Edward A. Freeman

He who goes steadily from Rome to Brindisi, seeing what comes in his way by the easiest manner of going, will not come very much oftener on the track of Horace and his friends than he to whom Brindisi is the haven for Egypt or India, and who rushes thither as fast as he can along the Italian side of the Hadriatic. The three routes will of necessity coincide at Bari. To Bari the traveller who starts from Rome must add Benevento, and he may, without much trouble, add Aricia. But the sites that lie around the Alban mount, the Alban lake, and its lesser fellow—the relics in short of so many volcanoes, wet and dry, the possible place of Alba, the more certain relics of its child Albano, the path by which the chariot of Marcellus climbed to the temple of which the last Stewart swept away what time had left—all these seem naturally to form a group and a subject by themselves. So may the objects for which Velletri supplies the best centre,—the hill, the walls, the temples of Cori, "Norba's ancient wall," with neither an inhabitant nor an habitation within it—Ninfa's more modern wall, equally without an inhabitant, but with ruined habitations, ruined churches, in abundance—all these may be connected with an iter ad Brundisium, but they hardly form an actual part of it. Let our traveller design to start in modern fashion by railway—we were going to say in prosaic modern fashion, only no way of going could well be more prosaic than that followed by Horace; let him study his time-tables, and he will find that he can, if so minded, visit Segni and go back to Rome in a single day; he can hardly do so by Anagni. Not that we should counsel such a way of dealing with the walks, the gates, the temple-foundations, that crown the height of Signia. It would most likely be found possible to sleep at Segni. Gsell-fels, prince of guidebook-makers, recommends the locanda there as "reinlich und eidlich," and the second adjective does not mean that the traveller will be in any danger of being sworn at. Still some may be more inclined to go to Segni and back again from Velletri, where there is no doubt as to living quite happily at the sign of the Cock. Anagni, Anagnia of the Hernicans, is the beginning of something new. It is the first point distinctly beyond the neighbourhood of Rome. It is not unlikely then that such a traveller as we have supposed may make Anagni his first halting-place. And at Anagni he may certainly rest for the night, though his quarters may be a comedown not only from Rome but from Velletri. But if, by any chance, he takes the earlier points in some other course; above all, if he visits Segni by any course, he will be all the more open to visit Anagni. The city of Boniface VIII., almost beckons to him to cross the valley and the stream. For it is as the city of Boniface VIII., the place where he so strangely met his end, the prisoner—not the last Pope who was fated so to be—of a French ruler, that Anagni will most likely present itself to the mind. In mediÆval history Anagni is a thoroughly Papal city, and to this day it keeps a Papal impress on its buildings, a Papal impress meaning something different at Anagni from what it means at Rome. Anagni did not remain a favourite Papal dwelling-place; it therefore did not suffer at the hands of Renaissance Popes as Rome lived to suffer. But, even in the first glimpse of the hill-city, we may well go back to much earlier times. We may remember that first Pyrrhos, then Hannibal, halted thither, each on his vain march towards the Rome which neither was to conquer. And when we have reached Hannibal and Pyrrhos, we may go back to earlier ages. There is a point of view in which Anagnia is, before all things, the head of the confederation of the Hernicans. There is no people of ancient Italy of whom it is harder to get any distinct idea than this stout hill folk. In treading Old-Latin or Volscian ground we can, even without book, call up a few personal names, a few personal figures, of particular Volscians or Old-Latins; we cannot call up the name of a single Hernican, historical or legendary. All that we know of them is their geographical position, and the one great event in their political history; and those tell us a great deal. They must have been a people of no small account whom Spurius Cassius thought worthy to fill the third place in the great Triple League along with Rome and Latium. And this, though, as having neither one great city like Rome, nor a crowd of cities like Latium, they hardly seem to form a power on the level with their two comrades. But their geographical position gave them a special importance. Thrust in as they were between Æquians and Volscians, no alliance could be more precious than theirs to Rome and Latium. They were the most exposed member of the League, the outpost of Latium, as Latium itself was the outpost of Rome. Of all the three, the brunt of the struggle must have fallen most fiercely upon them; the hills of Anagni must have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to another, we better understand the political relations of the endless little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies. They must be always doing something to one another in the way either of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.

We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba, the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it, than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space, allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia, and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of earthly men," or as—

Reared by the hands of giants

For godlike kings of old.

The walls of Anagni are wonderful only as the great works of Rome are wonderful. They are built by men to whom it was more natural to put together rectangular stones with some kind of regularity than it was to pile together huge polygons anyhow. They were built by men who thoroughly understood the principle of the arch, and knew how to use it with all boldness. They remain, in various degrees of preservation, round the greater part of the circuit of the town. In some parts they are broken down altogether; in some they are supplanted, in others merely patched, by walls of later date; in short, they have gone through all the casualties which a wall is likely to go through in the course of two millenniums or so; but the wall of modern Anagni, as a whole, is still the old wall of Anagnia. The construction differs a good deal in different parts as to the size of the stones and as to their nature, and as to the degree of rudeness or finish in the work. In some parts the wall stands single; in others it is strengthened by further defences, buttresses rather than towers—defences, by-the-way, which must be carefully distinguished from the additions of later times. But one general character reigns throughout. The stones, greater and smaller, smoother and rougher, are always rectangular, and always laid with some measure of regularity. In some cases ranges of larger and smaller stones alternate; in one part of the wall stones of two natures and colours almost alternate. The chief material is a light-coloured stone exactly like the puff-stone of Gloucestershire, the material of Berkeley Castle and of not a few other buildings in that neighbourhood. This is eked out here and there by the dark volcanic peperino, which, towards the south-eastern part of the wall, is used much more freely. The general effect, wherever the wall is at all perfect, is stately and striking in the extreme, both in form and colour.

Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls, and took a certain pleasure in speaking of them as Hernican walls? We come back to our library; we take down the Dictionary of Geography; we turn to the article "Anagnia," and we find that by far the best contributor to the series, Mr. E. H. Bunbury, has another tale to tell. Our feelings are damped when he says, "The only remains extant there are of Roman date and of little interest." As to the "little interest," we venture to have our own opinion in any case; we should hold that so great an extent of ancient wall still bounding an inhabited town was an object of high interest, even if it could be shown to belong to the latest days which could come under the definition of "Roman date." But what is Roman date? Mr. Bunbury sends us to the correspondence of the Emperor Marcus with Cornelius Fronto. We hope he does not ask us to believe that the walls are later than the days of the philosophic Emperor. For, if he will allow them to be as old as that, we can call the Emperor himself to witness that they must be a good deal older. For Marcus himself read an inscription over one of the gates, "Flamen sume samentum." He did not know what "samentum" meant, and we cannot find the word in our Latin dictionary. But a native explained to him its meaning in the Hernican language; it meant the skin of the victim which the flamen put on his head when he entered the town. We do not want to be unreasonable in our dates, if only we can let in our Hernicans at some corner. When we looked at the walls, we saw at once that they had no fellowship with the primÆval works at Cori and at Segni; they did seem to us to have fellowship with the works of the Tarquins at Rome. We shall be quite happy if Mr. Bunbury will allow us to put the walls as early as the year B.C. 307. The next year Anagnia sank from a Hernican city, a free ally of Rome, into a town whose people were burthened with Roman citizenship without the Roman franchise. If we may carry back walls over whose gates Hernican inscriptions could be read between four and five hundred years later, to a date as nearly as that, we shall have done all that we could wish. They will be walls of the days of Hernican independence, walls on which Hannibal and Pyrrhos have looked.

One thing is plain, that the builders of the walls of Anagnia, like the builders of the cloaca at Rome, but most unlike the elder builders of Cora and Signia, knew as well as any men how to turn arches. On the highest point of the town, by the modern gate which looks out towards Ferentino, within the circuit of the ancient arx, we may still see, blocked, partly hidden by the modern gate, disguised by the arrangements of the mediÆval castle, the double gate of the ancient wall. It is perfectly plain, but with arches thoroughly well turned, with a double range of voussoirs. A smaller arch of the same workmanship beside them looks almost as if it had been blocked from the beginning. The arx itself, it should be remembered, had its separate wall within that of the city, a noble fragment of which, of exactly the same character as the town wall, is still to be seen in a narrow street a little lower down.

When we actually reach Anagni, there can be no doubt that the character in which it chiefly strikes us is that of the city of the Hernican walls, if Hernican walls we may call them. But historically Anagni is so far more famous as the city of mediÆval Popes that it is fitting that it should have something to show in that character also. The town is rich in mediÆval fragments. The main street, in its winding courses, displays long ranges of blocked arcades, round and pointed, which, when open, must have given it, narrow and often dim as it is, no small measure of stateliness. Not a few buildings stand out with arches of vast height and boldness, suggesting, as it is fit that one papal city should suggest to another, the mighty works of Rome's absent Bishops at Avignon. Not remarkable for height, but most remarkable for their span, are the exceedingly bold arches which support the communal palace, once, it is said, the dwelling of the Popes, a building which, on its northern side, shows a range of windows which savour of France or England rather than of Italy. The houses with their staircases often present highly picturesque shapes, which in one house in the main street, where the outside staircase is sheltered by two arches resting on a graceful column, grow into a form of genuine beauty. And an elegant form of double window, two round arches divided by a slender shaft, is characteristic of the architecture of Anagni. It is needless to add that at Anagni, as everywhere else in Italy, most of these relics of the skill of former times have been mercilessly disfigured and mutilated.

