Edward A. Freeman

“ For the child of Salona, the great object of a Dalmatian voyage, is coming within sight far away. The mighty campanile of Spalato rises, kindled with the last rays of sunlight; presently the cupola of the metropolitan church, the long line of the palace wall, the buildings of what is plainly no inconsiderable city, stand out against their mountain background. The sun has gone down behind the western headland, but we can get our first glimpse of the city, its arcades and tower and temples, by that moonlight which is as good at Spalato as at Melrose. ”

“ Dimly rising above us we see, disfigured indeed, but not destroyed, the pillared front of the palace, reminding us of the Tabularium of Rome's own Capitol. We pass under gloomy arches, through dark passages, and presently we find ourselves in the centre of palace and city, between those two renowned rows of arches which mark the greatest of all epochs in the history of the building art. We think how the man who re-organized the Empire of Rome was also the man who first put harmony and consistency into the architecture of Rome. ”

“ We pass through the stately streets of the newer town, we thread the steep ascents which lead us to the older town above, and we nowhere light on any of those little scraps of ornamental architecture, a window, a doorway, a column, which meet us at every step in so many of the cities of Italy. Yet the monumental wealth of Trieste is all but equal to the monumental wealth of Ancona. At Ancona we have the cathedral church and the triumphal arch; so we have at Trieste; though at Trieste we have nothing to set against the grand front of the lower and smaller church of Ancona. ”

“ So far as Aquileia is a city at all, it is now a "church city." The patriarchal church, with its tall but certainly not beautiful campanile, soars above all. But, if it soars above all, it still is not all. Here and there a fragment of a column, or an inscription built into the wall, reminds us of what Aquileia once was. One ingenious man has even built himself an outhouse wholly out of such scraps, here a capital, there a bit of sculpture, there inscriptions of various dates, with letters of the best and of the worst kinds of Roman lettering. ”

“ As we gaze on enslaved Durazzo, with free Greece behind us, with free Montenegro before us—as we run swiftly in our thoughts over the long history of the spot—as we specially call up the deeds of our own countrymen on the shore on which we look—we feel that something indeed has been done, but that there is yet much more to do. Before us, behind us, are lands to which England, and England only, has given freedom. A day must come when, what England has done for Corfu, for Arta, and for Dulcigno, she must do for Jôannina and for Durazzo. ”

“ In the general history of Europe Ragusa stands out, as the city itself stands out to the eye of the traveller, as that one among the famous cities of the Dalmatian and Albanian coast where the Lion of Saint Mark is not to be seen.
As is the history, so is the general effect. As we sail past Ragusa, as we look at the city from any of the several points which the voyage opens to us, we say at once, Here is one of the most striking sights of our whole voyage; but we cannot at once point our finger to any one specially striking object. ”

“ But the columns at Udine are not a mere range like those at Venice. They stand row behind row, almost like the columns of a crypt, and they supply a profitable study in their floriated capitals. The pillared space forms the market-place of the city, and a busy place it is at the times of buying and selling, filled with the characteristic merchandise of the district, the golden balls of silk, for whose presence the Venetian land may thank the adventurous monks of Justinian's day. ”

“ Not placed in any striking position, not a hill-city, not in any strictness a river-city, but a city of the plain looking towards the distant mountains—not adorned by any building of conspicuous splendour—Treviso is still far from being void of objects which deserve study. As we look on the city, either from the lofty walk into which so large a part of its walls have been turned, or else from the neighbourhood of its railway station, its aspect, without rivalling that of the great cities of 16 Italy, is far from unsatisfactory. ”

“ Tergeste, Trieste, stands forth as a rival of Venice, which has, in a low practical view of things, outstripped her. Italian zeal naturally cries for the recovery of a great city, once part of the old Italian kingdom, and whose speech is largely, perhaps chiefly, Italian to this day. But, cry of Italia Irredenta, however far it may go, he must not go so far as this. Trieste, a cosmopolitan city on a Slavonic shore, cannot be called Italian in the same sense as the lands and towns so near Verona which yearn to be as Verona is. ”

