CATHEDRAL, TRANI, INSIDE.
But the daring attempt is thoroughly successful; there is not, what we might well have looked for, any feeling of weakness; the twin columns yoked together to bear all that would have been laid on the massive round piers of England or their square fellows of Germany, seem fully equal to their work. It may be that the appearance of strength is partly owing to the use of real half-columns, and not mere slender vaulting-shafts, to support the roofs of the aisles. But the slender shaft comes in with good effect to support both the arch between the nave and the transept, and the arch between the transept and the great apse. The lofty transept is wholly an Italian idea; but the general idea of these two tall arches is thoroughly Norman.
In looking at such a church as this, so widely different from any of the many forms with which we are already familiar, there is always a certain doubt as to our own feelings. We admire; as to that there is no doubt. But how far is that admiration the result of mere wonder at something which in any case is strange and striking? how far is it a really intelligent approval of beauty or artistic skill? Both feelings, we may be pretty sure, come in; but it is not easy to say which is the leading one, till we are better acquainted with the building than we are likely to become in an ordinary journey. It is familiarity which is the real test. It is the building which we admire as much the thousandth time as the first which really approves itself to our critical judgement. We have not seen Trani for the thousandth time; but we did what we could; we were so struck with a first visit to Trani that, at the cost of some disturbance of travelling arrangements, we went there again, and we certainly did not admire it less the second time than the first. And, whatever may be the exact relation of the two feelings of mere wonder and of strictly critical approval, it is certain that a third feeling comes in by no means small a measure. This is a kind of feeling of historic fitness. The church of Trani is the kind of church which ought to have been built by Normans building on Apulian ground, with Greek and Saracen skill at their disposal.
But at Trani, as commonly in these Apulian churches, it is not enough to look at the building from above ground. The great height of the apses will have already suggested that there is a lower building of no small size; and so we find it, conspicuously tall and stately, even in this land of tall and stately under-churches—crypt is a word hardly worthy of them. The under-church at Trani shows us a forest of tall columns, some of them fluted, with a vast variety of capitals of foliage. A few only can be called classical; some have the punched ornament characteristic of Ravenna. A good many of the bases have leaves at the corners, a fashion which in England is commonly a mark of the thirteenth century, but which in Sicily and Dalmatia goes on at least till the seventeenth.
But the metropolitan church is not all that Trani has to show. In some of the buildings which we pass by in its narrow streets, we see some good windows of the style which it is most easy to call Venetian, though it might be rash hastily to refer them to the days of Venetian occupation. And there are other windows seemingly of earlier date, certainly of earlier character, which bear about them signs of the genuine Norman impress. But the strength of Trani, even setting aside the great church, lies in its ecclesiastical buildings; the best pieces even of domestic work are found in one of the monasteries. Two smaller churches deserve notice; one of them deserves special notice. This is the church of All Saints, of which we saw the east end on our way to the great minster, and on whose west end we shall most likely light as we come away from it. That west end is covered by a portico, or rather something more than a portico, as it contains a double row of arches. The front to the street forms part of a long and picturesque range of building, of which the actual arcade consists of four arches. One only of these is pointed, and that is the only one which rests on a column, the others being supported by square piers. But beyond this outer range, the vaulted approach to the church displays a grand series of columns and half-columns, with capitals of various forms. One is of extraordinary grandeur, with the volutes formed of crowned angels; the forms of the man and the eagle, either of them good for a volute, are here pressed into partnership. Within, the church is a small but graceful basilica, which, notwithstanding some disfigurements in 1853 which are boastfully recorded, pretty well keeps its ancient character, its columns with their capitals of foliage. He who visits Trani will doubtless also visit Bari, and such an one will do well both to compare the great church of Trani with the two great churches of Bari, and to compare and contrast this smaller building with the smaller church at Bari, that of Saint Gregory. Besides this little basilica, Trani possesses, not in one of its narrow streets, but in its widest piazza, a church, now of Saint Francis, but which, among many disfigurements, still keeps the form of the Greek cross within, and some Romanesque fragments without. Here, as also at Bari and at Bitonto, oriental influences—something we mean more oriental than Greeks or even than Sicilian Saracens—may be seen in the pierced tracery with which some of the windows are filled. In these cases this kind of work suggests a mosque; with other details, it might have carried our thoughts far away, to the great towers of the West of England.
Among the other members of this group of cities we might have expected to find Brindisi, so famous as a haven of the voyager in Roman days, and no less famous in our own, fill a high, if not the highest, place among its fellows. And Brindisi has its points of interest also, one of them of an almost unique interest. Over the haven rises a commemorative column—its fellow has left only its pedestal—which records, not the dominion of Saint Mark, but the restoration of the city by the Protospatharius Lupus. Is this he whose name has been rightly or wrongly added to certain annals of Bari? Anyhow there the column stands, one of the few direct memorials of Byzantine rule in Italy. There is the round church also, the mosaic in the otherwise worthless cathedral, and one or two fragments of domestic work. The lie of the city and its haven is truly a sight to be studied; we see that in whatever language it is that Brentesion means a stag's horn, the name was not unfittingly given to the antler-like fiords of this little inland sea. We trace out too the walls of Charles the Fifth, and we see how Brindisi has shrunk up since his day. But we are perhaps tempted to do injustice to Brindisi, to hurry over its monuments, when we are driven to choose between Brindisi and the greater attractions of the furthest city of our group, in some sort the furthest city of Europe. We pass by Lecce, which lies outside our group, as between Trani and Brindisi we have been driven to pass Monopoli, the spot which saw the first beginnings of the short Venetian rule in these parts. Everything cannot be seen, and we shall hardly regret sacrificing something to hasten to a spot which may well call itself the end of the world, and which forms the most fitting link between the central and the eastern peninsulas of Europe.