Autumn in the Valley [antikvár]

I THE NEW CENTURY At the turn of the century we were living in Rome, my husband and I and our nurseryful of children, in our pleasant apartment in the Via Venti Settembre. Not permanently transplanted — that had never been our plan j we had gone there when my mother died some three years before, to be near my father, who was very old, but I who was born and brought up in the Eternal City had taken deep root again and was very happy there. Rome, with her twenty-six hundred years of recorded history, has always ushered in the coming century with civic pomp and religious ceremony. It is the opening of the new span of time that must engulf, before it ends, all human beings then alive. The heavenly powers must be propitiated with sacrifices and processions, the people amused with games and spectacles to keep them from brooding fear and restless discontent. The custom can be traced back to earliest pagan times, when the celebration was held on the birthday of Rome, the anniversary of her founding by the foster sons of the she-wolf, and went by the name of ludi saecularesy centenary games. It was revived and transcended by Augustus when the eighth Roman century found him seated on the imperial