Ports - Trieste And Pola
Reprinted from:
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles13/travel-150.shtml(Originally Published Early 1900's)
Trieste stands forth as a rival of
Venice, which has, in a low practical view of things, outstript her.
Italian zeal naturally cries for the recovery of a great city, once
part of the old Italian kingdom, and whose speech is largely, perhaps
chiefly, Italian to this day. But, a cry of "Italia Irredenta," however
far it may go, must not go so far as this. Trieste, a cosmopolitan city
on a Slavonic shore, can not be called Italian in the same sense as the
lands and towns so near Verona which yearn to be as Verona is. Let
Trieste be the rival, even the eyesore, of Venice, still Southern
Germany must have a mouth.
We might, indeed, be better pleased to
see Trieste a free city, the southern fellow of Lubeck, Bremen and
Hamburg; but it must not be forgotten that the Archduke of Austria and
Lord of Trieste reigns at Trieste by a far better right than that by
which he reigns at Cattaro and Spina. The present people of Trieste did
not choose him, but the people of Trieste five hundred years back did
choose the forefather of his great-grandmother. Compared with the
grounds of which kingdoms, duchies, counties, and lordships, are
commonly held in that neighborhood, such a claim as this must be
allowed to be respectable indeed.
The great haven of Trieste may almost
at pleasure be quoted as either confirming or contradicting the rule
that it is not in the great commercial, cities of Europe that we are to
look for the choicest or the most plentiful remains of antiquity.
Sometimes the cities them-selves are of modern foundation; in other
cases the cities themselves, as habitations of men and seats of
commerce, are of the hoariest antiquity, but the remains of their early
days have perished through their very prosperity. Massalia," with her
long history, with her double wreath of freedom, the city which
withstood Caesar and which withstood Charles of Anjou, is bare of
monuments of her early days. She has been the victim of her abiding
good for-tune. We can look down from the height on the Phokaian harbor;
but for actual memorials of the men who fled from the Persian, of the
men who defied the Roman and the Angevin, we might look as well at
Liverpool or at Havre.
Genoa, Venice herself, are hardly real
exceptions; they were indeed commercial cities, but they were ruling
cities also, and, as ruling cities, they reared monuments which could
hardly pass away. What are we to say to the modern rival of Venice, the
upstart rebel, one is tempted to say, against the supremacy of the
Hadriatic Queen? Trieste, at the head of her gulf, with the hills
looking down to her haven, with the snowy mountains which seem to guard
the approach from the other side of her inland sea, with her harbor
full of the ships of every :nation, her streets echoing with every
tongue, is she to be reckoned as an example of the rule or an
exception to it?
No city at first sight seems more
thoroughly modern; old town and new, wide streets and narrow, we search
them in vain for any of those vestiges of past times which in some
cities meet us at every step. Compare Trieste with Ancona; we miss the
arch of Trajan on the haven; we miss the cupola of Saint Cyriacus
soaring in triumph above the triumphal monument of the heathen. We pass
through the stately streets of the newer town, we thread the steep
ascents which lead us to the older town above, and we nowhere light on
any of those little scraps of ornamental' architecture, a window, a
doorway, a column, which meet us at every step in so many of the cities
of Italy.
Yet the monumental wealth of Trieste is
all but equal to the monumental wealth of Ancona. At Ancona we have the
cathedral church and the triumphal arch ; so we have at Trieste; tho at
Trieste we have nothing to set against the grand front of the lower and
smaller church of Ancona. But at Ancona arch and duomo both stand out
before all eyes; at Trieste both have to be looked for. The church of
Saint Justus at Trieste crowns the hill as well as the church of Saint
Cyriacus at Ancona; but it does not in the same way proclaim its
presence. The castle, with its ugly modern fortifications, rises again
above the church; and the duomo of Trieste, with its shapeless outline
and its low, heavy, unsightly campanile, does not catch the eyes like
the Greek cross and cupola of Ancona,
Again at Trieste the arch could never,
in its best days, have been a rival to the arch at Ancona; and now
either we have to hunt it out by an effort, or else it comes upon us
suddenly, standing, as it does, at the head of a mean street on the
ascent to the upper town. Of a truth it can not compete with Ancona or
with Rimini, with Oranges or with Aosta. But the duomo, utterly
unsightly as it is in a general view, puts on quite a new character
when we first see the remains of pagan times imprisoned in the lower
stage of the heavy campanile, still more so when we take our first
glance of its wonderful interior. At the first glimpse we see that here
there is a mystery to be unraveled; and as we gradually find the clue
to the marvelous changes which it has undergone, we feel that outside
show is not everything, and that, in point both of antiquity and of
interest, tho not of actual beauty, the double basilica of Trieste may
claim no mean place among buildings of its own type. Even after the
glories of Rome and Ravenna, the Tergestine church may be studied with
no small pleasure and profit, as an example of a kind of transformation
of which neither Rome nor Ravenna can supply another example.
The other ancient relic at Trieste is
the small triumphal arch. On one side it keeps its Corinthian
pilasters; on the other they are imbedded in a house. The arch is in a
certain sense double; but the two are close together, and touch in the
keystone. The Roman date of this arch can not be doubted; but legends
connect it both with Charles the Great and with Richard of Poitou and
of England, a prince about whom Tergestine fancy has been very busy.
