[44] It seems probable that the sandstone capitals alone belonged to the first eighth-century church, and the marble ones to the eleventh-century restoration. There is now a modern church built over the old crypt.
[45] Dell' Architettura in Italia, viii. 257.
[46] See Sacchi, Antichità Romantiche d'Italia, p. 98.
[47] Ricci (Dell' Architettura, etc.) tells us the spiral column was very anciently used in Asia, and that Rome did not adopt it till Hadrian's return from the East. Under the later Cæsars it became usual, but it fell into disuse in the rest of Italy. The Byzantines used it in some buildings, and in these two early Longobardic imitations of the East, we have a curious masonic link with the ancient traditions of Solomon's Temple, which Josephus tells us was adorned with spiral columns. It may be that they were old Roman columns carried up the mountain from some ruin, but I should rather take them as one of the first instances of the use of the spiral column by the Comacines, a form to which they were devoted in later times. There are endless instances of spiral colonnettes on the façades of Romanesque churches of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
[48] I speak of the time when Signor Difendente Sacchi visited the church in 1828, before writing his work.
[49] Probably the root of our word Lobby.
[50] I Maestri Comacini, Vol. I. chap. i. p. 50.
[51] The words asse and tavole for planks of wood still survive in Italy.
[52] Hope, Storia dell' Architettura, chap. xxv. p. 179, 180.
[53] See the [illustration] of the church of S. Frediano, on page 48, for a perfect specimen of Lombard tower.