Everywhere around is something which takes us back to the most glorious days of the Republic. Opposite is a living monument of that mechanical genius which shines in the great works of Ghetaldi and Boscović. This is the Torre del Orologio, with a domical cupola containing a wonderful clock, in which a revolving globe shows the moon’s age, and two bronze figures of men in armour strike a bell to tell the hours. Upon the bell are the Latin lines:—
Acta velut Phoebus distinguit tempora cursu
Terrigenis, peragens signa superna poli;
Sic sonitu nostro numeratur civibus hora
Nocte monens requiem, luce, laboris opus.[357]
To the left is a beautiful Moresco-Gothic building, the Dogana and Zecca or Mint of the Republic—at present serving as the Ricevitoria principale of the Emperor and King. From here issued forth those half Byzantine pieces with their saintly Blasius and ‘Tuta Salus’ scroll, of which we had seen so many examples on the former sites of Ragusan industry in Bosnia. The Mint, which is behind the Dogana, I visited in company with Signor Vincenzo Adamović, who is one of the representatives of numismatics in modern Ragusa, and who, besides possessing a considerable collection, has published some interesting essays on the medallic history of the Republic. The coins of Ragusa date back, according to Signor Adamović, at least to the ninth century. The earliest coin is of brass, bearing the Byzantine name ‘Follaris’ or ‘Obolus,’ and displaying on the obverse a laureated head, evidently, like some of our Anglo-Saxon monetary effigies of the same date, copied from the fourth-century coinage of the Roman Empire. The earliest silver coin, the Grosso or Denaro, dates from the end of the thirteenth century,[358] and is the first coin on which St. Blasius makes his appearance. The Mint is at present converted into a granary for oats, so that there is little to remark inside the building except an inscription over the massive arch of the standard office of weights and measures:—
Fallere nostra vetant et falli pondera, meque
Pondero dum merces, ponderat ipse Deus.
The present Zecca and Dogana were built in the year 1520, and are among the few buildings which by their massive construction withstood the shock of the great earthquake of 1667. But there is another building hard by, of greater antiquity and more absorbing interest, which has also happily come down to us uninjured. The Palazzo Rettorale, the residence of the old Rectors of the Republic, whose rich colonnade faces the Piazzetta on the left, is a monumental epitome of Ragusan history—the grandest relic of the ancient commonwealth. An inscription on the exterior records that it was founded in 1435 ‘by the nobles and most prudent citizens of Ragusa, under the divine auspices of Blasius, martyr and most holy priest, being patron of this city of Epidaura Ragusa.’[359] The date of its completion, 1452, takes us back to the period when the commerce and literature of Ragusa were first bursting into bloom. The style of the architecture, Florentine, and not Venetian, is typical of the Tuscan source whence Ragusan literature drew its earliest inspiration, and bids a kind of architectural defiance to the Lion of St. Mark. This is not so huge a pile as the palace of the Doges, but neither has it that element of barbaresqueness. These massive arches and the backbone of iron girders within, which enabled the building to withstand the terrific ordeal of the earthquake, characterise well the sober sense and heroic endurance of the citizens who reared it.
This is the Lararium of the Republic. Within are the effigies of her greatest heroes and benefactors, the archives of her history,[360] the rolls of her nobility. This is a treasure-house of the associations of every age of Ragusan story. The stone benches in the porch beneath the spacious arcade are the same on which the senators and patricians of old used to discuss the gravest affairs of state. The massiveness of the Roman arches and that classic colonnade may well be taken to betray the spirit of that race to which the ancient rock of asylum owed her first foundations; the too imaginative patriotism of Ragusa has even gone farther, and claims the capitals themselves to have been transported hither from the Epidauritan mother-city. On one of these is carved an alchemist, seated book in hand amidst his crucibles and alembics, and a Latin inscription[361] of apparently the same date as the sculpture, informs the spectator that he is viewing the inventor of medical arts—Æsculapius, ‘the glory of his birth-place, Ragusa.’ At least it records the pious devotion of mediæval Ragusa to her Roman penates; and though the Cupids that sport amidst the acanthus-leaves of the other capitals were certainly never carved at Epidaurus, we may yet see in them an interesting tribute of Ragusa to the beautiful paganism of the Renascence.