In the ecclesiastical line the other churches supply a few good fragments of the same character as those in the domestic building; but the cathedral church within the arx is the only one which has the least claim to be looked on as a striking whole. It stands boldly on the edge of the hill with its east end—that is, what would be east according to northern rules, for it is in truth nearly west—rising up nobly with its three apses in good Romanesque style, while a stately bell-tower of the more massive sort, though sadly marred on two sides, stands near the east end which should be west. The crypt is in a somewhat ruder form of the same style. The whole outside of the church is worth study; the inside is of an early and massive type of the Italian Gothic, always, unless in the case of some unusual merit, less satisfactory than Italian Romanesque. The sacristy contains the vestments of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII., and a good many other curious objects. The church is just now suffering restoration; let us hope that nothing very dreadful will happen to it. There, at least, seems no disposition to pull down the apse, after the pattern of the church which Popes and Emperors alike have decreed to be the mother-church of Rome and of the world.

II. Ferentino.

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Italy contains two places bearing the name of Ferentinum or Ferentino, as England contains two places—perhaps more—bearing the several names of Leeds, Stafford, Birmingham, Hereford, Cambridge, Washington, Rochester, and others more obvious. And as the Northumbrian Rochester is also very conveniently written Rutchester, so the Etruscan Ferentinum is also conveniently written Ferentia. On an iter ad Brundisium we cannot possibly have anything to do with Etruscan Ferentia; our business lies with that Ferentinum which, according to the Itineraries, was to be found on the Via Latina between Anagnia and Frusino, and which is to be found there still. But if the name of the southern Ferentinum is more certain than that of its fellow, its ancient nationality is less certain. Its historical position is Hernican; it lies between Hernican Anagnia and Hernican Frusino; yet it is also spoken of as Volscian, as it may well have become in the endless warfare of those ever-shifting nations. Yet it is in other company that we should be best pleased to find it. Our earliest remembrance of the name places "Ferentinum of the rock" among the Thirty Cities, and gives it no mean place among them. We go to the spot with the lines ringing in our ears which place its warriors under the rule of proud Tarquin himself, on the spot where—

... in the centre thickest

Were ranged the shields of foes,

And from the centre loudest

The cry of battle rose.

Yet, even without book, we may have been a little surprised both to find a Thirty-city so far in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican hills, and to find its warriors marshalled along with such distant comrades as Tibur and Pedum and "Gabii of the pool." And, when we come back to our books, a horrible thought presses itself upon us more and more, a thought that Ferentinum may have no right to any place in that list at all. The name seems to be Lord Macaulay's guess—among a hundred other guesses—at the manifestly corrupt name which comes next before Gabii in Dionysios' list of the Latin cities. Some read as near to our mark as Fortinei; so we may hope for the best; but remembering where Ferentinum stands, very far from Gabii, we confess that our hopes are small.

In obedience to the Itinerary, it is from Anagni that we make our way to Ferentino. And as we go from Anagni to Ferentino, we better take in the special position of Anagni on the top of its isolated hill. Till we have gone some little distance, we are hardly conscious that Anagni is there at all; gradually the bell-tower rises into view, and the rest of the city follows. A few miles only lead us from the hill of Anagni to the hill of Ferentino. At the first glance it may be that the spot which we have reached does not specially strike as "Ferentinum of the rock." It does not seem to stand on such steep cliffs as many other hill-fortresses, Norba pre-eminently among them. But, when we begin to follow the line of the walls, we find out that, whether Lord Macaulay is right or wrong in speaking of Ferentinum at all, he has at least chosen his epithet wisely. Ferentinum is Ferentinum of the rock. Large parts of the wall stand directly on vast masses of rock, and sometimes rock and wall almost lose themselves in one another. And the walls of Ferentino certainly yield in interest to none of our series. They are still standing through the greater part of their ancient circuit, and for the most part they are of two manifest dates, differing in material and construction. There is an original lower part of the wall, built of huge blocks of lias which we may describe as rude, but less rude than the rudest work at Cori. The height to which this earliest construction of all reaches differs in different parts, but it has in most parts been patched and raised, not only by later repairs of all manner of dates, but long before then by a construction of very respectable antiquity, which would seem venerable if it were not for the elder and more massive stones beneath it. The later work has a general likeness to the walls of Anagnia both in construction and material, and it is distinguished from the more primitive work by the same mark. The pilers of the elder stones had no notion of the arch; the builders of the later wall were perfectly familiar with it. The only complete opening of the earlier work is a small postern with merely inclined sides; but in one of the ancient gates, not far from the modern gate by which the visitor is most likely to enter, stones of the earlier date support an arch of the second date. This ancient entrance is, as usual, warily placed; the giants, or whoever they were, from the days of Tiryns onwards, knew perfectly well how to take a military advantage of any enemy who might attack their strongholds. Another gate, now known as Porta Maggiore, is a much more elaborate work, with its inner and outer arch still remaining. Here the gate is placed with great skill, advanced in front at a point where the wall turns at an angle. The wall may be followed, and followed to great advantage, through the more part of its circuit. One hardly knows whether to count it gain or loss that the path becomes most difficult just at the point where, through large later repairs, the wall becomes least interesting. When we have to scramble—all at least save Alpine climbers—with constant thoughts for the safety of our legs and feet, we are less able to take in the differences in the various forms of construction, or to consider the dates to which we may be inclined to refer each. In the more instructive parts of the walls of Ferentino no such necessity is laid upon us; they may be studied with perfect ease, and the outlook from the various points of their circuit may be enjoyed at the same time. And at one point, not far from the Porta Maggiore, it will be well to go down the hill a little way to study the long inscription cut in the rock in honour of a local worthy and magistrate, Aulus Quinctilius by name, who seems to have played much the same part at Ferentinum in pagan days which Sir William Harpur played ages later at Bedford. He founded everything that, according to the notions of his day, could be founded. Among other things he ordained that thirty bushels of nuts should be yearly given to be scrambled for by the boys of Ferentinum, without distinction of bond or free. Now is the will of this pious founder carried out? Are there any Italian Charity Commissioners to look into these matters, and to see that the boys get their nuts? Or, if the scrambling for nuts be deemed a nuisance—yet many well-remembered scraps of Latin plead on its behalf—will they devise a scheme for the better employment of the funds? Or has the benefaction of the benevolent Quinctilius, like some benefactions nearer home, been lost altogether? Two or three years ago the Times was filled with letters complaining how a charitable foundation in Somerset had vanished altogether, and how the founder's monument, once standing in the church, had been buried under a neighbouring barn. In one point at least the benevolent Aulus of Ferentinum has been more lucky. When Ferentinum had quatuorviri, they did not bury people in their temples, still less did they set up monuments in their temples to people who were not buried in them. So the monument which commemorates the bounty of Aulus Quinctilius stands in the open air clear enough to be seen, well fenced in withal, which the visitor may perhaps regret, as a little time may be wasted in searching for the key. But do his benefactions go on? We will not hint at their having been alienated by Goths or Vandals, by East-Roman exarchs or Lombard princes. Can we trust the really dangerous characters in these parts of the world, Popes, Popes' nephews, Roman princes, and Roman cardinals, who pull down buildings and steal their columns to make their own palaces and villas? Perhaps some of them may have swallowed up the funds which should go in nuts to the boys of Ferentinum.

We have been writing as we dreamed on the spot. As at Anagni, we wish—we must confess the weakness—to see independent Hernicans wherever we can. It gives us therefore a little shock when we come back and turn to our books, and find the walls of Hernican Ferentinum spoken of, without any special emotion, as "Roman." We look up again in a moment, and ask, What is Roman? At Ferentinum the word certainly means something quite different from what it commonly means in Britain and Northern Gaul. There we are happy if we light on anything earlier than the third century A.D. Here no one asks us to accept any date later than Sulla; some will allow us to go as far back as the middle of the second century B.C. We are allowed to think that the walls of Ferentinum were in being when old Carthage and old Corinth were still standing. But we have not yet got to our great piece of evidence. Ferentino contains inscriptions much older and more important—though about the comparative importance some might raise a doubt—than Aulus Quinctilius and his nuts. But we must get to them by the proper road; we must get into what once was the arx, what is now the ecclesiastical quarter. Now, at places like Ferentino, ecclesiastical and domestic buildings seem like something kindly thrown into the bargain. We go to look at walls, not at churches or houses; so we get something more than we asked for when we find that Ferentino contains many houses which are worth at least a glance, and several churches which are worth much more than a glance. Indeed at Ferentino the study of walls and that of churches cannot be kept asunder. That some of the great stones have been taken to build the small and now disused church of Saint Lawrence is a slight matter. The most striking feature of Ferentino in any distant view consists of the mass of buildings which is formed by piling the cathedral church, the bell-tower, and the Bishop's palace, on the walls of the arx, as a mighty sub-structure. The walls of the arx show the same two dates as the walls of the tower. In one part we have only the vast rude stones of the first period; at another part they support the upper range of the second. The first no one will refuse to our Hernicans, to Hernicans older than Spurius Cassius; but how about the second, the "Roman" date? This is claimed in several inscriptions as the work of the censors Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius—censors, that is, not of Rome but of Ferentinum. The inscription may be seen in the first volume of the great Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, p. 238, and its closer likeness is given at fol. lxvii., lxviii. of the Priscae Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica. Now Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius are names of a frightfully modern sound, suggesting well-known persons of the days of Divus Julius and Divus Augustus. But no one asks us to think of them here, though we may likely enough have got hold of the Hernican forefathers of those better-known Romans. They had no such need to change their names and the alphabet in which they are written, as when the son of the Etruscan Avle Felimne became the Roman Publius Volumnius. Now our Hirtius and Lollius claim to have built what they built from the foundation; but they must at the outside only mean that they built the later work on the top of the primÆval wall. And to a zealous eye even the work of Hirtius and Lollius has an archaic look about it. There are no columns against the wall, as in the Tabularium of Catulus at Rome; the work is finished with a row of triglyphs, not unlike those on the tomb of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio Gnaivod patre prognatus." But we need not go back quite so far as his day. The further back we can go the better, but any time before Sulla will do. The history of Ferentinum allows us to carry our Hernicans of Ferentinum, like our Etruscans of Perusia, down to the Social War. Ferentinum, it must be remembered, was one of those Hernican towns which were true to Rome when Anagnia fought against her. What follows is most instructive. The men of Ferentinum, steady allies of Rome, refused the proffered reward of Roman citizenship, and chose rather to remain a distinct, even if a dependent, community. That is to say, the old Hernican city went on, as long doubtless as to the days of the Social War, a self-ordering commonwealth, with its own laws and magistrates—Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius among them—subject only to the demands of military service which were needed in the wars of Rome, and sometimes perhaps to the unlawful excesses of powerful Romans.

