Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI | Page 5

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; tho' at Trieste we
have nothing to set against the grand front of the lower and smaller
church of Ancona. But at Ancona arch and duomo both stand out
before all eyes; at Trieste both have to be looked for. The church of
Saint Justus at Trieste crowns the hill as well as the church of Saint
Cyriacus at Ancona; but it does not in the same way proclaim its
presence. The castle, with its ugly modern fortifications, rises again
above the church; and the duomo of Trieste, with its shapeless outline
and its low, heavy, unsightly campanile, does not catch the eyes like
the Greek cross and cupola of Ancona.
Again at Trieste the arch could never, in its best days, have been a rival
to the arch at Ancona; and now either we have to hunt it out by an
effort, or else it comes upon us suddenly, standing, as it does, at the
head of a mean street on the ascent to the upper town. Of a truth it can
not compete with Ancona or with Rimini, with Orange[6] or with Aosta.
But the duomo, utterly unsightly as it is in a general view, puts on quite
a new character when we first see the remains of pagan times
imprisoned in the lower stage of the heavy campanile, still more so
when we take our first glance of its wonderful interior. At the first
glimpse we see that here there is a mystery to be unraveled; and as we
gradually find the clue to the marvelous changes which it has
undergone, we feel that outside show is not everything, and that, in
point both of antiquity and of interest, tho' not of actual beauty, the
double basilica of Trieste may claim no mean place among buildings of
its own type. Even after the glories of Rome and Ravenna, the
Tergestine church may be studied with no small pleasure and profit, as
an example of a kind of transformation of which neither Rome nor
Ravenna can supply another example....
The other ancient relic at Trieste is the small triumphal arch. On one

side it keeps its Corinthian pilasters; on the other they are imbedded in
a house. The arch is in a certain sense double; but the two are close
together, and touch in the keystone. The Roman date of this arch can
not be doubted; but legends connect it both with Charles the Great and
with Richard of Poitou and of England, a prince about whom
Tergestine fancy has been very busy. The popular name of the arch is
Arco Riccardo.
Such, beside some fragments in the museum, are all the remains that
the antiquary will find in Trieste; not much in point of number, but, in
the case of the duomo at least, of surpassing interest in their own way.
But the true merit of Trieste is not in anything that it has itself, its
church, its arch, its noble site. Placed there at the head of the gulf, on
the borders of two great portions of the Empire, it leads to the land
which produced that line of famous Illyrian Emperors who for a while
checked the advance of our own race in the world's history, and it leads
specially to the chosen home of the greatest among them.[7] The chief
glory of Trieste, after all, is that it is the way to Spalato....
At Pola the monuments of Pietas Julia claim the first place; the basilica,
tho' not without a certain special interest, comes long after them. The
character of the place is fixt by the first sight of it; we see the present
and we see the more distant past; the Austrian navy is to be seen, and
the amphitheater is to be seen. But intermediate times have little to
show; if the duomo strikes the eye at all, it strikes it only by the
extreme ugliness of its outside, nor is there anything very taking,
nothing like the picturesque castle of Pirano, in the works which
occupy the site of the colonial capitol. The duomo should not be
forgotten; even the church of Saint Francis is worth a glance; but it is in
the remains of the Roman colony, in the amphitheater, the arches, the
temples, the fragments preserved in that temple which serves, as at
Nîmes,[8] for a museum, that the real antiquarian wealth of Pola lies....
The known history of Pola begins with the Roman conquest of Istria in
178 B.C. The town became a Roman colony and a flourishing seat of
commerce. Its action on the republican side in