The tower is more interesting, though it is only an incomplete fragment. The lower stage is of stone built in dark and light courses, with a large sunk recess on each side. On the west side is a fine doorway built of alternate courses of white marble and serpentine, and there are small circular windows in the cardinal sides just above the lowest stage. Above these the whole is a plain mass of brickwork, of which a very small portion only seems to be original. This tower is no less than fifty-two feet in outside diameter, and its lowest stage is finely groined, with no provision for the passage of bells. It might almost as well have been intended for a baptistery as for a tower! It stands close to the north side of the choir, and by its side is a rather fine doorway leading into the transept, with a good deal of late Gothic sculpture and architectural detail. There are niches and figures in the jambs and round the arch, the Coronation of the Virgin under the latter, and figures of the Annunciation stuck against the wall on either side in a very haphazard fashion. The strange contrast in style between these two doorways will be seen in the illustration which I give. Here we have, side by side, examples of the most pronounced kind of two national styles of Gothic; the door into the tower being as clearly Italian in its beautiful colour and refined simplicity, as that into the church is German in its cleverness, want of repose, and hard angularity of detail.
The only other old churches I could find in Udine were San Giacomo and that of the Ospidale. The former is modernized, but retains an early square brick belfry, arcaded below, and with simple pointed windows of two lights above. The church of the Ospidale is also modernized. The façade has a gable with an old brick eaves-arcade, and the only too common feature of a large circular window inclosed within a square border.
A picturesque Renaissance well-canopy (dated 1487) over the Fonte di San Giovanni was the only other feature I could find worth sketching or making a note of; and having seen everything, I took the railway on again to Venice.
The views of the Friulan Alps, under which one travels for some distance, are very exquisite. We passed Conegliano, where I once left the railway for a journey through the heart of the Dolomite country to Cortina d’Ampezzo, and, to my regret, hurried past Pordenone, having forgotten that at any rate a tall brick campanile was there, which seemed to promise some reward to the visitor. It is of plain arcaded brickwork below, and the upper stage is slightly battered out with very tall machicoulis, from within the parapet of which a smaller octagonal stage rises, covered with a low spire. The whole composition as one sees it from the railway is unusual and very good, and recalls just a little the campanile of the Palazzo Publico at Siena.
CHAPTER X.
“With all its sinful doings, I must say
That Italy’s a pleasant place to me,
Who love to see the sun shine every day,
And vines (not nail’d to walls) from tree to tree
Festoon’d.”
Beppo.