There was nothing to prepare us for the exquisite vista which unfolded itself before us on the crest of Monte Guasco as we toiled up the steep stair-streets which scale the Cathedral hill. The houses were old but undistinguished, the homes of the very poor, who do not even have windows in Italy, but live behind stable doors in bassi. Nor did we realise the moment at which we emerged from them, for our eyes were blocked by the bell-tower of age unknown which stands like a sentinel before Ancona's Cathedral. There is no church in Christendom so enthroned. It is built between two tideless seas on a wind-swept hill, which was once the seat of the white temple of the laughing Goddess of Eryx—Aphrodite, who was born of the foam.
Beside it is the old Episcopal Palace in which Aeneas Sylvius, the last of the crusaders, waited for the false Patriarch of Venice to set sail with him against the Turks. Poor Pius II., with his quixotic and splendid dream of reconquering Jerusalem for the Papacy, how often must he have stood on the bulwark of San Ciriaco's hill watching for the galleys of the Venetian to come into sight. And when at last they did sweep down upon Ancona he was no longer waiting; he had embarked alone upon a longer journey; the last and most incomprehensible of the crusades had failed!
We, too, stood upon the crest of Monte Guasco behind its bulwark of acacia trees, on our first evening by the Adriatic, and looked down upon the busy wharf, with the long arm of Trajan's Mole encircling the harbour, and the white crescent of Ancona stretching round the bay to Monte Astagno. It was nearing the hour of sunset. Across the sunlit water we could see the great Appennines towering towards heaven, aerial as clouds upon the horizon. There Rimini lay, on that fair coast, and Venice and Ravenna, the homes of Poetry and Romance. But near at hand Ancona's fleet of bright-winged boats was spread across the bay. We stood and watched them sailing out into the west, slowly, for there was little wind to fill their gold and copper sails. They looked like argosies of Love journeying into a land of sunset mists across a painted sea. Surely they must come back to-morrow with dreams below their wings, and little lovely treasures from the land whither they were sailing to-night! Slowly they crossed the bar—now a crimson wing tapering to gold with a black griffin rampant; now an orange Gonfalon bearing a lion and anchor; now one of black and gold, now one of Venetian brown. We watched them drifting out, and always the west grew more golden and the distant mountains more aerial until the sea was a path of flame from the far-off coast to Trajan's Mole, where the sunset gilded the black hulks of the coal-ships in the harbour. Ere the last of those fantastic birds had winged its way out to the deep waters, the lights of Ancona had begun to twinkle in the dusk, and the bells of San Ciriaco were stilled.
Ancona: the Fishing Fleet.
San Ciriaco is worthy of its site. Begun a thousand years ago in the form of the earliest Christian temples, half Byzantine, half Romanesque, it preserves the original Greek cross of nave and transept, and is crowned by an antique dome, one of the oldest in Italy, which time and the salt breath of the Adriatic have painted a wonderful green, the despair of artists. The exterior of San Ciriaco is of almost Eastern simplicity, but sun and wind have mellowed the dazzling white marbles of its walls to such gracious tints that it is like a perfect fruit ripened slowly to perfection through the centuries. Its chief glory is the Gothic portico of rose-red Verona marble which tradition and Vasari assign to the hand of Margheritone d'Arezzo, the sombre painter of crucifixes, who was so jealous of Giotto that he died of spleen. Two couchant lions at the head of a flight of steps support its outer columns, and within it is blush-hued, with slender columns, alternate rose and white, wrought with a delicate frieze of the heads of saints and the grotesques of mediaeval fancy.
Nor has the interior of this noble church suffered much from the hands of the restorer. It is a granary of rare and interesting Byzantine fragments, and its choir is graced by ten of the marble columns which once stood in the temple of Aphrodite.
Ancona of to-day is a garden where the beautiful flowers of an ancient architecture are still flourishing among the energetic weeds and herbs of everyday life. Between the two horns of her crescent bay, Monte Astagno, crowned by the Spanish bastions of the Fortezza, and Monte Guasco, which enthrones the lovely church of San Ciriaco, there is a network of streets. Let us for the sake of the metaphor suppose that these streets are paths in the garden of Ancona; and let us walk in them, searching in the tangle of hardy commercial upshoots for the delicate blossoms which graced the pleasances of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More than this, for down in the crowded port we shall discover the ancient growths of the Roman city in many a broken arch on whose blackened stones a Gothic spandril has been grafted, and in the glorious Triumphal Arch which the Imperial Plotina and her sister-in-law raised in honour of Trajan.