This last fact comes out in a strange story told by Aulus Gellius (x. 3). It is an extract from a speech of Gaius Gracchus, setting forth the wrongs of the Italian allies. The wife of a Roman prÆtor suddenly wished the public baths of Ferentinum to be cleared and made ready for herself. The thing was not done so fast as the great lady wished; so her husband bade the two quÆstors of the town to be seized; one was scourged, the other threw himself over the wall. This tale, told in the words of Gracchus, proves a good deal as to the arbitrary way in which Roman magistrates are not ashamed to deal with the dependent cities even of Italy, whatever might be their formal relation to Rome.

It is of less importance that Gellius casually speaks of the town as a municipium, while Livy also casually implies its possession of the Latin franchise. Such obiter dicta do not go for very much. Scholars sometimes get astray in these times from forgetting that, not only casual sayings, but even formal documents, may sometimes err. Thus not long ago we saw a solemn paper in which a public officer, bound to accuracy, a clerk of the peace, had to describe several towns in the West of England. We here read of "the county of the city of Bristol," the "borough of Gloucester," the "borough of Bath," and the "borough of Taunton." An inquirer some ages hence might be misled into forgetting that Bath is a "city" and Gloucester even a "county of a city." May we not sometimes get wrong about municipia and Latin colonies from the same kind of cause? Ferentinum was not, in the strict sense, a municipium, but an allied Hernican commonwealth. In the like sort, we once saw an official document from a high sheriff calling on the electors of a county to elect, not a "knight of the shire," as they had done for six hundred years, but a hitherto unheard-of being called a "member of Parliament." Is it not possible then that Livy, and even Cicero, may sometimes use a wrong phrase in talking of tribes, curiae, and centuries, in ages long before their own day?

The walls then, though called "Roman" in a vague sense—that is, it would seem, simply not primÆval, like those of Cori and Segni—are doubtless Hernican in the sense of being built while Ferentinum was still a separate Hernican community. The walls that we see are most likely the walls over which the unlucky quÆstor threw himself. The walls of the arx, where we read the legend of Hirtius and Lollius, connect the Hernican town with later times. Just at the point where the inscription is they are carried up to form the Bishop's palace, and from the middle of one side rises the bell-tower of the cathedral—a very good example of the usual Romanesque type of such buildings. The church of Ferentino is small and unpretending, and a good deal damaged within, but it still keeps its main features, not only its bell-tower, but its west front, its apses, its ranges of windows. A little restoration, in the true sense of the word, would soon make it into as good a specimen of its own class as could be needed. But, unless we altogether misunderstood the words of one of its own clergy, antiquity and simplicity are not esteemed at Ferentino. The little minster is convicted of the crime of being old, a charge which, except by comparison with the walls beneath it, cannot be denied. Only, if the church be an offender on this score, how fearful must be the crime of the walls? Unless we misunderstood in the most amazing way what we heard with our own ears, the church of Ferentino, convicted of the crime of old age, is sentenced to destruction. A new church is actually begun; when it is finished the old one is to go. Happily the new one as yet stands still for want of funds; let us hope that funds may refuse to drop in till a wiser Bishop and Chapter shall rule at Ferentino.

The church at Ferentino is dedicated to Saint Ambrose, who may be seen there in the worldly garb of the unbaptized prefect, before the infant voice greeted him as Bishop of Milan. And in the inner buildings of the arx—buildings most worthy of a visit on their own account—strange tales lurk of the sufferings of the saint, which seem to find no place either in history or in received legend. Among other things he was thrown into a boiling caldron. Down below is another church Santa Maria Maggiore, some centuries younger than the cathedral, and a very pretty example of its style; which, as far as we know, no one designs to destroy. Singularly graceful, but singularly un-Italian, it strikes by the power of contrast, as it rises above the walls, or as we go up to it from the gate which shares its surname. A few other ecclesiastical and domestic scraps may also be picked up in the city of the rock. The primitive remains are the great object in all these places; but it is always a gain when the walls shelter something which has an interest of another kind. The walls of the stout-hearted people who chose rather to be citizens of Ferentinum than citizens of Rome lose nothing by having been turned to an unlooked-for use as the holy places of their successors, perhaps descendants, of another age and another creed.

III. Alatri.

The tale of those Hernican cities, fenced in with primÆval walls, among which we have been lately sojourning, is worthily brought to an end at Alatri. Among its immediate Hernican fellows that town must certainly claim the highest place; it might on some grounds claim the highest place, even if we throw in Old-Latin and Volscian rivals. Yet it is the one which has the least history. There is very little to say about it, except that Alatrium, like Ferentinum, was faithful to Rome, but preferred to keep its separate Hernican being rather than accept the proffered reward of Roman citizenship. It therefore doubtless remained a distinct commonwealth down to the Social War. And here at least there can be no question about dates. Alatri is not especially rich in mediÆval antiquities; it has still less claim to be called rich in Roman antiquities. Nor does it supply us with the work of more or less Romanized Hernicans, like the censors of Ferentinum. At Alatri nearly everything that we care about is strictly primÆval. We cannot reasonably doubt that both the circuits of wall at which we now look were there in the days of Spurius Cassius, and were by no means new then.

Alatri seems to have been somewhat of an out-of-the-way place in all ages. Not lying on any of the great roads of Italy, it has no place in the Itineraries, and now it lies much further than Anagni or Ferentino—nay, even than Cori and Norba, from common tracks of going and from the common haunts of men. Yet it cannot be looked on as seriously inaccessible; it may at least be reached without calling in the help of asses and mules. The party whose track we are now following—a party, be it noticed, numbering two ladies among them—reached Alatri in a carriage from Frosinone, having slept there after seeing Ferentino. The old Hernican town of Frusino had scant justice done to it by our wayfarers; as no man or book had pointed it out as a seat of primitive walls, it was treated merely as a resting-place between the wonders of Ferentino and the wonders of Alatri. Frosinone was slept in, but was not examined; yet a glance from its railway station, the point which connects Alatri with the modern world, shows that it at least possesses a by no means contemptible bell-tower. From Frosinone then our travellers made their way to Alatri, and, as Alatri gradually rose before them, they were for a while puzzled, perhaps for a while even disappointed, with what they saw. But it was not for lack of a striking object to crown the Alatrian hill-top. Of all the walls of our series, the inner range of the walls of Alatri, the walls which fence in the arx, are the most prominent in a distant view. Even the circuit of empty Norba, beyond our immediate range, hardly outdoes these defences of a still inhabited town. At Alatri indeed the primÆval walls are so prominent that in the distant view no one would suspect them of being primÆval walls at all. They are still so nearly perfect that they can and do discharge what may be looked on as a survival of their original function. They still fence in the innermost and loftiest quarter of the town, where, as in so many other cases, the ancient citadel has become the episcopal precinct. But at Alatri the episcopal precinct puts on a distinct and central character which is rarely found in Italian cities. The arx is not in a corner, but in the middle; the lower town, fenced in by the wall of its own outer circuit, lies around it on every side. The arx forms an open, lofty, and airy platform, looking forth from every point of the compass on the mountains which keep watch around—on the little towns, Veroli among them, perched here and there on their heights—on the houses and churches of Alatri, covering the slope of the hill which the arx crowns. It is seldom that we find in an Italian town a church or any other building standing in this way free on a commanding site, not hemmed in on any side by parasitical buildings. These hill-towns are perhaps better off in this respect than most others; at Anagni, at Ferentino, the cathedral churches stand grandly on their heights, comparatively free from all buildings except their own proper companions. But there is not the wide, open space around them which surrounds the church of Alatri. One cannot help wishing that some more worthy building, either the primÆval temple itself or some more fitting successor, occupied so noble a site, a site in truth which needs—let us say either the ParthenÔn of Athens or the ParthenÔn of Lincoln to do it justice. But the only thing that can be said for the cathedral church of Alatri is that the lower part of its wall is part of the cella of the primÆval temple. Here we have something even more than can be seen at Segni. We know not what may have been added in the way of a pillared front; but it is plain that, as far as the main walls are concerned, the building which was transformed into a Christian church was actually the house of pagan worship itself. And it was a house going back, not to dated Emperors or consuls, but to the unrecorded age which reared these cities great and fenced up to heaven. There is the terrace, there is the wall of the cella, wrought of the same wonderful masonry as the walls of the surrounding arx, as the walls of the yet again surrounding city. It is strange indeed to see the ordinary rites of Christian worship, the ordinary accompaniments of a Christian church, dwelling, as at Rome and Syracuse, within the temples of a creed, fallen indeed but perfectly familiar. But here we see them within walls reared in honour of we know not what—gods of unchronicled days, gods alongside of whom Jupiter of the Capitol may have seemed as strange and foreign as Mithras and Serapis now seem alongside of Jupiter of the Capitol.

