It is pleasant to turn to the long-deserted Eastern quarter of Rome, where an entirely new city is being erected since the Italian occupation. We may yet hope to see Rome worthy of her past greatness.
"His Holiness" Pope Leo XIII. has lately issued, from his small isolated world within the walls of the Vatican, a most extraordinary letter, addressed to Cardinal Antonius di Luca, John Baptiste Petra, and Joseph Herzenroether, in which he shows the world at large that he has no eye for anything but the claims of the Church, and would fain have mankind believe that the temporal government of the Popes has been an unappreciated blessing, and far superior to that of any other, and to the present government of United Free Italy under the constitutional sway of King Humbert, in particular. Since 1859 the Italians of what was once known as the States of the Church, have been deprived of this great blessing of the Pontifical rule, and with what dire results let us examine.
During the period between the expulsion of King Bombina from the throne of the two Sicilies by the Garibaldians, and the evacuation of the Eternal City by the French in 1870, a brigand warfare was carried on, if not under the immediate auspices of the Pope and his Cardinals, at least with their secret support and connivance. Now, after little more than a decade of constitutional rule, brigandage has almost disappeared from the face of the land, and travellers are comparatively safe.
When Victor Emmanuel and the Italian troops entered Rome and took possession of it as the Capital of Italy, free from the Alps to Taranto, they found it a city of ruins, squalor, and hardly habitable in a sanitary point of view. Interesting, of course, to the traveller from its wealth of splendid relics of the past and vast treasures of art, but as undesirable for residence as the Upas Valley. Now what does the traveller see? A prosperous and happy population; a new city rapidly rising on the site of the ancient "Queen of the world," with all the conveniences, appliances, and luxuries of a modern European city. Magnificent new streets and boulevards, lined with buildings equal to any in Paris or London--streets traversed by tramways, and brilliantly lighted by gas; with shops and magazines, as in other great continental capitals. An energetic Government and municipality have planned and are carrying out vast improvements, that bid fair in a few years to render modern Rome not only equal to the Rome of the Cæsars in beauty and magnificence, but as desirable a residence from a sanitary point of view as any other city of its size.