Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. Freeman Edward Augustus

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СКАЧАТЬ Trieste has been Austrian in one sense only. Never forming a part of the Austria of Lombardy, it has had a far more abiding connexion with the Austria of Germany. The lordship which Trieste acknowledged was of course at first only an overlordship, and the Council and Commons of the city still continued to act as a separate commonwealth. But an union of this kind is one of those fatal partnerships between the stronger and the weaker which can lead only to bondage. Trieste has ever since remained Austrian in allegiance, save during the chaos of the days of the elder Buonaparte. Those days are commemorated by an inscription on the duomo, which tells of the expulsion of the French from the castle by an allied force, whose name of "Austro-Angli" might almost suggest some unrecorded tribe in our own island.

      It is certainly hard to conceive a building more uninviting without than the cathedral church of Saint Justus. But Sokratês was not to be judged by his outside, neither is the duomo of Trieste. A broad and almost shapeless west front is flanked by a low, heavy tower, not standing detached as a campanile, as it should stand in Italy, not worked into the church as it would be worked in England or Germany, but standing forward in a kind of Scotch fashion, like Dunkeld. The only architectural feature seems to be a large wheel window, which it would be unfair to compare to that of Saint Zeno. But the next moment will show, built in at the angle of the church and the tower, a noble fluted column with its half-defaced Corinthian capital, which is enough to show what has been. We are carried back to Rome, to Saint Mary in Cosmedin and Saint Nicolas in Carcere, as we trace out in the lower stage of the tower the remains of the temple of Jupiter which has given way to the church of Justus. Imbedded in its walls are pilasters, columns, and their basement, showing that Jupiter of Tergeste must have lifted his pillared portico above the sea as proudly as Aphroditê of the Doric Ankón. Fragments of entablatures, trophies, sepulchral monuments, are built up in the wall. The western doorway of the church is made out of a huge tomb of the Barbii – a gens which we do not elsewhere remember – deliberately cut in two, and set up the wrong way. The building or rebuilding of the tower in 1337 is commemorated by an inscription in letters of that date – "Gothic" letters, as some call them – out of a mutilated part of which the earlier Tergestine antiquaries spelled out that the tower was rebuilt, in 556, after a destruction by the Goths. As the letters ..LVM.. were enough to create the new saint Philumena, the letters ..OT… could easily be filled up into "a Gothis eversa" – quite evidence enough to lead a zealous Italian to lay the destroying deeds of his own forefathers on the Gothic preservers of the works of the elder day.

      As soon as we pass the doorway with the heads of the Barbii on either side, we forget the wrongs alike of Jupiter and of the Goths. The wonderful interior of the double basilica opens upon us. The first feeling is simply puzzledom. A nave of vast width seems to be flanked by two ranges of columns on either side, columns varying even more than is usual in their height and in the width of the arches which they support. When we look within the two lateral ranges, we are not surprised to find each ending in an apse with a noble mosaic; we are surprised to find the southern range interrupted by a cupola. This last phænomenon will help us to the explanation of the whole mystery. The church is in fact two churches thrown into one. When they were distinct, they must have stood even nearer than the old and new minsters at Winchester; indeed a plan in a local work shows, with every probability, their walls as actually touching in one point. The northern church was a basilica of the ordinary type, made up of columns – some of them of very fine marble – put together, as usual, without much regard to uniformity. All bear Corinthian capitals of different varieties, and all carry the Ravenna stilt in a rude form without the cross. The wall rose high above the arcade, and was pierced with a range of narrow clerestory windows, but with nothing else to relieve its blankness. This church the Tergestine antiquaries attribute, but, as far as we can see, without any direct evidence, to the reign of Theodosius. The southern church is, in its original parts, the same in style as the northern, but it is much smaller and, in its plan at least, thoroughly Byzantine. It was a small cross church, with a central cupola, and its north transept seems to have touched the south aisle of its northern neighbour. It is perhaps on the strength of the plan that the church is assigned to the reign of Justinian. But there is nothing Byzantine in the details; where the original capitals remain, they are of the same somewhat rude Corinthian character as those in the northern church; they have the same stilt, and under the cupola there is even a bit or two of entablature built up again. But the building went through much greater changes than the northern church did in the work of throwing the two into one whole. The date of this change seems to be fixed by a consecration recorded in the local annals in 1262. The south aisle of the northern church, the north aisle and north transept of the southern one, were pulled down, and the space which they had covered was roofed in to form the nave of the united building, while the two earlier basilicas sank into the position of its aisles. In the northern church this involved no change beyond the disappearance of the south aisle and the blocking of its clerestory; the smaller church to the south had to suffer far more. It had to be raised and lengthened; a quadrangular pier on the south side marks the original length, and the increase of height of course destroys the proper effect of the cupola. Then, as the cupola of course rested on columns with wider arches, its northern arch was filled up with two smaller arches and an inserted column, so as to make something like a continuous range. Still, late in the thirteenth century, they again used up the old marble columns; but they now used a flat capital, by which the additions of this time may be distinguished from the genuine basilican work.

      Probably no church anywhere has undergone a more singular change than this. It is puzzling indeed at first sight; but, when the key is once caught, the signs of each alteration are so easily seen. The other ancient relic at Trieste is the small triumphal arch. On one side it keeps its Corinthian pilasters; on the other they are imbedded in a house. The arch is in a certain sense double; but the two are close together and touch in the keystone. The Roman date of this arch cannot be doubted; but legends connect it both with Charles the Great and with Richard of Poitou and of England, a prince about whom Tergestine fancy has been very busy. The popular name of the arch is Arco Riccardo.

      Such, beside some fragments in the museum, are all the remains that the antiquary will find in Trieste; not much in point of number, but, in the case of the duomo at least, of surpassing interest in their own way. But the true merit of Trieste is not in anything that it has in itself, its church, its arch, its noble site. Placed there at the head of the gulf, on the borders of two great portions of the Empire, it leads to the land which produced that line of famous Illyrian Emperors who for a while checked the advance of our own race in the world's history, and it leads specially to the chosen home of the greatest among them. The chief glory of Trieste, after all, is that it is the way to Spalato.

      TRIESTE TO SPALATO

      TRIESTE TO SPALATO

1875

      Given such weather as suits fair-weather sailors, there can hardly be any enjoyment more thoroughly unmixed than a sail along the coast of Dalmatia. First of all, there is a freshness about everything. Here is a portion of land which is thoroughly unhackneyed; the coasts, the islands, the channels, of Dalmatia are as yet uninvaded by the British tourist. No Cook's ticket can be taken for Spalato; no hotel coupon would be of the slightest use at Sebenico. The land is whatever its long and strange history, old and new, has made it. It has gone through many changes and it has put on many shapes, but it has escaped the fate of being changed into a "playground of Europe."

      The narrow strip of land on the eastern side of the Hadriatic on which the name of Dalmatia has settled down has a history which is strikingly analogous to its scenery. A coast for the most part barren and rocky, but with its barrenness and rockiness diversified by a series of noble havens, is fenced off by a range of mountains from a boundless inland region. Each of these havens, with the cities which from early days have sprung up on each, has always been an isolated centre of civilization in a backward land. As a rule, broken only during a few centuries of the universal sway of Rome, the coast and the inland country have been the possession, by no means always of different nations, but most commonly of different governments. On the coast the rule of the Venetian has been succeeded by the rule of the Austrian, while in the inland region the rule of native Slavonic princes СКАЧАТЬ