high blocks of tenement dwellings in- habited by the poorer classes-has sprung up in the district called the Meadows of the Castle (Prati di Cas- tello), to the north of the Castle of St. Angelo, and to the north of the Vati- cana region that was open country from the time when Cincinnatus titled its fields until 1870.
 At the opposite side of the city thickly set houses line the streets which run out into the Campagna rom the Porta Pia and the Porta San Lo- renzo, so that considerable suburbs now cover what had been a perfectly lonely and silent region from the days of the Emperor Constantine to the days of Pope Leo XIII. Open vine yards have given place to factories, warehouses and dwellings.
 Three new bridges have been flung across the Fiber to the former farm lands of Cincinnatus. In this neigh borhood, too, all along the city side of the Ttber, the embankment, which has done so much for the health of Rome, has swept away innumerable tame