" Before the altar was the
_Schola Caniorum_.
[Footnote 1: Fabri, however, in his _Sacre Memorie_, says there were
forty-nine columns.]
[Footnote 2: Agnellus gives the names of the mosaicists Euserius or
Cuserius, Paulus, Agatho, Satius, and Stephanus.]
[Footnote 3: Zirardini, _De Antiquis Sacris Ravennae Aedificiis_.]
Agnellus tells us further in his life of S. Felix (_c_. 693) that that
bishop built a _Salutatorium_ (? Sacristy), "whence the bishop and his
assistants proceeded at the Introit of the Mass into the presence of
the people." But the Epigram which Agnellus quotes from this building
would seem to suggest that the _salutatorium_ was rather then rebuilt
than added for the first time to the church.
The magnificent basilica, one of the most splendid in Italy, was
sacked by the French in April 1512, but, as Dr. Corrado Ricci says, it
was not they who destroyed the church itself, but the _accademici_ of
the eighteenth century, who, instead of conserving the glorious
building, then some thirteen hundred years old, began in 1733 to pull
it down, to break up the beautiful capitals and columns of precious
marbles, and to make out of the fragments the pavement of the new
church we still see, begun in 1734 by Gian Francesco Buonamici da
Rimini.
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