ROME’S POPULATION

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 August 1931, Page 8

ROME’S POPULATION

AGAIN A MILLION. According to the latest census, Romo now has a population ot 999,<6J, and as since the city’s last birthday, April 21, when the census was taken, the 231 short of 1,000,090 have undoubtedly been made up by the excess of births over deaths (which, curiously enough, is much greater in the capital than in the other cities of Italy), and by the still considerable influx from the country, the Urbs is once more the city of 1,000,000 souls that it was in the time of the Emperors, says the “Manchester Guardian.” After that long-distant date the invasions of the barbarians and a thousand years of war and civil strife brought down the population so gieatly that, at the return of the Popes from Avignon in 1377, the city counted only some 15,000 inhabitants, mostly housed in ruins. The jubilee year 1100 found the city visited by schism, “the most enduring and devastating which Rome had ever seen,” with plague, invasions, and floods —what a spectacle for the Jubilee pilgrims! But since September, 1420, when the divisions in the Church were ended by the entry of Pope Mai tin into a sorely tried city, its recovery has been unbroken save for short periods and such episodes as the sack of Rome by the Imperial Spanish army in 1527. By that date Rome already counted 30,000 to 40.000 inhabitants; the number had grown to about 110,000 in 1000, and 142,000 a century later. In the Napoleonic period the population fell to 120.000; thereafter it grew comparatively rapidly. By 1870 it was nearly a quarter of a million, and subsequent censuses gave 300.000 in 18S1, 163,000 in 1901, 542,000 in JL9II, and 090,000 in 1921. Thus in the last decade alone the population of the capital has grown by over 300.000. There is a continual large influx from all faits of the country in consequence cf the concentration of the bureaucracy in Rome; the bulk of the incomers are from the Abruzzi, the south, and the islands. Scarcely 40 per cent, of the present inhabitants tan have been baptised in the Tiber. At the present rate of increase the recotfd million will be passed in 25 years’ time, and the new. plan for Greater Rome is based on that figure. Figures for the other principal cities of Italy are not yet available, tut it is probable that industrial Milan and populous Naples beat the capital hy a few'thousands, so that Rome is only the third city in point of population. ,