That haven is indeed a noble one. Few sights are more striking than to see the huge mass of the amphitheatre at Pola seeming to rise at once out of the land-locked sea. As Pola is seen now, the amphitheatre is the one monument of its older days which strikes the eye in the general view, and which divides attention with signs that show how heartily the once forsaken city has entered on its new career. But in the old time Pola could show all the buildings which befitted its rank as a colony of Rome. The amphitheatre of course stood without the walls; the city itself stood at the foot and on the slope of the hill which was crowned by the capitol of the colony, where the modern fortress rises above the Franciscan church. Parts of the Roman wall still stand; one of its gates is left; another has left a neighbour and a memory. At the north side of the capitol stands the Porta Gemina, leading from it to the amphitheatre. The outer gateway remains, a double gate-way, as its name implies, with three Corinthian half-columns between and on each side of the two arches. But here steps in a singular architectural peculiarity, one which reminds us that we are on the road to Spalato, and which already points to the arcades of Diocletian. The columns support an entablature with its frieze and cornice, but the architrave is wanting. Does not this show a lurking sign of what was coming, a lurking feeling that the arch itself was the true architrave? Be this as it may, there it stands, sinning, like so many other ancient works, against pedantic rules, but perhaps thereby winning its place in the great series of architectural strivings which the palace of Spalato shows us the crowning-point. The other arch, which is commonly known as Porta Aurea or Porta Aurata, conforms more nearly to ordinary rules. Here we have the arch with the coupled Corinthian columns on each side of it, supporting, as usual, their bit of broken entablature, and leaving room for a spandril filled in much the same fashion as in the arch of Severus at Rome. Compared with other arches of the same kind, this arch of Pola may certainly claim to rank amongst the most graceful of its class. With Trajan's arch at Ancona it can hardly be compared. That tallest and slenderest of monumental arches palpably stands on the haven to be looked at; while the arch of Pola, like its fellows at Rimini and Aosta, and like the arch of Drusus at Rome, is a real thoroughfare, which the citizens of Pietas Julia must have been in the daily habit of passing under. And, as compared with the arches of Rimini and Aosta, its design is perhaps the most pleasing of the three. Its proportions are better designed; the coupled columns on each side are more graceful than either the single columns at Rimini or the pair of columns which at Aosta are placed so much further apart. The idolater of minute rules will not be offended, as at Aosta, with Doric triglyphs placed over Corinthian capitals, and the lover of consistent design will not regret the absence of the sham pediment of Rimini. But it must be borne in mind that the arch of Pola did not originally stand alone, and that its usual name of Porta Aurea is a misnomer. It was built close against the golden gate of the city, whose name it has usurped. But it is, in truth, the family arch of the Sergii, raised in honour of one of that house by his wife Salvia Postuma. As such, it has a special interest in the local history of Pola. Ages afterwards, as late as the thirteenth century, Sergii appear again at Pola, as one of the chief families by whose dissensions the commonwealth was torn in pieces. If there is authentic evidence to connect these latter Sergii with the Sergii of the arch, and these again with the great Patrician gens which played such a part in the history of the Roman commonwealth, here would indeed be a pedigree before which that of the house of Paris itself might stand abashed.
A curious dialogue of the year 1600 is printed by Dr. Kandler in his little book, Cenni al Forrestiere che visita Pola, which, with a later little book, Pola und seine nächste Umgebung, by A. Gareis, form together a very sufficient guide for the visitor to Pola. From this evidence it is plain that, as late as the end of the sixteenth century, the ancient buildings of Pola were in a far more perfect state than they are now. Even late in the next century, in the days of Spon and Wheler, a great deal was standing that is no longer there. Wheler's view represents the city surrounded with walls, and with at least one gate. The amphitheatre stands without the wall; the arch of the Sergii stands within it; but the theatre must have utterly vanished, because in the references to the plan its name is given to the amphitheatre. And it must have been before this time that the amphitheatre had begun to be mutilated in order to supply materials for the fortress on the capitoline hill. Indeed it is even said that there was at one time a scheme for carrying off the amphitheatre bodily to Venice and setting it up on the Lido. This scheme, never carried out, almost beats one which actually was carried out, when the people of Jersey gave a cromlech as a mark of respect to a popular governor, by whom it was carried off and set up in his grounds in England. Of the two temples in the forum, that which is said to have been dedicated to Diana is utterly masked by the process which turned it into the palace of the Venetian governor. A decent Venetian arcade has supplanted its portico; but some of the original details can be made out on the other sides. But the temple of Augustus, the restorer of Pietas Julia, with its portico of unfluted Corinthian columns, still fittingly remains almost untouched. Fragments and remains of all dates are gathered together within and without the temple, and new stores are constantly brought to light in digging the foundations for the buildings of the growing town. But the chief wonder of Pola, after all, is its amphitheatre. Travellers are sometimes apt to complain, and that not wholly without reason, that all amphitheatres are very like one another. At Pola this remark is less true than elsewhere, as the amphitheatre there has several marked peculiarities of its own. We do not pretend to expound all its details scientifically; but this we may say, that those who dispute—if the dispute still goes on—about various points as regards the Coliseum at Rome will do well to go and look for some further lights in the amphitheatre of Pola. The outer range, which is wonderfully perfect, while the inner arrangements are fearfully ruined, consists, on the side towards the town, of two rows of arches, with a third story with square-headed openings above them. But the main peculiarity in the outside is to be found in four tower-like projections, not, as at Arles and Nîmes, signs of Saracenic occupation, but clearly parts of the original design. Many conjectures have been made about them; they look as if they were means of approach to the upper part of the building; but it is wisest not to be positive. But the main peculiarity of this amphitheatre is that it lies on the slope of a hill, which thus supplied a natural basement for the seats on one side only. But this same position swallowed up the lower arcade on this side, and it hindered the usual works underneath the seats from being carried into this part of the building. In the other part the traces of the underground arrangements are very clear, especially those which seem to have been meant for the naumachiæ. These we specially recommend to any disputants about the underground works of the Flavian amphitheatre.
