elo has nothing to do with the castle or the bridge, but takes its
name from the little church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and
includes the old Ghetto with some neighbouring streets. The rest explain
themselves well enough to anyone who has even a very slight acquaintance
with the city.

At first sight these more or less arbitrary divisions may seem of little
importance. It was, of course, necessary, even in early times, to divide
the population and classify it for political and municipal purposes.
There is no modern city in the world that is not thus managed by wards
and districts, and the consideration of such management and of its means
might appear to be a very flat and unprofitable study, tiresome alike
to the reader and to the writer. And so it would be, if it were not true
that the Fourteen Regions of Rome were fourteen elements of romance,
each playing its part in due season, while all were frequently the stage
at once, under the collective name of the people, in their ever-latent
opposition and in their occasional violent outbreaks against the nobles
and the popes, who alternately oppressed and spoiled them for private
and public ends. In other words, the Regions with their elected captains
under one chief captain were the survival of the Roman People, for ever
at odds with the Roman Senate. In times when there was no government, in
any reasonable sense of the word, the people tried to govern themselves,
or at least to protect themselves as best they could by a rough system
which was all that remained of the elaborate municipality of the Empire.
Without the Regions the struggles of the Barons would probably have
destroyed Rome altogether; nine out of the twenty-four Popes who reigned
in the tenth century would not have been murdered and otherwise done to
death; Peter the Prefect could not have dragged Pope John the Thirteenth
a prisoner through the streets; Stefaneschi could never have terrorized
the Barons, and half destroyed their castles in a week; Rienzi could not
have made himself dictator; Ludovico Migliorati could not have murdered
the eleven captains of Regions in his house and thrown their bodies to
the people from the windows, for which Giovanni Colonna drove out the
Pope and the cardinals, and sacked the Vatican; in a word, the
strangest, wildest, bloodiest scenes of mediaeval Rome could not have
found a place in history. It is no wonder that to men born and bred in
the city the Regions seem ev