CITTADELLA, die-a-della, Italy, city in province of Padua, compartimento of Venetia, 30 miles northwest of Venice. It contains beautiful churches and botanical gardens. Its modern industries are the manufacture of paper, cotton, woolen goods and linen. It was founded in 1220, as a protection against Treviso, and has still retained its walls, tower and moat. Pop. 11,332.
CITY (Latin civitas). The Greeks and Romans distinguished a city from a town, or mere assemblage of people living together under municipal laws, as an independent community or state possessing sovereign authority, and including any portion of the surrounding ter ritory the inhabitants of which possessed the rights of citizenship, but excluding conquered or dependent territories. Thus, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all both towns and cities in different senses. In Europe the word city came to have two meanings, the one civil, the other ecclesiastical. The civil meaning corresponded with the Roman sense, in which the great Ital ian republics and the German free cities during the period of their independence corresponded with it. The fluctuations in the fate of such cities must necessarily have caused the word to lose the sense of territorial independence, and this change would be promoted by the rise of rivals to them in other respects having no such claim. so that in modern times a city has come to signify merely a town holding from extent of population, favorable situation or other causes, a leading place in the community in which it is situated. The ecclesiastical sense of the term city is a town which is the see of a bishop. This seems to be the historical use of the term in England, and still possesses some authority there, but in general use it has been superseded by the wider one. In our historical retrospect we take the term in its least restricted sense.
The origin of cities belongs to the earliest period of history. According to Moses, Cain was the first founder of a city, and Nimrod built three, among which Babylon was the most important. The Jewish tradition is that
Shem erected the first city after the deluge. At the commencement of society the form of government was patriarchal. The ruler was the head of the family or clan. Relationship, the innate wish of men to live in society, and more perhaps than both these causes, the necessity of providing means of defense against more powerful clans, brought together separate fam ilies to one spot. The fertility of the East also afforded facilities for men to give up the rambling life of nomads and to form perma nent settlements. These settlers began to bar ter with those tribes who continued to wander with their herds from place to place. Thus cities sprung up. These were then surrounded with walls to prevent the inroads of the wan dering tribes. The bond of connection be tween their inhabitants thus became closer, and their organization more complete. As by de grees the chiefs of these family-states died away, the citizens began to elect the most able or most popular men for magistrates, without respect to birth or descent. Thus political in stitutions began to assume a systematic character.
The earliest form of government succeeding the patriarchal state was probably monarchical. In this the religious, paternal and political authority remained rudely mingled. When con quest extended the limits of these early king doms the authority of the king was weakened, his connection with the different parts of his dominions became imperfect and the prog ress of civilization was promoted almost solely by the growth of the cities. These gave rise to the division of labor, the refinements of social intercourse, the development of laws caused by the conflicting interests of many people living close together, the idea of equality of rights, the diminution of awe for a distant monarch, the growth of patriotism springing from the sense of advantages enjoyed and the exertion necessary to maintain them. These were the salutary consequences of the estab lishment of cities.