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Updated: July 22, 2025
The Region of the Hills takes in by far the largest area of the fourteen districts, but also that portion which in later times has been the least thickly populated, the wildest districts of mediæval and recent Rome, great open spaces now partially covered by new though hardly inhabited buildings, but which were very lately either fallow land or ploughed fields, or cultivated vineyards, out of which huge masses of ruins rose here and there in brown outline against the distant mountains, in the midst of which towered the enormous basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and Saint John Lateran, the half-utilized, half-consecrated remains of the Baths of Diocletian, the Baths of Titus, and over against the latter, just beyond the southwestern boundary, the gloomy Colosseum, and on the west the tall square tower of the Capitol with its deep-toned bell, the 'Patarina, which at last was sounded only when the Pope was dead, and when Carnival was over on Shrove Tuesday night.
Carnival is dead! But he was not really dead till midnight, when the last play of the season had been acted in the playhouses, the last dance danced, the last feast eaten amid song and laughter, and the solemn Patarina of the Capitol tolled out the midnight warning like a funeral knell. That was the end. The riderless race was at least four hundred years old when it was given up.
The first three of those men seized the Capitol at once, the fourth intended to do so. It was always the immediate object of every revolt, and the power to ring the great Patarina, the ancient bell stolen by the Romans from Viterbo, had for centuries a directing influence in Roman brawls.
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