POPULATION OF ROME

Evening Star, Issue 20346, 30 November 1929, Page 2

POPULATION OF ROME

Bom© has now more than 900,000 inhabitants. The legislation against “ urbanesimo,” or the tendency to drift towards cities, is gradually freeing the capital from vagabonds, beggars, and the country folk who come to seek for employment for which they are obviously unsuited. These are promptly sent “hack to the land.” In the near future Italy will have three cities— Milan, Borne, and Naples—each witli a million inhabitants. The present calculation is, needless to say, exclusive of the population of the Vatican City. Only once before in its long history has Borne had so many inhabitants, and that was nearly two thousand years ago under “the good Augustus,” when the population was well over a million. It sank rapidly as time went on, and in th© fourteenth century, when the Papal Court was at Avignon, it had dwindled to 17,000. In 1527, at the time of the Sack of Borne, it was still below 20,000. The papulation of Romo increased very slowly during the nineteenth century under the Popes, and very rapidly after Rome had become the capital of Italy. In 1870 it was 226,000, in ISOI it had risen to 462,000, in 1924 it was 736,000, and within the last wren years there has been an increase of some 211,000 inhabitants, in spite of the housing crisis.