Bucharest population will increase constantly from now on; totaling 177 thousand inhabitants in 1877, it will have 381 inhabitants in 1916, i.e. more than twice as much in less than fifty years. Above all, they were spared one important trouble thanks to the first watershed on Dimbovita, the overflowing of which will no longer be a danger. Instead, though, ever new dangers came to threaten the capital. Whatever Bucharest lacks, it is not problems.

At any rate, besides the whole lot of modernizing changes in the way streets looked and people behaved,  the 20^th century was being welcomed by a Bucharest that proved contagiously optimistic. Naturally, as is always the case, a retrospective understanding of that state of mind is the privilege of the inheritors - i.e. ours, today's people - rather than of the people who lived back then. There are, certainly, several histories of Bucharest apt to reflect the urban dynamism of the first decades of the century. I believe that one of the most faithful reflections can be found in the literature of the time - since, contrary to what one might think, Bucharest easily became a city that proved quite deft in playing the role of a literary muse. The privileged century for Bucharest is born with Ion Luca Caragiale's pen and grows vigorously in such prose as was written by Mateiu Caragiale, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, Cezar Petrescu, George Calinescu and so many others. Yet few managed to capture the gist of it as well as the first in this series - the playwright who was born a little to the north of the city and became a Bucharest man by adoption and who was to die, against his heart's desire perhaps, in the German capital. Caragiale's streets are trod by cabmen, scandalmongers and costermongers, the alehouses of his city host local clerks and merchants, just as the salons welcome officers and ladies of good families. Today it seems hard to believe that Caragiale's city was the same place where, at precisely the same time, a building like that of the Athenée was being raised, to the glory of the city. The building took twelve years to be finished (1886-1897) and just about as much to be renovated, a century later. Had the Athenée been the only thing in Bucharest, the city around should have been invented for its sake; for the various successive ends this splendid construction, designed by French architect Paul Albert Galleron, was destined for are more significant to the city than to the building itself. Raised on the ground initially meant for a man?ge of the "Romanian Equestrian Society", then functioning as picture gallery, audition hall, exhibition hall, library and cinema house, the Athenée was also, for a short while, at the beginning of the '20s, the meeting place for the House of Deputies - as a sort of acknowledgement of the supremacy politics held in the city life of the first decades of the century.

It was relatively late that Romanians discovered politics - in the modern and democratic sense of the term; yet, when they did, they were not long in making a virtue out of it. People in Bucharest have lived politics with maximum intensity; and so has their city, along with them. The city landscape is replete not only with historical monuments but also with politically relevant dwellings - such as the shaded house on Enei street that saw the birth of the Liberal Party, in 1875, or the room on Dealul Spirii, a place fit for the workers' balls, which witnessed the birth of the Communist Party, in May 1921.