Where the prÆhistoric temple has thus become the cathedral church, it is not out of keeping that the wall of the prÆhistoric arx should become the wall of the cathedral close. This is the wall which we see from afar, a wall which seems so straight and regular, so clearly furnished with a modern finish at top, that it is not till we can distinguish the mighty blocks of which it is formed that it has the air of a wall even of Roman, even of mediÆval, antiquity. Shall we say it? As we looked up at no very amazing distance, the wall of the arx of Alatri had a good deal of the air of the wall of a modern prison. We could not yet see the construction, and the outline seemed more regular and rectangular than it proves to be. Nowhere do we better see than at Alatri the nature of these primitive walls. They are seldom walls in the same sense as the later walls of Rome or of other places, walls built on the ground and standing up clear on both sides. Their business commonly is, as is perhaps more clear at Alatri than anywhere else, to strengthen by masonry the scarped side of a hill. Hence they have little or no height within, and the gateways are necessarily reached from within by a steep descent. The open space at Alatri allows this arrangement to be studied with unusual ease. The wall is eminently a wall against a hill, and its arrangements are made with no small art. The weak corner has its double defence; the way up from the town at this point is carefully sheltered. And what stones they are with which the hill of Alatri is strengthened; above all, what stones they are which are piled together to form its main gateway. Nowhere indeed in the walls of Alatri, whether of temple, arx, or city, do we find anything quite so rude as the rudest part of the wall of Cori. All the stones, of whatever shape—and they are of many shapes—have clearly been cut; they are all laid according to some kind of system, though the system according to which they are laid is not the same in every part of the wall. In some parts they seem almost to take the shape of constructive arches, at least of attempts at arches, such as may be seen in gateways and roofs at Segni and elsewhere. The true arch, it is hardly needful to say, is nowhere found in the original work; nor do we find even any of the attempts at the arch in that position where we should have most naturally looked for them, in the gateways. The great gateway of the arx at Alatri is indeed a wonderful work. Its builders either knew the arch and despised it, or else the thought of the arch had not come into their heads. It is as pure an example of the lintel-construction as any gateway at Athens or MykÊnÊ. We suppose that the lintel-stone of the great treasury is yet vaster than the huge lintel-stone at Alatri; but the Anakim of Alatri were at least rivals whom those of MykÊnÊ could not have despised. But, except in vastness of construction, we must not compare the gateway at Alatri, perfectly plain, a mere piling, though a very skilful piling, of huge blocks with the really artistic work of the MykÊnaian treasuries. It goes rather with the lion-gate; only there are no lions. The builders of Alatri could carve, as is shown over one of the smaller gateways of the arx. But they chose to carve quite other subjects than lions. On the great gate however they carved nothing; that is left in the stern majesty of the vast blocks which form it. And here we may distinguish between the cut blocks of the gateway itself and the far ruder blocks just within it, which merely formed part of the foundation, and which, when the steep path went down to the gate, would not have stood above ground. Even the builders of primÆval walls clearly drew a line between what was meant to meet the public eye and what was not.

But we must remember that the walls of which we have been speaking, the walls which first catch the eye, are not the whole of the walls of Alatri. They fence in only its inner and higher circuit. Their effect in the distant view is so imposing that the visitor will most likely be tempted to go to them first, instead of doing things in a more regular order by first tracking out the walls of the town itself. But these last, except that they do not supply anything like the primÆval gate, are just as well worthy of study as the walls of the arx itself. They remain perfectly round the greater part of the circuit of the city, and they are of the same general construction as the walls of the arx. At some points a singular contrast is made by mediÆval additions to the defences; good thirteenth century work, with the characteristic windows of the time, stands out as projections from the primÆval wall. And, as in some of the other places, we have something thrown in in the way of what the walls contain, besides the attractions of the walls themselves. From the arx of Alatri we look down on several bell-towers and rose-windows, and one church at least, that of Santa Maria Maggiore, though hardly equal to its namesake at Ferentino, is quite worthy of examination. But, next to its walls, the strong point of Alatri lies in its domestic buildings. Very seldom, in Italy or out of it, do we see graceful windows, chiefly couplets with a divided shaft, more thickly gathered together, than in its crooked and narrow streets. Alatri, in short, is, to the antiquarian eye, satisfactory in every point save one. There should have been some decent building, pagan or Christian, crowning the noble site of its arx, the noblest in our whole range.

With Alatri we end one main stage of our iter, that of the hill-cities. We shall henceforth pass by places which lie more in the world, some of them in the thick of modern communication. But if we had turned back at Alatri, we should have done a good stroke of work. A journey to the walls of the Hernicans is in every way pleasant and profitable. And in truth, even if we throw in the Old-Latins and the Volscians, it is not a journey of hardships. The little inns are very humble, very simple, but they may be fed in and slept in without anything very frightful to endure. It may perhaps be well to mention that the Locanda d'Italia, at Anagni, recommended in various guide-books, has ceased to exist for some years. Still a day and a night at Anagni are no hardship, and a guide may be found, shirtless and letterless, who knows what is really worth going to much better than many in England who boast at once more clothes and more learning. Indeed, the men of the walls seem altogether a kindly and well-disposed race. Some say that is because they are said to be reclaimed brigands, perhaps on the principle that a reformed rake used to be said to make the best husband. There are indeed more beggars among them than need be; but on this head a wise rule was laid down by a young Volscian, or he might be a Hernican—we cannot always be exact among these obsolete nationalities—"Give to the halt and the blind; but not to anybody else."

IV. From Alatri to Capua.

We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the special necessities of an iter ad Brundisium carry us to quite other parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a chance likeness between the names—a name that ranges from the Euxine to the Hudson—without seeking in any sort to identify the ??a??? of Dionysios and the ??a??? of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder mountains of Albania.

Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass from the primÆval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages, not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.

Greek influence indeed begins—some say that it historically began—on the western, not the eastern, shore of Italy, in lands which, in the present journey, we leave to the west of us and see only in glimpses. We hurry on, passing by much that we might well stop and study, from Frosinone to Caserta. And we are luxurious enough to rejoice at finding ourselves there. We have proved that a few days and nights may be passed among Volscians and Hernicans without damage or even serious discomfort; but we trust that it is not an avowal to be ashamed of that it is a pleasing exchange to find ourselves in thoroughly civilized quarters in the plains of Campania. We have found our Capua; not, however, at Capua itself, but under the shadow of the royal palace a few miles off. But we desert Capua only because Capuan comforts—we will not talk of luxuries—have fled from Capua and have found their new home at Caserta. Those who have tried a night at Capua itself, Santa Maria di vetere Capua, not the newer Capua on the site of Casilinum, report that, if Hannibal's army could be quartered there again, they would certainly not be corrupted by anything excessive in the way of creature comforts. Anagni and Frosinone are said to be far in advance of the city which long was to Rome what Paris long was to London. The excuse doubtless would be that Capua is Capua no longer. The name of Capua, and with it the stirring history of early mediÆval Capua, has wandered from the true Capua to Casilinum. It is not at the town now called Capua, but at the village—it is hardly more—of Santa Maria, that we must look for what is left of Etruscan Vulturnum, of Samnite, Campanian, and Roman Capua, the special city of pleasure, the city where, before all others, pleasure was sought for in scenes of blood.

On our present course we have no special call to either Capua, old or new. We have in times past seen both the amphitheatre of the elder Capua and the cathedral portico of the newer. But, when Caserta has been chosen as a convenient halting-place, it would be a shame for the historic traveller to pass by two such famous spots without a glance at either, while in their neighbourhood lies a third object, of no small value in its own line, which will have the further charm of novelty. It is well, while still fresh from the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, to look again on the amphitheatre of Capua—Capua, the mistress of Rome in the sports of slaughter. There is a certain special lore of amphitheatres, the mastery of which does not fall to the lot of all, even of those who look on the monuments either of Rome or Capua with a general historical eye. But it is easy to see that in the Capuan amphitheatre the underground arrangements can be studied as they hardly can be studied anywhere else. The walls, the seats, are far less perfect than at Rome; much more then are they less perfect than at Verona. But the substructure seems wholly untouched. In the Roman Coliseum the underground work is only partially brought to light, while of what has been brought to light it is not always clear how much is the work of the Flavian Emperors, and how much of the mediÆval barons who turned the amphitheatre into a fortress. Here, better than at Rome, we may study what really happened when the lions came up from underground to be slaughtered by the imperial hands of Commodus. If any question is raised as to the date of the building, one who is not a special Capuan topographer may be satisfied with the fact, that the inscription of Hadrian claims for that prince only a renovation and enrichment of the building with columns and statues. This seems to imply that the shell is older; it may be far older. In idea at least, the amphitheatre of Capua is far older than that of Rome. It illustrates a strange but well-known law of human nature, that the taste for luxury and the taste for blood should find a common home.

Besides the modernized basilica, besides the tombs of various sizes and designs which line the road—one of which is indeed singularly like a model of an amphitheatre—the true Capua has little to show besides the amphitheatre itself. It is strange to see so great a city, one which for some ages must have been far greater, far more splendid than Rome, so utterly gone—or rather to see the little that is left of it translated to another site. But great as Capua undoubtedly was, we begin to doubt its extreme antiquity. Capua, once Etruscan Vulturnum, remained Etruscan Vulturnum till the fourth century of Rome. It was the last remnant of the great Etruscan dominion in that region of Italy. As such, it represents a state of things far older than Rome. But the city itself may well be of later date than Rome. At all events, we may be sure that it is of far later date than Cori and Alatri. The city by the Vulturnus, down in the plain, taking its name from its guardian river, marks an advance not only on the mountain strongholds of Segni and Norba, but on Veii, on Rome itself. It must be far older than Florence; but it is the fellow of Florence; it marks an equal forsaking of the oldest type of a city. It is hard to see where the arx of Capua could have stood, if we are to understand by an arx something set upon a hill. But what a position that of Capua was, according to later ideas, is shown by its revival after the Hannibalian war. The Samnite settlement, parted away from their kinsfolk of the mountains, had become Campanians, and, to seek shelter against their kinsfolk of the mountains, they had been fain in some sort to become Romans.

says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as simply worded as it could be in a mediÆval chronicle, which gives us a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons, who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum, and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the arx of Capua, are not to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan arx, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain which rises above its massy tower.

V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal.