“ But there is no grand church, no grand municipal palace; the castle itself is not what on such a site it ought to be. The castle is the kernel of the whole place. Gorizia is not a hill-town, nor can we call it a river-town. There is the castle on the hill, and the town seems to have gathered at its foot. The castle soars so commandingly over the country round that we wish here, as at Udine, that there was something better to soar than the ugly barrack which forms its uppermost stage. There are indeed better things within Count Leopold's gateway. ”

“ Yes, it is in the court of the persecutor, the man who boasted that he had wiped out the Christian superstition from the world, that we see the noblest forestalling of the long arcades of the Christian basilica. It is with thoughts like these, thoughts pressing all the more upon us where every outline is clear and every detail is invisible, that we tread for the first time the Court of Jovius—the columns with their arches on either side of us, the vast bell-tower rising to the sky, as if to mock the art of those whose mightiest works might still seem only to grovel upon earth. ”

“ Not a few points of Peloponnêsos for some ages, all Peloponnêsos for a few years, Athens itself for a moment, comes within the same range. We might write the history of Argos from the Venetian point of view, a point of view which would shut out the history of Mykênê, and would look on Tiryns only as Palai-Nauplia, the precursor of Napoli di Romania. But no man could journey through Greece itself with Venice in this way in his thoughts. Far older, far nobler, memories would press upon him at every moment. ”

“ The land which we see is Hellenic in a sense in which not even Sicily, not even the Great Hellas of Southern Italy, much less then the Dalmatian archipelago, ever became Hellenic. From the first historic glimpse which we get of Korkyra, it is not merely a land fringed by Hellenic colonies; it is a Hellenic island, the dominion of a single Hellenic city, a territory the whole of whose inhabitants were, at the beginning of recorded history, either actually Hellenic or so thoroughly hellenized that no one thought of calling their Hellenic position in question. ”

“ The lower city, Cattaro itself, τὰ κάτω Δεκάτερα, seems to lie so quietly, so peacefully, as if in a world of its own from which nothing beyond the shores of 278 its own Bocche could enter, that we are tempted to forget, not only that the spot has been the scene of so many revolutions through so many ages, but that it is even now a border city, a city on the marchland of contending powers, creeds, and races. But, if we once look up to the mountains, we see signs both of the past and of the present, which may remind us of the true nature and history of the land in which we are. ”

“ Before we reach Otranto, while we are still on the railway, the mountains of Albania rise clearly before our eyes; from the hill of Otranto itself they rise more clearly still. And even to those to whom those heights are no unfamiliar objects from 317 nearer points of view, it is a thrilling and a saddening thought, when we look forth for the first time from a land of which every inch belongs to the free and Christian world, and gaze on the once kindred land that has passed away from freedom and from Christendom. ”

“ Sabioncello, the long, narrow, stony peninsula, all backbone and nothing else, formed part of the dominions of the commonwealth of Ragusa. Curzola was for three centuries and a half a stronghold of that other commonwealth which Ragusa so dreaded that she preferred the Turk as her neighbour. Nowhere does the winged lion meet us more often or more prominently than on the towers and over the gates of Curzola. And no wonder; for Curzola was the choice seat of Venetian power in these waters, her strong arsenal, the place for the building of her galleys. ”

“ Up the mountain, during part of its course skirting the castle walls, climbs the winding road—the staircase rather—which leads from Cattaro to Tzetinje. On it climbs, up and up, till it is lost in the higher peaks; long before the traveller reaches the frontier line which divides Dalmatia and Montenegro, long before he reaches the ridge to which he looks up from Cattaro and its gulf, he has begun to look down, not only on the gulf and the city, but on the mountain castle itself, as something lying far below his feet. ”

“ It is a moment to be marked in a life, as we round the island headland, one of the stony Dalmatian hills rising bleak and barren from the sea, and catch the first glimpse of the city, the tall bell-tower, the proud rampart of mountains which forms its background. ”