The popular name of the arch is Arco Riccardo.
Such, beside some fragments in the
museum, are all the remains that the antiquary will find in Trieste;
not much in point of number, but, in the case of the duomo at least, of
surpassing interest in their own way. But the true merit of Trieste is
not in anything that it has itself, its church, its arch, its noble
site. Placed there at the head of the gulf, on the borders of two great
portions of the Empire, it leads to the land which produced that line
of famous Illyrian Emperors who for a while checked the advance of our
own race in the world's history, and it leads specially to the chosen
home of the greatest among them. The chief glory of Trieste, after all,
is that it is the way to Spalato.
At Pola the monuments of Pietas Julia
claim the first place; the basilica, tho not without a certain special
interest, comes long after them. The character of the place is fixt by
the first sight of it; we see the present and we see the more distant
past; the Austrian navy is to be seen, and the amphitheater is to be
seen. But intermediate times have little to show; if the duomo strikes
the eye at all, it strikes it only by the extreme ugliness of its
outside, nor is there anything very taking, nothing like the
picturesque castle of Pirano, in the works which occupy the site of the
colonial capitol. The duomo should not be forgotten; even the church of
Saint Francis is worth a glance; but it is in the remains of the Roman
colony, in the amphitheater, the arches, the temples, the fragments
preserved in that temple which serves, as at Nimes, for a museum, that
the real antiquarian wealth of Pola lies.
The known history of Pola begins with
the Roman conquest of Istria in 178 B.C. The town became a Roman colony
and a flourishing seat of commerce. Its action on the republican side
in the civil war brought on it the vengeance of the second Caesar. But
the destroyer became the restorer, and Pietas Julia, in the height of
its greatness, far surpassed the extent either of the elder or the
younger Pola. Like all cities of this region, Pola kept up its
importance down to the days of the Carlovingian Empire, the specially
flourishing time of the whole district being that of Gothic and
Byzantine dominion at Ravenna. A barbarian king, the Roxolan
Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to Pola after the submission of
his nation to Hadrian; and the panegyrists of the Flavian house rank
Pola along with Trier and Autun among the cities which the princes of
that house had adorned or strengthened. But in the history of their
dynasty the name of the city chiefly stands out as the chosen place for
the execution of princes whom it was convenient to put out of the way.
Here Crispus died at the bidding of
Constantine, and Gallus at the bidding of Constantius. Under Theodoric,
Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the Istrian land on
which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its inhabitants. In
the next generation Pola appears in somewhat of the same character
which has come back to it in our own times; it was there that
Belisarius gathered the Imperial fleet for his second and less
prosperous expedition against the Gothic lords of Italy. But, after the
break up of the Frankish Empire, the history of medieval Pola is but a
history of decline. It was, in the geography of Dante, the furthest
city of Italy; but, like most of the other cities of its own
neighborhood, its day of greatness had passed away when Dante sang.
Tossed to and fro between the temporal
and spiritual lords who claimed to be marquesses of Istria, torn by the
dissensions of aristocratic and popular parties among its own citizens,
Pola found rest, the rest of bondage, in submission to the dominion of
Saint Mark in 1331.
Since then, till its new birth in our
own times, Pola has been a failing city. Like the other Istrian and
Dalmatian towns, modern revolutions have handed it over from Venice to
Austria, from Austria to France, from France to Austria again. It is
under its newest masters that Pola has at last begun to live a fresh
life, and the haven whence Belisariust sailed forth has again become a
haven in more than name, the cradle of the rising navy of the united
Austrian and Hungarian realm.
That haven is indeed a noble one. Few
sights are more striking than to see the huge mass of the amphitheater
at Pola seeming to rise at once out of the land-locked sea. As Pola is
seen now, the amphitheater is the one monument of its older days, which
strikes the eye in the general view, and which divides attention with
signs that show how heartily the once forsaken city has entered on its
new career. But in the old time Pola could show all the buildings which
befitted its rank as a colony of Rome. The amphitheater, of course,
stood
without the walls; the city itself stood at the foot and on the slope
of the hill which was
crowned by the capitol of the colony, where the modern fortress rises
above the Franciscan
church. Parts of the Roman wall still stand; one of its gates is left;
another has left a neighbor and a memory.
Travelers are sometimes apt to complain, and
that not wholly without reason, that all amphitheaters are very like one
another. At Pola this remark is less true than elsewhere, as the amphitheater
there has several marked peculiarities of its own. We do not pretend to ex-pound
all its details scientifically; but this we may say, that those who dispute—the
dispute still goes on—about various points as regards the Coliseum at Rome will
do well to go and look for some further light in the amphitheater of Pola. The
outer range, which is wonder-fully perfect, while the inner arrangements are
fearfully ruined, consists, on the side toward the town, of two rows of arches,
with a third story with square-headed openings above them.
But the main peculiarity in the outside
is to be found in four tower-like projections, not, as at Arles and
Nimes, signs of Saracenic occupation, but clearly parts of the
original design. Many conjectures have been made about them; they look
as if they were means of approach to the upper part of the building;
but it is wisest not to be positive. But the main peculiarity of this
amphitheater is that it lies on the slope of a hill, which thus
supplied a natural basement for the seats on one side only. But this
same position swallowed up the lower arcade on this side, and it
hindered the usual works underneath the seats from being carried into
this part of the building.
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