We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend on Tifata as grew round—

Yet beside the rites of Canaan, the rites of the gods who had sent forth him whose name proclaimed him as the Grace of Baal, the darkest forms into which any kind of Italian or Hellenic worship strayed might well seem mild. In tracking the career of Hannibal, we are ever disappointed at the utter lack of means to call up a picture of the man himself apart from his public acts. He had human weaknesses, for he found a mistress at Salapia. He had his sallies of merriment, for he could raise a laugh at the grave Gisgo. But the course of his inner life is hidden from us. Still we can at least see that he was, in his own belief, charged with a mission from the gods of his own city. And it needs an effort to bear in mind that the gods of Hannibal were Baal and Moloch. The goddess to whom he would have reared a temple would have been, not a Diana, but an Ashtoreth. Yet, among the many, and mostly false, charges of cruelty brought against the great Phoenician by Roman writers, we do not hear, as we do in the case of some other Carthaginian commanders, of captives being made to pass through the fire to the gods of Carthage. Hannibal, the friend of Capua, would at Capua honour Diana of Tifata; but it was not Diana that had sent him. With what thanks did he honour his own gods, when Capua, second city of all Italy, welcomed the victor of Trebia, Trasimenus, and CannÆ? Is it too bold a flight to fancy the mount of Tifata the scene of the same form of Baal-worship as the mount of Carmel?

But the gods of Italy lived on, undisturbed by the momentary presence of Semitic rivals. Diana was not the only power worshipped on Tifata; Jupiter also had his holy place. And it may be that the venerable church which now forms the chief attraction of the hill-side represents the holy place of Jupiter rather than the holy place of Diana. It is curious to see how a kind of appropriateness was often sought after in the nomenclature of Pagan temples when turned into Christian churches. Thus, at Athens, the ParthenÔn remained the ParthenÔn, while the temple of the warrior ThÊseus or HÊraklÊs became the church of the warrior George. We should look for a Santa Maria or a Santa Lucia at the least, on the site of the sanctuary of Diana. Had we here a San Pietro, we should have very little doubt in setting down the prince of the Apostles as having supplanted the father of gods and men. But at Sant' Angelo in Formis we feel somewhat less certain; St. Michael suggests the Norman, and the Norman has been there. It may well be that the name is no older than his day.

But St. Michael on the slope of Tifata did carry us back in thought to a church of St. Peter seen some months before under a widely different state of outward things. We then made a somewhat difficult journey to a great and solitary Tuscan basilica in time of snow. The outward aspect of nature had certainly changed a good deal between the bleak day in January when it was found a hard task to follow the way from Pisa to the basilica of the prince of the Apostles in Grado and the sunny day in May when the same travellers found their way without difficulties of any kind to the basilica of the prince of the archangels in Formis. And there certainly can be no likeness of position, even if both were seen in January or both in May, between the basilica standing low in the flats by the mouth of Arno and the basilica which nestles against the mountains which form a wall to the rich plain of Vulturnus. But in seeing any one of these great churches, left, not ruined, like our Cistercian abbeys, but still living on a kind of life in places forsaken or nearly so, something always brings up the memory of some other of its fellows. Aquileia is perhaps the greatest case of all; but Aquileia, with its special position in the history of the world, stands by itself. If Aquileia itself is dead, it has lived on a wonderful after-life in the shape of its Venetian colony. We go to see Aquileia, because it is Aquileia; but even a well-informed traveller may know nothing of San Pietro in Grado and Sant' Angelo in Formis, till either his guide-book or some earlier visitor points them out to him as places which he ought not to pass by. Aquileia again has other things to show besides the great basilica and its surroundings. St. Apollinaris in Classe is as nearly forsaken as a church that is still kept up can be; but the basilica of Classis does not stand by itself; it forms part of the wonders of Ravenna, as St. Paul without-the-Walls forms part of the wonders of Rome. St. Peter in Grado might be looked on as standing in the same relation to Pisa; but it hardly enters into our general conception of Pisa, as the church of Classis—papal havoc hinders us from adding the church of CÆsarea—certainly enters into our general conception of Ravenna. S. Angelo in Formis at all events does not enter into our general conception of old Capua, because there is not enough of old Capua left to form any general conception of it at all. The church and the small surrounding village do form a kind of distant arx to the greater collection of houses which surrounds the amphitheatre; but among the nearer objects which catch the eye from the height, the most prominent is not old Capua with its amphitheatre, but new Capua, Casilinum that once was, with its towers and cupolas, mediÆval and modern. We look on many things from the terrace in front of the portico of the archangel, but that which among artificial objects chiefly draws the eye towards it, is not the elder Capua of Hannibal and Marcellus, but the Capua which succeeded Aversa as the seat of the elder but the less famous of the Norman powers in Southern Italy. As we mark the advance of national union, no less than as we mark the advance of mere dynastic aggression, we have sometimes to think, for a moment perhaps to mourn, that "kingdoms have shrunk to provinces," though in this form of advance and incorporation, we have no longer to add that "chains clank over sceptred cities." Capua, on both its sites, once the head of an Etruscan, once of a Norman dominion, passed, in one age, under the universal rule of Rome. In another age it again sank from its separate headship to become a member of that greater Norman dominion in Apulia and Sicily which, after more shiftings, unions, divisions, transfers to distant rulers, than any other part of Europe, has in our days been merged in the realm of united Italy, with Rome as its head, but not its mistress.

We reach then the height which, whether that of Jupiter or Diana of old, is now the height of the warrior archangel. The whole history of the church belongs to the independent days of the second Capua; in its present shape it belongs to the days of independent Norman rule in the second Capua. But the days of independent Norman rule were days when the arts of the earlier rulers of the land still lived on. We see signs of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns bearing such massive stilts. Columns indeed we should hardly say, as some of them are plainly mere fragments. But here, just as in Sicily, just as in Aquitaine, the pointed arch is no sign of coming Gothic; the style is still wholly Romanesque, and somewhat rude Romanesque too. And in this region of Italy we can hardly doubt as to attributing the almost accidental shape of the arches to the influence of Saracen models, perhaps to the workmanship of Saracen craftsmen. Hard by, but not joining the building, by an arrangement unlike Sicily, unlike Apulia, but the common rule of Northern Italy, rises a bell-tower, or rather the beginning of a bell-tower, which raises our wonder as to what it would have been if it had ever grown to its full height. Two stages only are finished, the lower of hewn stone, the upper of brick; but their bulk is so great that the tower, if it had ever been finished, would surely have ranked among the highest of its class, utterly overpowering even the great basilica at its side, except so far as it would have been itself overpowered by the natural heights above it. As in some other cases, the thought suggests itself, were not those who left off building the tower wiser than those who began it? The tall bell-towers of Italy look well as they rise from the Lombard plain, as they crown the hill of Fiesole, as they skirt the shores of the lake of Como. But we are not sure that a gigantic tower, which, if it was to have any kind of proportion, ought to have been carried up to a height as great as that of Venice, was in its right place when set a little way up a mountain-side, as if simply to show how small man's biggest works look in the midst of the works of nature. But the technical eye is thankful for the fragment that has been built, though mainly on a very technical ground. Professor Willis is gone, but his happy phrase of mid-wall shafts has not died with him. The custom of the elder Romanesque towers, the abiding fashion of Germany and Northern Italy, was to set the little columns which divided the coupled windows in the very middle of the wall; the latter Norman fashion, whether in Normandy, in England, or in Apulia, was to set them nearly flush with the outer wall. In this tower, Italian by geography, Norman by allegiance, two sides conform to the Italian and two to the Norman fashion. Nothing can show more clearly that even such small matters of detail as the use of a mid-wall shaft were made matters of serious thought, and that it was sometimes thought well to come to a compromise between two rival forms of taste.

The outside of this church, except so far as it forms an object in the general landscape, is perhaps chiefly attractive to the technical observer; the inside will surely appeal to every visitor, though the visitor who is technically informed in matters of painting may possibly look upon it with more of curiosity than of positive admiration. But the eye of the more general inquirer will give something like positive admiration to a basilica of eight arches, resting on ancient columns of various marbles, with its original design far less damaged than is common in Italian churches, and with every inch of available space covered with elaborate paintings of the date of the building. Like St. Peter by Pisa, the archangel by Capua trusted to painting for his enrichment and not to mosaics; and though the Campanian pictures are by far the better preserved of the two, though nearly all the subjects can be made out with the greatest ease, yet Ravenna and Venice rise to the mind to make us think that at least if endurance be the object, there is a more excellent way.

The walls of this church form almost a pictorial Bible, with a few legendary and local subjects thrown in. The Abbot Desiderius, holding, after the usual symbolical fashion, the church in his hand, is to be seen at the east end along with the archangels and evangelists. At the west end is what connoisseurs tell us is one of the very earliest pictures of the Last Judgment. On the two sides a crowd of scenes and figures from the Old and New Testament cover the whole space. The style of the painting is said to show Greek workmanship; we look toward the west end and mark, hardly above the ground, a single small shaft with a capital of strictly Byzantine character. The ruling Norman seems on this spot to have pressed into his service the artistic powers of all the inhabitants of the peninsula. Italian, Greek, Saracen, all give their help to adorn the house of the archangel. The Norman himself contributes nothing but the position of two small columns in the tower windows. We cannot even attribute to him the position of the house of the archangel, set Norman-fashion in a high place; for the first church was built before the Norman came. It is not so further east, where a distinctively Norman element is to be seen in the great churches of Apulia. But the gathering together of the best skill of the time from all quarters is a thoroughly Norman function, whether in Italy or in England.

The basilica should be compassed, so far at least as to climb the hill a little way to look at its east end. Its surrounding buildings supply an arch or two to catch the eye on the way up or down. But the essential features of Sant' Angelo are the grand display of painting and the union of elements of so many kinds. It is the first of a great series of churches at which our course will bid us to stop here and there. But before we reach them we shall pass by one point where our musings will again be mainly secular and largely pagan. A short journey will lead us from Campania into Samnium, and the valiant men of the Samnite land will claim a tribute on a spot which is Samnite beyond all others.