“ But the first general impression of the land is one of utter barrenness, and for a great part of our course, long after we have come down into the lower ground, this first general impression remains literally true. It is not like a mountain valley or a mountain coast, with a fringe of inhabited and cultivated land at the foot of the heights. All is barren; all is stone; stone which, if it serves no other human purpose, might at least be used to make the road better. ”

“ When we have reached Spalato, we have not yet gone through half our course. Before we can come back to study its wonders more worthily, we have to spend a day in the archipelago of larger islands, nearly each of which, unlike their northern fellows, has some old historical memory. We have for part of another day to sail along that still narrower strip of Christendom which fences off Ragusa from the Mussulman, to thread our way through the lovely Bocche of Cattaro, till we reach the furthest of Dalmatian cities, with the path to unconquered Montenegro over our heads. ”

“ But perhaps not much in the way of art is to be looked for in a city where, as at Trieste and Ancona and Rome herself, it seems to be looked on as adding beauty to the inside of a church to swathe marble columns and Corinthian capitals in ugly wrappings of red cloth. ”

“ Still as we tread, even in their state of ruin, the streets, the little piazze, of what once was Antivari, we see that the city perched on its Albanian height must have been no unworthy fellow of its neighbours on the Dalmatian shore.
It is sad that the enlargement of Europe and of Christendom, the winning back of their ancient coast by the valiant warriors of the Black Mountain, should have been bought only at such a price as the destruction of this interesting and really beautiful little city. The loss, it may be feared, cannot be repaired. ”

“ Venice was an inland power on that Italian land off which she herself lay anchored. She might pass for an inland power even on the Ragusan side of the Hadriatic. The Dalmatian territory of Venice looks on the map like a narrow strip; but, compared with the Ragusan coast, the Venetian coast has a wide Venetian mainland to the back of it. But Ragusa lies at the foot of the mountains, and the crest of the mountains was her boundary. She has always sat on a little ledge of civilization, for four centuries on a little ledge of Christendom, with a measureless background of barbarism behind her. ”

“ All this is as it was; modern military art has added to the defences of Ragusa, but it has not taken away her elder bulwarks. But her haven is now of the very smallest, and admits only vessels of the smallest size. The modern haven is at Gravosa, and the road which Sir Gardner Wilkinson describes as so well kept, but as useless because no carriages went upon it, is still as good and more useful. At this moment Ragusa bears the honourable character of a city of refuge for the unhappy ones who seek shelter under the government of a civilized state from the barbarian rule beyond the mountains. ”

“ Presently we plunge into the full intricacies of the Dalmatian seas. We pass through the narrow channel which parts the mainland from the eastern promontory of the long, slender island of Lesina—the awl. Here we come within old Hellenic memories. We are now within the full range of Greek colonization, though of Greek colonization only in its latest stage. Issa, now Lissa, Black Korkyra, now Curzola, amongst the islands, and Epidauros on the mainland, were all of them undoubted Greek settlements. ”

“ Between Benevento and Bari the eye is caught by the great tower of Trani. Such a city cannot be passed by; or, if we are driven to pass it by, we must go back to get something more than a glimpse of it. And Trani is one of the towns pledged to Venice by Ferdinand of Naples. In the midst of cities whose chief memories later than old Imperial times carry us back to the Norman and Swabian days of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, we find ourselves suddenly plunged into the Venetian history of the end of the fifteenth. ”

“ Go straight from the railway-station towards another bell-tower, not to that of the duomo. That course will lead to the so-called villa or public garden. The suppressed Dominican convent close by its gate has no attractive feature except its tower, one of the usual Italian type, only with pointed arches. But the grounds of the villa, raised on the ancient walls of the monastic precinct, look down at once on the waves of Hadria. In the northern view we look out on lands and hills beyond the water; but no man must dream that the eastern peninsula of Europe is to be seen from Trani. ”