The Roman antiquities of Pola are thus its chief attraction, and they are enough to give Pietas Julia a high place among Roman colonies. But the ecclesiastical side of the city must not be wholly forgotten. The duomo, if a small matter after that of Parenzo, if absolutely unsightly as seen from without, is not without its importance. It may briefly be described as a church of the fifteenth century, built on the lines of an ancient basilica, some parts of whose materials have been used up again. There is, we believe, no kind of doubt as to the date, and we do not see why Mr. Neale should have wondered at Murray's Handbook for assigning the building to the time to which it really belongs. No one could surely have placed a church with pointed arches, and with capitals of the kind so common in Venetian buildings, more than a century or two earlier. There is indeed an inscription built into the south wall which has a special interest from another point of view, but which, one would have thought, could hardly have led any one to mistake the date of the existing church. It records the building of the church by Bishop Handegis in 857, "Regnante Ludowico Imperatore Augusto in Italia." The minute accuracy of the phrase—"the Emperor Lewis being King in Italy"—is in itself something amazing; and this inscription shares the interest which attaches to any memorial of that gallant prince, the most truly Roman Emperor of his line. And it is something to mark that the stonecutter doubted between "Lodowico" and "Ludowico," and wrote both letters, one over the other. But the inscription of course refers to a reconstruction some hundred years earlier than the time when the church took its present shape. Yet these basilican churches were so constantly reconstructed over and over again, and largely out of the same materials, that the building of the fifteenth century may very well reproduce the general effect, both of the building of the eighth and of the far earlier church, parts of which have lived on through both recastings.
The ten arches on each side of the Polan basilica are all pointed, but the width of the arches differs. Some of them are only just pointed, and it is only in the most eastern pair of arches that the pointed form comes out at all prominently. For here the arches are the narrowest of the series, and the columns the slightest, that on the south side being banded. The arch of triumph, which is round, looks very much as if it had been preserved from the earlier church; and such is clearly the case with two columns and one capital, whose classical Corinthian foliage stands in marked contrast with the Venetian imitations on each side of it. The church, on the whole, though not striking after such a marvel as Parenzo, is really one of high interest, as an example of the way in which the general effect of an early building was sometimes reproduced at a very late time. Still at Pola, among such wealth of earlier remains, it is quite secondary, and its beauties are, even more than is usual in churches of its type, altogether confined to the inside. The campanile is modern and worthless, and the outside of the church itself is disfigured, after the usual fashion of Italian ugliness, with stable-windows and the like. Yet even they are better than the red rags of Trieste and Zara within.
Such is Pola, another step on the road to the birthplace of true grace and harmony in the building art. Yet, among the straits and islands of the Dalmatian coast, there is more than one spot at which the traveller bound for Spalato must stop. The first and most famous one is the city where Venetians and Crusaders once stopped with such deadly effect on that voyage which was to have led them to Jerusalem, but which did lead them only to New Rome. After the glimpses of Istria taken at Parenzo and Pola, the first glimpse, not of Dalmatia itself, but of the half-Italian cities which fringe its coast, may well be taken at Zara.
ZARA.
1875—1877—1881.
The name of Zara is familiar to every one who has read the history of the Fourth Crusade, and its fate in the Fourth Crusade is undoubtedly the one point in its history which makes Zara stand out prominently before the eyes of the world. Of all the possessions of Venice along this coast, it is the one whose connexion with Venice is stamped for ever on the pages of universal history. Those who know nothing else of Zara, who perhaps know nothing at all of the other cities, at least know that, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the possession of Zara was claimed by Venice, and that the claim of Venice was made good by the help of warriors of the Cross who thus turned aside from their course, not for the last time, to wield their arms against a Christian city. It is as Zara that the city is famous, because it is as Zara that its name appears in the pages of the great English teller of the tale. And perhaps those who may casually light on some mention of the city by any of its earlier names may not at once recognize Zara under the form either of Jadera or of Diadora. One is curious to know how a city which under the first Augustus became a Roman colony by the name of Jadera had, in the time of his orthodox successors in the tenth century, changed its name into anything with such a heathenish sound as Diadora. Yet such was its name in the days of Constantine Porphyrogenitus; and the Imperial historian does not make matters much clearer when he tells us that the true Roman name of the city was "Jam erat," implying that the city so called was older than Rome. Let us quote him in his own Greek, if only to show how oddly his Latin words look in their Greek dress.