VI. A Glimpse of Samnium.

From Caserta and what is to be seen from Caserta, our next journey lies by the line of railway which runs right across Italy, connecting the two great lines of the east and west of the peninsula. It leads us from the Campanian plain, with at least its sheltering wall of mountains, with Tifata to guard the great city that once was from the ruder land beyond, to the great plain of Apulia from which every feature of a mountain-land has passed away. But, in so crossing from one side of Italy to the other, we pass through a striking and an historic region. We are in the land of the mightiest Italian rivals of Rome, the land of those with whom Rome had to fight, before Pyrrhos and Hannibal came, and ages after Pyrrhos and Hannibal were gone.

Our course leads us into the heart of the Samnite land, a land which may well call up endless musings on the hard fate of those "hearts of steel" who bore up so long against Rome, in the days when Rome was really at her greatest. And the memories of the same land in after days are not wholly alien to those of earlier times. Our course brings us, at not a few points, across the memories, if not of nations, yet of men, who had to bear up against the power of Rome, when the power of Rome had taken a far other form than that of the senate and the armies against which the Samnite had to strive. For the old Samnite land holds its place in later story, as the land of princes who felt what the spiritual Rome could do when the powers of the spiritual Rome were at their highest. We pass through regions which were the scene of no small part of the history of the Norman and Swabian lords of Sicily and Southern Italy. We are deep in the land of the counts, dukes, kings, and emperors of the house of Hauteville and the house of Hohenstaufen; and we are often called on to stop and track out their deeds. At not a few points do we light on some building, some inscription, which brings up the memory of Frederick, the Wonder of the World, and of Manfred, whose field of overthrow we shall presently pass by. In both periods the history of these lands has a character altogether different from that of Northern and Central Italy. In the later period this needs no proof: we are dealing with the history of a kingdom, not with the history of a system of separate cities. But something of the same difference extends to the earlier period also. If we wish to know more of Volscians and Hernicans, yet more keenly do we wish to know more of Samnites. The part which they played is greater, at all events in scale, and their dealings with Rome belong to a stage of Roman history when we feel that we have a kind of right to know more than we could hope to know in the earlier time. But while we know something of the character of the Samnite people as a whole, while we know something—though much less than in some other Italian lands—of the geography of the Samnite country, we have no clear notion of the political position or the political action of any particular Samnite city or canton, such as we ever and anon do get of particular cities of Etruria and Latium. And again, it is seldom that we can call up any distinct personal conception of any Samnite leader as a living and breathing man. This is indeed a grievance which affects Samnites along with the other Italian enemies of Rome. The personal conceptions which we do get of Etruscans and Latins largely belong to legendary times. Of historical Volscians we know very few. And we have already complained on Hernican ground that we cannot picture to ourselves the personal likeness of any single Hernican of independent Hernican days.

Still, on this particular journey we have small right to complain; for we pass by the spot which calls up the memories of the most memorable Samnites of whom we have any personal knowledge. They are men of one name, most likely therefore of one house, and men of whom we emphatically wish to know more than we do know. Leaving Caserta behind, glancing at the Campanian plain and the Campanian mountains, marking Naples only by the smoke of the distant city, we pass along through what, in our simplicity, we take to be the vale of Vulturnus, till we light on a more classical friend, armed with a more classical map, who explains that the stream which we are tracing is in strictness not Vulturnus himself, but only his tributary Calor. Anyhow we go along its course into the heart of the Samnite land, and we pass by one spot—a spot which we ought to have treated better than merely to pass it by, a spot round which the greatest memories of Samnite history gather, and where they strangely interweave themselves with wholly different memories of the history of our own land. We reach Telesia, the home of the Pontii, and we remember that Telesia was also for a moment the home of Anselm. Our guide-book provokingly fails us; but the large building on the hill-side must surely be the monastery where he sojourned. There are Roman antiquities in the place; for Samnite antiquities we do not look. But did Samnites build no walls, or do the mighty bulwarks of Cori and Segni mark an earlier state of things than the Sabellian occupation of Southern Italy? Anyhow, we are here at the place which has attached itself as a surname to the two most memorable men in the scanty personal history of Samnium. Here, on his own ground, we remember that Gaius Pontius who spared Rome's army at the Caudine Forks, and who lived to be led, twenty-seven years later, as a spectacle in a Roman triumph, to end his days, one might almost say as a martyr, by the axe of the headsman in a Roman dungeon. So we used to read the tale in our youth; so moralized the historians of our youth over the special baseness which handed over such a man to such an end. Or are we to adopt the new reading of the tale which at least saves Quintus Fabius Maximus from that special stain of blood-guiltiness which cleaves to the canonized memory of Divus Julius? It may be well if we can believe that one of the worthiest heroes of the old commonwealth, if he could not forestall the magnanimity of Pompeius and Aurelian, at least did not sink to the special and petty spite of the murderer of Vercingetorix. We are now taught that the Gaius Pontius who appears twenty-seven years after the first mention of that name, is most likely not the same man as the merciful victor of the Caudine Forks. If this be so, then Quintus Fabius, in consigning his Pontius to the axe, merely conformed to the cruel custom of his nation, without the further aggravation of slaying in cold blood one who had dealt with Rome so nobly. And after all some might hint that the oldest Pontius of all was the wisest. It may be that the sage old father of Gaius knew human nature best, when he bade his son either to massacre the whole Roman army or else to let them go free without terms. It may be that the son chose a more dangerous path than either, when he took to diplomacy and middle courses.

But if the earlier Pontius of Telesia should prove—though the guess is a simple guess—to be in truth two Pontii, perhaps a father and a son, no doubt seems to have fixed itself on the identity of the last Pontius at the Colline gate of Rome. The rising again of Samnite life at the last moment of all, when the war with the allies seemed to have lost itself in the deeper whirlpool of the war of Marius and Sulla, is really the most striking thing in the whole history, such as we have it, of the Samnite people. We are taken by surprise when, in days when Rome already seems the fully established head, not only of Italy, but of all the Mediterranean world, her power, her very being, is threatened by the leader of a nation which seemed to have been dead and buried for some centuries. But, just like the Volumnian tomb in one way, so the Samnite resurrection in another way is a witness to the real life which the other states of Italy kept on under a form of Roman dominion which made them externally dependent, which threw its influence into the scale of oligarchy in their external affairs, which ever and anon subjected them to some irregular demand, but which left the general course of their lives to be whatever they themselves chose it to be. In the days of Marius and Sulla, Etruscans and Samnites were still Etruscans and Samnites; they had not become Romans, nor had they merged their being in any common name of Italians. The Social War itself was the first attempt at forming a general Italian nationality. But the last campaign of the last Pontius shows how deep, in Samnite hearts at least, was the earlier feeling, the feeling which knew no greater whole than the federal union of Etruria or Samnium. It shows too how specially deep was the feeling of hatred for the single city which had brought down so many cities and leagues to become its helpless dependents. Against Pontius at the Colline gate Rome fought for life, as she had never fought since the old days when she had to guard herself against enemies who lived within sight of her capitol. Foreign invaders, Pyrrhos, Hannibal himself, did not come with the same fixed purpose of rooting up the wood which sheltered the wolves of Italy. We can hardly doubt that it is the hand of Sulla which from that day to this has hindered the south of Italy from being like the north. But the blow which crushed the Samnite people as the other nations of Italy were not crushed, was vengeance taken for a moment when it once more became a question whether Rome should rule over Italy, whether Rome should exist at all.

At Telesia we look out, and muse on what might have been, if one Pontius had done otherwise than he did by the forks of Caudium, if another Pontius had fared otherwise than he fared at the gates of Rome herself. At our next halting-place we are called on, not to muse on what might have been, but on what was. At Beneventum we tread the battle-ground of Pyrrhos and Manfred, the ground of two of the greatest victories of the Rome of the earlier and the Rome of the later day. There we need not strive to call up the dim figures of men, like the older and the later Pontius, known by one action of their lives. The Epeirot and the Swabian stand out as clearly discerned figures in the history of their several ages. And the places where we next halt will show us the place of overthrow for both, the place of death and utter ruin for one.

VII. Benevento.

We follow the stream of Calore till we reach a city which, without ever having been one of the great cities of the world, without having been even one of the greatest cities of Italy, has always kept up an important historic being. Beneventum is a familiar name in all ages; yet Beneventum has never been either a mighty commonwealth like Venice or Genoa, or the head of a mighty kingdom like Naples and Palermo. It has had its princes; if we never heard of them before, we should learn a good deal of them by studying the monuments of their city. That is to say, the monuments will tell us a great deal about princes nine hundred or a thousand years back; no monument that we remember in Benevento tells us anything about the last prince who bore their title. Let us suppose a wanderer who began his travels at Autun and who finds himself, in the course of the same wandering, at Benevento. He will feel it as a grotesque coincidence that, not so very long ago, a man was living who had once been Prince of Benevento and who before that had been Bishop of Autun. Benevento, among many other things that it is, is also the later city of Talleyrand, as Autun is the earlier. But there is this difference that one thinks of Talleyrand at Autun and one does not think of him at Benevento. At Autun he has his place, though a very strange place, in the long succession of Bishops of Autun; at Benevento, though he bore the style of its prince, he stands all alone; we cannot find a niche for him in the succession of the Beneventan princes. Yet a prince of Benevento whose existence marks the ending for a season of the long papal dominion in Benevento reminds us that Benevento had its princes before that papal dominion began. It reminds us of the two distinctive features in the later history of the city. Benevento was first the seat of Lombard princes who, placed on the borders of both empires, contrived to escape all practical submission to either; it was then the seat of an outlying scrap of papal dominion surrounded on all sides by the Sicilian realm. In both these characters Benevento was a kind of curiosity on the historical map of Europe. But the city had its ups and downs before those days, and amongst other things it had gone through a somewhat grotesque change of name. It is hard to believe that a city placed so far inland can really have been of Greek origin; but legend attributed it to a Greek founder, and its oldest name had a Greek sound. Greek Maloeis, Samnite Maluentum, had, when it was read into Latin Maloventum, an ill sound; so, when the Samnite stronghold was changed into the Roman colony, it took the name of Beneventum, city of welcome.

