Masco city

On a bluff looking west across to the Mackinac Bridge nearly half a mile from town. Grand Hotel is a living Victorian resort on a grand scale indeed, one of only a dozen remaining in the United States.

The Grand’s famous 800’ porch, promoted by W. Stewart Woodfill as the world’s longest porch, overlooks master Gardener Jennie Shanku giving a garden tour. She discusses landscaping styles and cultivating on a massive scale spring bulbs, roses, perennials, zinnias and dahlias of formal carpet bedding, wildflowers on the embankment, and the porch’s famous geraniums. Seven gardeners plant over 300 flats of bedding plants. On a rock island, everything is composted: clippings, weeds, branches, sticks, wood chips, coffee grounds, and limed horse manure all stay on the property.

Architectural historian Kathryn Eckert, seldom inclined to hyperbole, writes in Buildings of Michigan, "The Grand Hotel exceeds all superlatives ever written to describe its stately majesty and festive quality. . . . [Its] classical columned façade is one of the most enduring images of Mackinac Island." She goes on to describe how, in 1882, a wealthy lumberman from Kalamazoo, Senator Francis B. Stockbridge, "purchased the site of the hotel and formulated a scheme to finance its construction." He talked up the project to the two railroads and steamship line that served the island. The transportation consortium built and ran the hotel. (Northern Michigan railroads and ship lines became developers of most all Lake Michigan's resort colonies from Harbor Springs south to Grand Haven. They sought to develop tourism to replace business lost as the pine forests were giving out and lumbering faced a sudden decline.)

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Rome (Italian: Roma)

Rome (Italian: Roma) is the capital city of Italy and of the Lazio region, as well as the country's largest and most populous comune, with more than 2.7 million residents (December 2006, demo.istat.it). Its metropolitan area is Italy's second after Milan. It is located in the central-western portion of the Italian peninsula, where the river Aniene joins the Tiber. The Mayor of Rome is Walter Veltroni.

An enclave of Rome is the State of the Vatican City, the sovereign territory of the Holy See and smallest nation in the world.

Rome, Caput mundi ("capital of the world"), la Città Eterna ("the Eternal City"), Limen Apostolorum ("threshold of the Apostles"), la città dei sette colli ("the city of the seven hills") or simply l'Urbe ("the City"), is thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan. As one of the few major European cities that escaped World War II relatively unscathed, central Rome remains essentially Renaissance and Baroque in character. The Historic Centre of Rome is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site