One comes to this great basilica always I think as to a ruin, to find
without surprise the doors closed and only to be opened after long
knocking. The round campanile that towers and seems to totter in its
strange dilapidation beside the church is so beautiful that it
surprises one at once by its melancholy nobility in the midst of so
much meanness and desolation. It is a building of the ninth century,
and may well have been used as much as a watch tower as a bell tower.
Till recently it had at its base a sacristy, but this has been swept
away. Of old the church too had before it a great narthex of which
certain ruins are left, among them a little tower on the left.
Within we find ourselves in a vast basilica divided into three naves
upheld by twenty-four marvellous columns of great size and beauty, of
Greek marble, with beautiful Byzantine bases and capitals. The central
nave is closed by a curved apse set high over a great crypt thrust out
beyond the rest of the church. Beyond the two aisles are two chapels
each with its little curved apse. The walls of the church and the
walls above the arcade were undoubtedly originally covered, in the one
case with splendid marbles, in the other with mosaics.
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