Rome [antikvár]

From an historical and architecturai point of view Romé is unquestionably the most interesting city in the world. From the aesthetic it is alsó still the most beautiful, despite the graceless constructions of the later nineteenth and the present century, which have clogged and polluted its centre and disfigured its approaches, once the source of particular marvei to travellers from other parts of Europe. In the rangé and scope, the variety, the quantity, and the intrinsic quality of its resources, it remains not merely unequalled but unapproached among the greatest artistic treasuries of the civilized world. That it retains this pre-eminence among cities is due to providence rather than to the vigilance of Romans, who have, as a matter of historical record, shown themselves over the centuries as destructive by indolence of their heritage as were the declared enemies of Romé by calculation. The great majority of the buildings and ruins, monuments and fragments which survive to enchant the eye and touch the imagination come from two relatively short periods in the history of Romé, separated in time by more than a thousand years. Of what was built during the first 700 years or so of Rome's existence - during which a shepherd's colony on the Palatine Hill grew into a town, the town into a walled city, a petty kingdom became a republic and the republic developed into an empire - virtually nothing, other than the public sewer, now remains, even in fragmentary form. Augustus, the city's first great town-planner, obliterated the past when he set in motion the massive building programme which he initiated around 27 B. C., to which Nero gave new impetus after the calamitous fire of A. D. 64, and which wavered to an end only around A. D. 312 with the supersession of Maxentius and the removal a few years afterwards of the seat of Imperial government to Byzantium. By the end of the first century A. D. Romé was a city of a millión and a half inhabitants - rather more than its population at the beginning of the present century - and its palaces, basilicas, baths, and colonnades were the wonders of the civilized world. One mediaeval authority describes Imperial Romé as consisting of over 300 streets, and containing more than 46,000 apartment houses, 17,000 palaces, 13,000 fountains, 9,000 baths, 3,500 bronzé