palaces. Every American school boy knows of Genoa as the birthplace of Columbus, but it took the Genoese nearly four hundred years to decide to honour the discoverer of America with the statue which now stands before the railroad station. John Cabot, who saw the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia before Columbus set foot on continental America, was also born in Genoa.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE ETERNAL CITY

Go thou to Rome,-at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness.

O SAID Keats. Yet I think Rome is less than a

Paradise, more than a city, and far more than a

wilderness of ruins, or the grave of an ancient civilization. There are so many Romes-the Rome of the Forum and the Colosseum, the Rome of St. Peter's and the Pope, the Rome of the king and government of Italy, the Rome of the artist, the archaeologist, and the historian, and the combination of all these, the Eternal City, that is the pride of the Italians and the "port of dreams" for thousands.

I am reminded of a story told of the learned Pope Leo XIII. He often asked the foreign visitor:

"How long have you been in Rome?”

If the answer was, “A week, Your Holiness," the pontiff would say:

"Then you must feel as if you know Rome very well!" If the visitor replied that he had been in the city for six months, Pope Leo's remark would be:

"Then you have begun to look about you a little bit." But if the foreigner should say that he had lived in Rome for several years, the Pope would smilingly say:

"Ah, then you have discovered that a whole lifetime is not too long to learn what Rome really is!"

mense area.

The city seems enormous, for it is spread over an imOne reason for this is the fact that a large part of it is taken up with ruins, churches, and historic monuments of one kind or another. The town is actually no larger than St. Louis or Boston, but if you were to reproduce Rome on the site of either of the others, you would have to allot a big space in the heart of it for the relics of the past. The Forum, as big as an eighty-acre farm, is surrounded by the business buildings of modern Rome. The Colosseum is another great field of stone and mortar right in the midst of the business section. St. Peter's and the Vatican occupy as much land as the Colosseum. Almost anywhere you could throw a stone and hit a church taking up an acre or so of ground.

Most of the city is on the left bank of the Tiber, rising partly on the plain of the ancient Field of Mars, and partly on the surrounding hills. On the right bank of the river are St. Peter's and the Vatican. Modern Rome is confined chiefly to the plain. The heights where stood the ancient mistress of the world were almost uninhabited during the Middle Ages, and only within comparatively recent years have they begun to be reoccupied. Yet these seven hills of Rome add greatly to its beauty. The Palatine, where Cicero lived and where Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, built his huge palace, is now a park and verdure hides the ruins of the halls where succeeding emperors lorded it over the multitude. A curious relic here is a little stone altar chiselled with the Latin words, Sei deo, sei deiva-to the Unknown God. I have been told that this was set up to the patron god of Rome and that only the priests knew the name of the deity to whom it was really dedicated. Even they did not write it down,

but handed it on from generation to generation, for it was feared that if the common people should know it, one of them might betray it to an enemy, who would surely bribe the god with offerings and sacrifices to cease to protect Rome.

Between the Palatine and the Capitoline, on which rose the magnificent Temple of Jupiter, the most sacred shrine of the Roman world, are the ruins of the Forum. Upon the Quirinal is the royal palace of the kings of Italy. On the sides of the Viminal the modern city grows apace. Last night I dined upon the Aventine, not going up in a chariot, on horseback, or afoot, as did Cæsar and Cicero, but in an Italian automobile, which landed me at the Castle of the Cæsars. Climbing some ragged stone steps past ruined columns, we came out at length upon a stone platform where a gay crowd was dining in the open-air restaurant overlooking the myriad lights of the city.

As we ate delicious food amid the laughter and light talk of the twentieth century, my imagination unreeled before me a series of moving pictures. First I saw in my mind's eye the burial of Remus upon this hillside, after he had been slain by Romulus in a fit of jealous rage. That was twenty-six centuries and more ago. Next I beheld these slopes alive with a surging mob of plebeians, their hearts aflame with the injustices and oppressions of the patricians. There followed terrible pictures of the wild orgies of seven thousand men and women engaged in their degrading worship of Bacchus. Again the scene changed, and across my mental screen flitted a figure frail and small, yet with an indescribable dignity of bearing. He moved about in a cluster of men with dark, Hebraic countenances and long beards, who appeared to be hanging

upon his every word. And recalling that he was a visitor to Jews of the Rome of two thousand years ago, I gave the picture a title:

"Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God."

But here my reverie was interrupted by the waiter presenting me with such a substantial bill that I came back with a jolt to the world of to-day. Since the spell was broken, I climbed into my car and was soon again in the midst of modern Rome.

The principal streets of the business city of Rome are the Via Nazionale and its continuation, the Corso, one of the most brilliant avenues in all Europe. During the season both of these thoroughfares are thronged with pedestrians and vehicles. A large part of the traffic of Rome is still pulled along by horses, though the taxis are also numerous and cheap. The old-fashioned victoria drawn by one horse, which the driver usually flogs unmercifully, is most prevalent. There are also red street cars, which are a bit shorter than ours and get their power through overhead trolleys. Carts drawn by mules decorated with bells and coloured fringes, so that they look as if they were ready for a holiday, bump over the cobbled pavements. Donkey carts are not so common here as in Naples.

One of the striking things about Rome is the number and the beauty of its fountains. The finest of them is the Trevi, which used to be called Virgin Water, either because of its purity or because of the tradition that a young girl pointed out this spring to the engineers of Agrippa. They built a subterranean channel fourteen miles long to conduct the stream that issues here to the baths of that warrior and statesman beside the Pantheon. The same