which lies on the right bank of the Tiber is
divided into two Regions; namely, Trastevere and Borgo. The first of
these is included between the river and the walls of Urban the Eighth
from Porta Portese and the new bridge opposite the Aventine to the
bastions and the gate of San Spirito; and Trastevere was the last of the
thirteen Regions until the end of the sixteenth century, when the
so-called Leonine City was made the fourteenth and granted a captain and
a standard of its own.

The men of Trastevere boast that they are of better blood than the other
Romans, and they may be right. In many parts of Italy just such small
ancient tribes have kept alive, never intermarrying with their
neighbours nor losing their original speech. There are villages in the
south where Greek is spoken, and others where Albanian is the language.
There is one in Calabria where the people speak nothing but Piedmontese,
which is as different from the Southern dialects as German is from
French. Italy has always been a land of individualities rather than of
amalgamations, and a country of great men, rather than a great country.

It is true that the Trasteverines have preserved their individuality,
cut off as they have been by the river from the modernizing influences
which spread like a fever through the length and breadth of Rome. Their
quarter is full of crooked little streets and irregularly shaped open
places, the houses are not high, the windows are small and old
fashioned, and the entrances dark and low. There are but few palaces and
not many public buildings. Yet Trastevere is not a dirty quarter; on the
contrary, to eyes that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity
in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod
publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The
contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region,
has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome
is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was
trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In
the architecture of the so-called new quarters the very gifts of the
Italians turned against them; for they are born engineers and
mathematicians, and by a really marvellous refinement of calculation
they have worked miracles in the construction of big buildings out of
altogether insufficient material, while the Italian workman's
traditional skill in mo