Beneventum, marked by Procopius as a strong city in a high place, stands low as compared with the true hill-cities. Still, as compared with Capua, it might itself pass for a hill-city. It has just that amount of rise above the river which there commonly is where there is a river, such a rise as may be seen in many an English town which is not as Durham or Lincoln. We miss the primÆval walls of the hill-cities; but we find, on the other hand, works of Roman and mediÆval art such as in the hill-cities we do not find. The arch of Trajan has vanished from Rome, except so far as it lives in the sculptures which were torn from it to enrich the arch of Constantine. But at Benevento, as at Ancona, the memorial of the conqueror of Dacia still abides. The Beneventan arch may indeed fairly take its place in the Roman series. It belongs essentially to the same class of designs as the arch of Severus and the arch of Constantine, while it has little in common with its own tall and slender fellow at Ancona. At the same time, since it has, in general effect at least, taken upon itself something of the position of a town-gate, since it bears the name of Porta aurea, to match the golden gate of Constantinople and the golden gate of Spalato, the arch of Beneventum has now a somewhat greater air of reality than triumphal arches commonly have. The weak point of that class of structures is that they are of no use. They do not, like a wall, a gateway, a house, a temple, a hall of council, serve any purpose in the ordinary economy of things. They are purely monumental, set up to commemorate something or somebody, but in no way to help on men's daily affairs, public or private. And yet they are not mere monuments, like a statue or an inscribed stone. A large building of this kind, having very much the air of a building which does serve some purpose, is a little deceptive. It is so like a real gateway that it calls up the thought of a real gateway, and leaves us a little disappointed at finding that the building, after all, never was of any use to anybody, and was set up simply to be looked at. There is, therefore, something a little unsatisfactory in the whole class of triumphal arches, and it may even be that a slightly ludicrous element is thrown in when we find that the immediate occasion for rearing this record of the life and exploits of the "fortissimus princeps" whom it commemorates was the repair of the Appian Way. But it does not become us to find fault with any built and graven monument, specially with one of a time of which we have so few written monuments as the memorable reign of Trajan. We are so much the slaves of accidental associations, so apt to draw lines at some altogether unreasonable point, that we may doubt whether the reign of Trajan holds the place which it should hold in popular imagination. Suetonius wrote the lives of Twelve CÆsars, and this mere accident has caused the notion of a break which has no real existence between the Suetonian Twelve and those who next followed them. The reign of Trajan marks the Empire at its highest pitch of extent and power, at that highest pitch which, in its own nature, comes just before the beginning of decay. His days saw, too, the highest pitch of architectural magnificence; and with Tacitus and Juvenal to adorn it, one might be inclined to say that, as an age of Latin literature, the age of Trajan might hold its own against any earlier period of the Imperial rule. For we must remember that the great writers of the early days of Augustus are in truth writers of the republican period living on into the Empire. The Flavian period, continued under Trajan, is quite as rich as the earlier days of the Empire itself. And we may notice that the arch of Beneventum marks the reign of Trajan, and with it the Roman Empire, at what was really its highest point. It was raised at a time when it could commemorate conquered Dacia and tributary Armenia. That Dacia and Armenia could be brought within the range of that Roman world which is continued in the system of modern Europe is proved by daily witnesses. But the arch of Beneventum was built too early to commemorate its hero's later victories in the further East, momentary victories in lands which neither Alexander nor Trajan could bring within the abiding range of Western influences.

The arch of Trajan is so distinctly the most famous thing in Benevento that it has carried us out of all chronological order. But the historical interest of Beneventum lies earlier and later than Trajan's day. In truth the Pax Romana forbade that the main interest of any Italian city should lie in Trajan's day. We may believe or not as we please in the presence of DiomÊdÊs and Æneas; but Pyrrhos, Hanno, Totilas, and Manfred are visitors who cannot be forgotten. The city has looked out on many battles, from the overthrow of the Molossian to the overthrow of the Swabian. A pleasing tale in its history is when that Tiberius Gracchus who is the first of a name to appear in Roman history led back his victorious slave-soldiers to receive the reward of freedom, and to be welcomed by the rejoicing people of the faithful colony. For among the Thirty Cities of those days, the Latin colony of Beneventum was not one of the laggard twelve, but one of the faithful eighteen that were ready to endure all hardships. In later warfare the city seems to have been less steadfast. It welcomed Belisarius, and in after days Totilas took it without any trouble, and if he destroyed the walls it was not out of revenge for any resistance on the part of its inhabitants, but for fear they should supply a post of defence for an imperial army. But the greatest day of Beneventum as an historical city comes later than Totilas and earlier than Manfred. The memory of that day may be studied in the chief remaining buildings in the city, the two greatest churches and the castle. The west front of the metropolitan church, a grand example of Italian Romanesque, is furthermore a perfect chronicle of local history. There we may read, built up into the wall, a crowd of monumental records of the Lombard princes of Beneventum, with their deeds, especially their dealings with the dangerous power of the Franks, set forth at length. The bronze doors are famous, with their long array of Scriptural subjects ending in a lesson in the ecclesiastical geography of the province, the figures of the Archbishop of Beneventum and his suffragans. The harmony of the front is a little marred by the single low and massive corner-tower; but the inscription sums up the history of Beneventum, political and physical, for some ages. The city was laid waste by the Emperor Frederick in 1229 and by an earthquake in 1688. The tower was built after the first overthrow in 1279; it was restored after the second in 1690. Destruction wrought by the elements would thus seem to be more easily repaired than destruction wrought by the hand of CÆsar. But it is somewhat strange to find Frederick, in his own belief a successor of Trajan, a follower of Trajan in Eastern conquests, branded as a destroyer in the city where Trajan's memory is cherished. But Frederick had to deal with a kind of power which Trajan knew not. The wrath of the later Emperor fell on a city which was too faithful to the Roman Bishop. The course of Trajan's rule was not likely to be interfered with either by the obscure chief of the persecuted Christian sect, or by any minister of the creed of which Trajan was himself chief Pontiff.

Within the church the repairs done after the earthquake have wrought a good deal of mischief. But we can still see the four ranges of columns of a mighty basilica which must once have taken its place among the noblest of its class. Their capitals are a little nondescript; but they do not offend the eye; if they were certified to be of Trajan's day, it would doubtless be the right thing to admire them. The ambones and the Easter-light are lovely work of the early fourteenth century, the days of a real Renaissance, truer than that which followed. The treasury is rich in vestments and other precious things; but the reader of Anselm's Life looks in vain for that specially gorgeous vestment which a Beneventan Archbishop of the eleventh century bore away from Canterbury in exchange for the arm of St. Bartholomew, and which made its wearer the most splendid object among the assembled fathers at Bari. If this missing garment carries our thoughts to England, the round church of St. Sophia—hexagonal in its inner range—carries us to the Eastern world, and reminds us that there was more than one line of successors of Trajan, and that Beneventum came under the influences of both. The cloister, with its amazing series of capitals, its birds, its elephants, its hunting scenes, may rank with those of Aosta and of Arles, of which that of Aosta can supply camels to match the Beneventan elephants. The castle dates only from Pope John the Twenty-second, far away at Avignon; we look perhaps more carefully at the older fragments built up in its walls and on the lion in front of it. With the lion in our thoughts we may look out for other beasts, graven or molten or abiding in their own relics. Procopius saw there the tusks of the Kalydonian boar, as in later times he might, either at Warwick or at Bristol, have seen the ribs of the dun cow. It is for palÆontologists to say what it was that the Beneventan antiquaries really showed him. Failing this natural wonder we go to pay our respects to another beast whose shape is due to man's device, in quite another part of the city. A rudely carved bovine animal, in which local patriotism sees the Samnite bull—the bull which, on the coins of revived Samnium, so proudly trampled down the Roman wolf—is now cruelly to be ruled as nothing better than a monument of intruding Apis-worship. We have less time to spend at Benevento than at some other cities; but the Roman arches and vaults of the strange building called Quaranta Santi, the grand Roman bridge below, must not be forgotten, and we must still give one more thought to the two mighty men whose hopes were shattered at Beneventum. Manfred fell with his faithful Saracens around him; Pyrrhos lived to fall by a meaner end at Argos; but Beneventum ended the real career of both. It is strange how the two were in some sort the converse of each other. Pyrrhos carried the Epeirot arms into Sicily and southern Italy; Manfred, lord of Sicily and southern Italy, established a Sicilian dominion on the coast of Epeiros. Korkyra, Corfu, the island which has seen every master except the Turk, formed part of the dominions of both alike. We leave Benevento for another city in which the East and the West of Europe, and a crowd of other elements besides, meet yet more closely than they do at Benevento. At Beneventum the eye of Horace began to be caught by the well-known mountains of Apulia; Procopius somewhat boldly speaks of inland Beneventum as being opposite to Dalmatia. The city which we take as our next chief goal, if not strictly opposite to Dalmatia, is so marked as being opposite to one Illyrian port as to have sent its name, so to speak, across the Hadriatic. We will not trouble ourselves to look out for Equotuticum, or to regale ourselves with either the bread or the water of Canusium. It is to the walls of Bari, fishy Bari, that we have to make our way; at Bari, Greek, Latin, Saracen, even Englishman, are all at home, and Bari is opposite to Antivari.

VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia.

