Such is the church of Parenzo, and at Parenzo the church is the main thing. As we pass away, and catch the last traces of the church of Euphrasius rising above the little peninsular city, our thoughts fly back to the other side of the Hadriatic, and it seems as if the men who came to fetch the great stone from Istria to Ravenna had left one of the noblest basilicas of their own city behind them on the Istrian shore.
POLA.
1875—1881.
After Parenzo the most obvious stopping-place on the Istrian shore will be Pola; and at Pola the main objects of interest for the historical student will be classed in an order of merit exactly opposite to those which he has seen at Parenzo. At Parenzo the main attraction is the great basilica, none the less attractive as being a monument of early opposition to the claims of the Roman see. Beside this ecclesiastical treasure the remains of the Parentine colony are felt to be quite secondary. At Pola things are the other way; the monuments of Pietas Julia claim the first place; the basilica, though not without a certain special interest, comes long after them. The character of the place is fixed 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 amphitheatre 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 amphitheatre, the arches, the temples, the fragments preserved in that temple which serves, as at Nîmes, for a museum, that the real antiquarian wealth of Pola lies.
There is no need to go into the mythical history of the place. Tales about Thracians and Argonauts need not be seriously discussed at this time of day. Nor can there be any need to show that the name Pola is not a contraction of Pietas Julia. Save for the slight accidental likeness of letters, so to say is about as reasonable as to say that London is a corruption of Augusta, or Jerusalem of Ælia. In all these cases the older, native, familiar, name outlived the later, foreign, official, name. When we have thoroughly cleared up the origin of the Illyrians and the old Veneti, we may know something of the earliest inhabitants of Pola, and possibly of the origin of its name. But 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 the civil war brought on it the vengeance of the second Cæsar. But the destroyer became the restorer, and Pietas Julia, in the height of its greatness, far surpassed the extent either of the elder or the younger Pola. Like all cities of this region, Pola kept up its importance down to the days of the Carolingian Empire, the specially flourishing time of the whole district being that of Gothic and Byzantine dominion at Ravenna. A barbarian king, the Roxolan Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to Pola after the submission of his nation to Hadrian; and the panegyrists of the Flavian house rank Pola along with Trier and Autun among the cities which the princes of that house had adorned or strengthened. But in the history of their dynasty the name of the city chiefly stands out as the chosen place for the execution of princes whom it was convenient to put out of the way. Here Crispus died at the bidding of Constantine, and Gallus at the bidding of Constantius. Under Theodoric, Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the Istrian land on which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its inhabitants. In the next generation Pola appears in somewhat of the same character which has come back to it in our own times; it was there that Belisarius gathered the Imperial fleet for his second and less prosperous expedition against the Gothic lords of Italy. But, after the break up of the Frankish Empire, the history of mediæval Pola is but a history of decline. It was, in the geography of Dante, the furthest city of Italy; but, like most of the other cities of its own neighbourhood, its day of greatness had passed away when Dante sang. Tossed to and fro between the temporal and spiritual lords who claimed to be marquesses of Istria, torn by the dissensions of aristocratic and popular parties among its own citizens, Pola found rest, the rest of bondage, in submission to the dominion of Saint Mark in 1331. Since then, till its new birth in our own times, Pola has been a falling city. Like the other Istrian and Dalmatian towns, modern revolutions have handed it over from Venice to Austria, from Austria to France, from France to Austria again. It is under its newest masters that Pola has at last begun to live a fresh life, and the haven whence Belisarius sailed forth has again become a haven in more than name, the cradle of the rising navy of the united Austrian and Hungarian realm.
PORTA GEMINA, POLA.