In the Piazza Mercanto is a great bronze lion wearing an exaggerated dog-collar on which is inscribed the “Custos Justitiæ,” the heraldic motto and device of the city.
Manfredonia, Termoli, Ortona and Pescara are all of them charming Adriatic towns, each and all possessed of vivid reminders of the days of the corsairs, adventurers and pirate Saracen hordes. Their battlemented walls and castles still exist in the real, and little of twentieth century progress has, as yet, made its mark upon them. Mythology, history and romance have here combined.
Ancona is not included in every one’s Italian itinerary. This is the more to be regretted in that it is very accessible, not only by road but by rail from Ravenna or Perugia, or by sea, in eight or ten hours, from Venice. The city of fifty thousand inhabitants, with a Ghetto of six thousand Jews, is beautifully situated on an amphitheatre of hills overlooking the Adriatic. The mole which encloses its harbour supports two triumphal arches, making a sort of monumental water-gate unequalled by anything similar in all the world. One of these arches was erected by the Roman Senate in 122, to the honour of Trajan, and the other in honour of Pope Clement XII in 1740.
Trajan undoubtedly deserved the honour. It was he who was the first to hold that “it was better a thousand guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.” When he appointed Subarranus Captain of the Guard, he presented him, according to custom, with a drawn sword, saying, as he handed it, these memorable words: “Pro me, si merear, in me” (“Use this sword for me: If I deserve it, against me”). It is good to know that men like these may have memorial arches as well as mere cut-throat conquerors.
Trajan’s Arch, Ancona
Every student of Italian architecture knows Piranesi’s drawing of the famous Trajan arch at Ancona. It was more truthful than many of his drawings of Roman antiquities, and might indeed have been made in these latter years, for little is changed on Ancona’s seafront.