THE TREASURES OF THE TIBER.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 89, 22 January 1872, Page 3

THE TREASURES OF THE TIBER.

(From the Times.') “ Or, if the Tiber could speak !” is an exclamation which must have been wrung from the lips of many a stranger as he gazed down into the turbid stream from the parapet of the Saint Angelo or of the Sisto Bridge. The Italians, it appears,are at last determined that the Tiber shall tell its own talc. They have made up their minds to search the river from end to end, from Ripetta to Ilipa Grande, dredging it from the slimy surface of its present bed to the rocky bottom on which the liver trickled before human history began. There is no doubt that iu every branch of material activity the Italians have in these last few years developed a public and private spirit which will soon biing them to the level of the most stirring nations. The opening of the Mont Cenis tunnel, by completing the new route to the East, will bestow on their countiy the main bonefits of the land and water thoroughfares which other nations have traced across Egypt, and lay opon to their maritime and commercial enterprise those remote regions with which the modern world was first made familiar by their forefathers, but from which they themselves have been estranged during many centuries of a decline which resembled lingering death. This is piospective life in Italy ; but in the instincts of the people of that country there must be always something retrospective. 'Whatever prosperity the present and future may have in store for them, the past will always cling to them. The new palace on the hill-side can never be so handsome or so commodious as to make them less proud of their grim ancestral ca. de, the battered towers of which still cumber the mountain top. To console the Romans for the hard fate which doomed them to the eternal servitude under Papal sway, the Emperor Napoleon endeavoured to persuade them that their true mission should be le citllc <J<‘s mines. The Italians now masters of themselves and masters of Rome , have taken the Imperial hint. They have cast in their lot with their Roman brethren. A company has been formed at Rome for the excavation of the bed of the Tiber. There is nothing more catching than the enthusiasm, of the Romans for their ancient river. They believe they have got a Pompeii —nay, ten times a Pompeii—under these waters, and they will set about fishing it up. Pompeii had a warning of its impending fate, and all the inhabitants could remove was withdrawn from Pie curiosity of after generations. But the Tiber received all that Rome could not keep from it, and whatever went into it was never afterwards disturbed. The Romans look on their stream as the safe receptacle of all lost things. Search, they sav, and you will find. Probe the shattered piers of the Sublician Bridge, they tell you, and you must reach the helmets and cuirasses of those Etruscan warriors whose bodies have been rotting there ever since the vic'o'ious townsmen of lloratius Cooles hurled them in, 2,367 years ago. Dig in front of Castle Saint Angelo, and you may find some of the balls fired from the falconet of Benvenuto Cellini, with which he boasts of having killed the Constable of Bourbon and wounded the Prince of Orange during the famous siege and sack of the city in 1527. Sifts the sands along the Lungara, and you may be rewarded with the signet ring, or some other personal ornament, still clinging to the ilcshlcss bones of the Duke of Caudia, son of Pope Alexander VI., whom, in 1407, his younger brother, Ciesar Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, caused lo be murdered and thrown into the river. Look, indeed, where you like, wherever the stream glides along too skirts of the Seven Hills, you have buried undwr its sands the evidence of the noble exploits and of the staitling crimes of that people who filled the world with their name in a higher strain and for a longer period than any other human race. The Tiber was the sink of Rome, which was the woild’s sink. Where else than into its waters could be Hung the crucifixes and the conscciated vessels which might compromise the secret convert to Christianity in the day of persecution; or where had the Cln'stian himself in the hour of triumph a better Lethe at hand into which he might plunge the idols and all the relics of abhorred heathenism, and doom them to perpetual oblivion ? Where else, says the Romans, should we look for the cargoes of galleys and barges, so many of which have been swamped at llipa Grande, in the turmoil of political strife or amid the havoc of natural convulsions ; some of them, in olden times, laden with the spoils of Tyre and Carthage, the marbles of Greece, the gums of India; some in later epochs, with the trophies of Lepanto, the shrines and reliquaries of Palestine? Where else should the heads of Imperial statues, or those of warriors, statesmen, and Court minions, have rolled as they were knocked down one after another from the shoulders on which they were grafted the features of the Dii Mbwrcs destined to have their own short spell of popular worship? Whatever had life in Rome would almost seem to have lost it in the Tiber. While everything around decayed and perished, and Hie world passed away, leaving the site of Rome a dreary solitude, the ancient stream flowed on, sweeping away the debris of Rome’s wreck, awaiting the day in which it should be called to give up its memories.