St. Peter’s is the largest church in the world, covering two hundred and forty thousand square feet. It cost over sixty million dollars, took one hundred and seventy-six years to build; contains many vast and beautiful chapels, tombs of the popes, many paintings by great masters, and sculptures by Bernini, Michaelangelo, Canova and Thorwaldsen.
KINGDOM OF ITALY
Modern Italy occupies the central of the three great peninsulas of southern Europe, together with Sicily, Sardinia, and some smaller islands. The peninsula, which at the Strait of Otranto approaches within less than fifty miles of Albania, is bounded west and south by that portion of the Mediterranean known as the Tyrrhenian Sea, east by the Adriatic, and north by the Alps, separating it from France, Switzerland and Austro-Hungary. The frontier with France is estimated at three hundred and seven miles; with Switzerland at four hundred and seven miles; and with Austria at four hundred and sixty-six miles. Its greatest length is seven hundred and ten miles; the breadth ranges from three hundred and fifty-one miles in the north to about twenty between the Gulfs of St. Eufemia and Squillace, but in most places is about ninety or one hundred miles. The seaboard of the peninsula extends to two thousand two hundred and seventy-two miles.
Mountains and General Configuration.—On the northern frontier the Alps sweep round in a mighty arc from Nice to Trieste, running out in places into Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venice. For the most part they rise steep and abrupt, except where their wall is pierced by long, deep valleys; and some of the loftiest peaks in the system, including Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, belong to this mountain-girdle.
The highest mountain entirely within the kingdom is Gran Paradiso, the culminating point of the Graian Alps, in Piedmont. Between the Alps and the Apennines spreads the broad fertile Lombardo-Venetian plain, a nearly level country, which differs altogether in character from the peninsula to the south, and for a long period was politically distinct from it. Most of this great alluvial tract, which fills nearly the whole of northern Italy, belongs to the basin of the Po; it is irrigated by numerous streams and canals, and is one of the most fruitful and flourishing districts of Italy.
This great northern plain—generally but a few feet above sea-level—round which the Alps rise like a wall, is believed to have been at one period an extension of the Adriatic Gulf, which has been gradually filled up with rich alluvial soil worn down from the steep sides of the mountains by the snow-fed torrents.
The Apennines.—The form of all the more strictly peninsular part of Italy is given by the central range of the Apennines, which extends continuously through its length from the maritime Alps of France, round the head of the Gulf of Genoa, down to Cape Spartivento in the extreme south. The Apennines have their highest part, called the Gran Sasso d’Italia, “the great rock of Italy,” near the center of the long range. The slopes of these heights to the sea, northeast and southwest, are so short as to allow of only small rivers.
Nearly parallel with the southern part of the Apennine range, and westward of it, there appears a more recent chain of isolated volcanic heights. Chief of these, on the peninsula, is the cone of Vesuvius, which rises abruptly from the Campagna of Naples, above the old cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, buried by its lava streams and ashes. North of Rome, in this volcanic region, the round lakes of Bolsena and Bracciano occupy the craters of old volcanoes. Carrying the line southward, across the Tyrrhenian Sea, we come to the volcanic group of the Lipari Islands, with the ever-active volcano of Stromboli; and farther on to Mount Etna, in Sicily, the highest of European volcanoes. Almost all the rest of Sicily, not volcanic, is covered with mountains of moderate elevation, the main line of which extends along the northern side of the island from east to west as if in continuation of the course of the Apennines across the narrow Straight of Messina.
Islands and their Surface.—The island of Sardinia, separated from Corsica by the Strait of Bonifacio, one hundred and fifty miles long from north to south, is for the most part mountainous, especially along the eastern side, in the middle of which rises the granitic Mount Gennargentu.