At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the iter ad Brundisium is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire, or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction. Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi, has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed DiomÊdÊs as a founder, while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent. Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar it. It was—indeed, with all mutilations, it still is—a fine front of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as they do a kind of earlier and more healthy Renaissance, which, taking classical form as its general models, took them only as general models, and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.

Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller—at least the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and Benevento—by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it represents. Along this coast, any CÆsar of the East is in his place, if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms—not without a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen—which is the characteristic style of this region, the natural result of its political history. Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades, and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports. The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to pay CÆsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay CÆsar his due. We long to stop at Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of the whole region at Bari.

Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church, which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers. A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.

The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the Imperial eagle—better suited for the purpose than anything else—all do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms. But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below. Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively Oriental, and which look as if they had come—as they possibly may have come—from a mosque.

Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of styles—more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style, for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly, by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.

IX. Bari.

We are now at Barium, Bari, the original Bari of the West, as distinguished from the Bari, Bar, Antibaris, Antivari, which repeats its name on the opposite coast. There we can now again, as we could have done seventy years back at Cattaro, land at a Montenegrin haven. The distinction between the two bearers of the name of Bari implies an association which is not out of place. The historic interest of Bari gathers wholly round its connexion with the lands on the other side of Hadria. In earlier days the place has really no history whatever. Its most memorable day was when the powers of the Eastern and Western Empires—powers which perhaps never again worked in such harmony—were needed to dislodge a Saracen Sultan from its walls. "Emir," some one will say, not "Sultan," and certainly we are more used in Europe to Sultans of much later date than the days of Lewis the Second and Basil the First, Sultans coming from quite other lands than any that can have sent forth the Mussulman prince of Bari. But he is called Sultan as well as Emir by his one biographer, the Emperor Constantine, and we cannot appeal from those august pages which still form the best guide-book to the eastern shores of the Hadriatic. Anyhow, the Sultan of Bari was a philosopher; he never laughed, except once when he saw a wheel go round; for that reminded him of the ups and downs of his own fortunes. Then Bari passes to the rule of the Eastern Empire; instead of a Sultan it has a Katapan, representative of the Eastern Augustus in that Italian dominion which had become so small at the beginning of the ninth century, and which was so great again at its end. Threatened again at the beginning of the eleventh century by new Saracen invaders, it is guarded by the fleets of Venice, still the faithful vassal of Constantinople against a common enemy. Seventy years later the arms of Robert Wiscard added the capital of Byzantine Italy to his Norman dominion, and before the century was out, Pope Urban, the great stirrer of the West against the Mussulman East, chose Bari as the scene of the Council called to denounce at once the practical abuses of the Christian West and the dogmatic errors of the Christian East. Once more, in the next age, we find Bari looking across the sea to its old lord, and chastised by the Sicilian king for its disloyalty. Add that Bari, before all saints, still honours St. Nicolas of the Lykian Myra, and keeps his relics sacred, we are told, from Turkish desecration by the craft of merchants of her own city. Altogether Bari seems, at least in its history, as much Greek as Italian or Norman. It would seem neither unnatural nor unpleasant if Greek were still the tongue of the seafaring folk of Bari, much as a Norman in his own land often carries an air about him which would make Danish seem a much more natural speech for him than French.

But the great buildings of Bari belong to that mixed Norman and Italian style of which we have already seen something at Bitonto. The architectural attractions of the city are chiefly to be found in two great churches and one smaller one. The castle, standing by the sea, should have its landward side walked round, and the walk will reveal much of picturesque outline and a little of good detail. But it is the churches, above all the great abbey of St. Nicolas, which are the glory of Bari. They all lie in the old town by the sea, the old town of narrow and crooked streets, in which it does not much matter which way you go; you are sure to come either to the castle or to one of the churches before very long. Very different are things in the new town, which we may rejoice in as we look at it as a sign of Bari's abiding or renewed prosperity, but which can raise no feelings of pleasure on any other ground. Its streets, crossing each other at right angles, are indeed carefully dedicated to the worthies of Bari; but, unless we can always remember which of several perhaps not very familiar worthies watches over each of several angles which are exactly alike, it is easy to take a wrong turn and to put oneself under the care of Andrew of Bari when we ought rather to be commending ourselves to Robert. And under either protection we yearn in the wide straight streets for some physical shelter from the Apulian sun, and wonder why modern Rome, modern Athens, and modern Bari should have so much less common sense than Bologna, Padua, and Corfu had in days long past. Still, amid this rectangular labyrinth the sea is a help on one side, while on another the tall tower of the metropolitan church of St. Sabinus beckons us into the older streets, whose narrowness and crookedness at least supply shade. That tower, one of the tallest and stateliest of Italy, we naturally assume to be a detached campanile, without a fellow and standing apart from its confederate buildings, church and baptistery. So it doubtless would be in a purely Italian city; but here we are in the city where the Norman displaced the Greek. The two great churches of Bari, like that of Bitonto, have their towers wrought into the building in Norman fashion, and at the duomo the great round baptistery is also merged in the same mass with the church and its towers. Both of the great churches of Bari have east ends of the same kind as that at Bitonto; the apses are swallowed up; the place where the great apse should be is marked by a single splendid Romanesque window. The eastern towers of St. Nicolas have never been carried up; at St. Sabinus the southern one has perished, but the northern one still soars in all its majesty, thoroughly Italian in its conception, but rather to be called Norman in its detail. St. Nicolas has also another pair of unfinished towers at its west end, standing at once beyond the aisles as at Wells and Rouen, and in front of them as at Holyrood. They flank a grand Italian front which one would think would be finer without them. These western towers are absent in the metropolitan church; but that has a most perfect octagonal cupola over the crossing, the grouping of which with the two lofty eastern towers, if there was any point from which it could really be seen, must have been wonderful. Thus, in both churches, something of a German outline has either been consciously brought in or has been incidentally stumbled on. The four towers of St. Nicolas, the octagon and eastern tower of St. Sabinus, will easily find Rhenish fellows, though we should perhaps have to go as far as AngoulÊme for a single tower of equal majesty mourning over a vanished brother. In other points the external arrangements of the two great churches of Bari have much in common. The rose windows, the coupled windows, the blank arcades, are much the same in both. So is the choice of animal forms for the fanciful supports of columns. In most places the lion discharges that function—in a building designed by lions we should doubtless see something different. So we do here at Bari, where the solid forms of the pachydermata are, perhaps discreetly, preferred to the lighter carnivora. The elephant, we think, is to be found in both churches, and the huge earth-shaking beast is represented so as to remind us both of Pyrrhos and of Hannibal; some have the smaller ear of India, some the larger of Africa. The hippopotamus appears only in the west front of St. Nicolas. Had the daring shipfolk who bore away the saint's bones from Lykia made their way to the Nile also?

When we pass the threshold of the two buildings we see that their fate in modern times has been very different. St. Sabinus has suffered much as Bitonto has suffered. The upper part of the building is hidden in just the same fashion, and ugly tricks have been played with the columns and their capitals. St. Nicolas, on the other hand, has been left comparatively alone. The chief changes which it has undergone must have taken place not very long after the original building. The original plan was much the same as that of Bitonto—three arches from columns, a massive pier, then three more arches from columns. But this arrangement was disturbed at an early time by throwing three spanning arches across the nave. The effect is so striking that we can hardly regret their presence; but it is perfectly easy to see that they are insertions, and, though they are essentially of the same style, yet they differ in their details from the original columns. These last all approach more or less to the Corinthian type; in the under-church the patterns are more varied. Here are still the wonder-working relics of St. Nicolas, and the balsam or "manna" which flows from them may still be drunk. In the duomo the under-church has been restored out of all ancient character, but it still keeps an ancient Byzantine picture.

As so often happens, the secondary church of Bari altogether surpassed the mother church in historic fame and local honour. To ourselves the fact in its history which comes home most nearly is that it was here that Urban held his Council, here that Anselm, to the satisfaction of all Western minds, refuted the creed of the East, here that he interceded with the Pontiff and the assembled fathers on behalf of the king who had wronged him. Here too it was that the keen eye of English Eadmer spied out on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Beneventum the splendid cope which is no longer to be seen at Beneventum. Such little touches in those days often brought the ends of the world together in a way to which, in our days of more general intercourse, nothing answers. When French was the polite language alike at Dunfermline and at Jerusalem, when the Latin-speaking clerk was at home in any corner of the West, when the few men of the West who had learned Greek spoke it so that a Greek could understand them, when men passed to and fro between the civil services of England and Sicily, communication between distant parts of Europe was in some ways easier than it is now. Bari, one of the chief places for setting out on crusades, must for a long time have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan city. We do feel that the ends of the earth have combined to meet at Bari, when we find the place of honour in the church of St. Nicolas at Bari held by a princess of Bari, who became Queen of the greatest Slavonic kingdom. Emblematic figures of Bari and Poland support the tomb of Queen Bona, and her epitaph describes her husband Sigismund, the first of that name, as not only the mighty King of Poland, but Grand-Duke of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Mazovia, and Samogitia. Yet we might have lighted on Slavonic associations earlier on the road. There is a strange record of a Bulgarian settlement in the parts of Beneventum; but that would take us yet further afield: it was before Bulgarians became Slavonic. But what are we to say to the Samnite Schiavia which sheltered Anselm?

The journey is done—

Otranto lies yet further; but Otranto, yet more notably than Bari, comes within the Venetian Notitia. So does Brundisium, city of the stag's horn, of the haven so aptly called, if we only knew in what tongue it is that Brentesium has that meaning. But we are tempted to regret that Brindisi and not Otranto is the point for which Hadria has to be crossed. Brindisi has no moral claim. We cannot look thence, as we can from Otranto, upon the mountains of still enslaved Epeiros; no one is tempted even to dream that he looks on free Corfu or on the lesser satellite that stands in front as its outpost.