CHAPTER XVII

SPALATO AND SALONA

Westward Along the Coast—First Glimpse of Spalato—The Campanile—Diocletian’s Palace—Salona and Her Ruins.

The full glow of the morning sunlight gleamed and danced upon the brass-work of the little steamer _Petka_ as the stevedores finished their loading of her freight from the dock at Cattaro and the last assortment of passengers had wobbled noisily up the gangway.

It was exactly ten o’clock when the lines were cast off and the ship steamed slowly ahead, turning on her course to gain the Adriatic. She circled about almost at the very edge of the shore line, for there is no semblance of a beach and the deep water extends to the bases of the mighty cliffs that surround the harbour, until Cattaro in the distance put one in mind of a collection of Noah’s Ark houses. The waters were calm and smooth as the surface of a mirror, and held quiescent and in perfect outline the reflections of the rugged mountains.

Once the _Petka_ had negotiated the many consecutive mouths of the Bocche and had finally passed the grim walls of the fortresses on Punta d’Ostro, close on the starboard, she set her course almost due west with her ultimate destination Fiume, her home port; but she was due to call _en voyage_ at almost all of the towns along the coast.

Her main deck was an odd and interesting sight. It was crowded, so crowded that one could see scarcely one square inch of planking, with a rare galaxy of Montenegrins, Cattarines, Albanians, Greeks and Austrian soldiers, each garbed in some bit of costume that made his or her nationality unmistakable. All sprawled about in the sun, smoking or sleeping, their heads and shoulders entwined about their luggage and their legs aimed across the deck like the tails of so many comets.

Above the upper deck, reserved for first-class passengers, white awnings had been stretched, and under these we followed the examples of the natives on board, to a certain extent, to enjoy the beauties of the land-locked passage, through which the ship set her course after leaving Gravosa.

Here on deck, lunch was served at noon and dinner in the evening, each meal an elaborate affair with wine, and composed of some of the most palatable dishes to be had anywhere in Europe. Seven constitutes the usual number of courses served at dinner on board any of these Adriatic coasters, and lunch is hardly less voluminous: _hors-d’œuvres_, of course; soup; fish; a sort of cold fish salad with mayonnaise; spring lamb and delicious vegetables; game of some description; salad; and dessert.

And just to offer one more probative demonstration of how puny the world really is, the chief officer of the _Petka_ had been for many years in the service of a trans-Pacific steamship company, and, during that time, had lived in Santa Clara, California. There his three children had been born, and their father assisted in their education by teaching each one to speak five languages in addition to English.

Almost the entire distance from Gravosa to Fiume the course of the steamers lies along an inland passage protected from the sea-swells of the Adriatic by hundreds of islands, some large and some small, but all of a considerable height, while, from the shores of the mainland, the mountains rise with such apparent verticality that it would seem a simple matter to stand at any point along the top and drop a plumb line to the water below. No matter what moment you might gaze up or down the coast or seaward you would be able to see from five to thirty-five islands, without half trying. The water is all of such great depth, even to the edge of the coast, that it is said a vessel might pass safely between two protruding rocks situated so close together as to barely admit of the ship’s passage. The conspicuous absence of lights to warn the mariner at night makes navigation seem difficult and dangerous, but the pilots know the channels as they know their rosaries. Neither are the ships supplied with searchlights to facilitate the picking out of the few buoys that mark the channels farther along. One or two of the particularly narrow places of the course, however, are marked by miniature light-houses, not more than ten feet in height, which stick up from the water to indicate the base of a wall of rock as it juts out into the blackness of the night.

About fifty miles from Ragusa, in the narrow channel which divides the Sabbioncello Peninsula from the island of Curzola, a famous sea battle between the Venetians and the Genoese took place. This affray was won by the latter, who captured the distinguished Venetian navigator, Marco Polo, he having just returned from a cruise in the China Seas. Polo was taken to Genoa and placed in a dungeon, where he laboured over the manuscript of his widely read book of travels. Doge Dandolo, the Venetian ruler and the admiral of the fleet, was also captured and borne away a prisoner of war by the Genoese, but while _en route_ he dashed out his brains against the bulwarks of the galley upon which he was confined.

Just south of Spalato, twenty hours’ ride from Cattaro by this slow steamer, you will pass the island of Solta, where is gathered the honey, world-famed for its excellence, sucked from the blooms of the rosemary and the cistus rose.

The object that will first attract your attention upon entering the harbour of Spalato is the tall campanile, always in repair, and around which the hideous scaffolding has been allowed to remain since 1882, and it will probably remain for some time to come; for the repairs to the tower are so slow in progressing that as soon as one job is finished another presents itself. The building of this campanile was begun by Maria of Hungary about 1300, but her death in 1323 caused an interruption to the work. It was not again taken up until 1360, when Elizabeth the Elder, sent by her son Lewis of Hungary to govern Dalmatia, ordered that the work be carried out under the supervision of the Spalatine architect, Nicolas Tverdoj. The tower was completed in 1416, but it was not so substantially built as it might have been—for we are told that the subtle art of “graft” had made itself felt in Dalmatia even at that date—and as early as 1472 an architect, Nicolo Fiorentino, commenced the repairs which have continued to this day and which, from all appearances, promise to continue until the campanile is a ruin.

From the top of the scaffold, after a somewhat tiresome climb, one can obtain a comprehensive and beautiful panoramic view of Spalato, where lived and died the composer Von Suppe, and also of the harbour.

Aside from the quaintly dressed Dalmatian fisher folk, who patch and re-patch the variegated sails of their tiny craft along the stone quay, the town is interesting from the fact that it contains the best example of Roman domestic architecture to be found anywhere in the world, not excepting the magnificent ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The subject of this rather broad, but nevertheless true, statement is the old palace built by Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century, and in which the Roman ex-Emperor took up his abode after his abdication and where he lived until his death in 313, A. D. Its building marked the date of a new departure in architecture; a departure which ended in the development of the Byzantine and the Romanesque art of modern Europe, they having been inaugurated by modifying the rules of the ancients.

To this favoured spot on the coast near the then powerful Illyrian metropolis of Salona came Diocletian, and here he built his imperial villa, where he hoped to live peacefully for the remainder of his days. And what a wonderful villa it must have been!

Its walls were from five hundred and seventy to seven hundred feet in length, fifty feet in height, and encompassed nine and one-half acres of ground. The eminent English architect, Adam, who, in 1757, accomplished the difficult and arduous task of plotting the first plans of the ruined palace on paper with no previous mathematical data to guide him, said that it was “a climax in architecture.” So much of its original splendour did it retain that the imperial Roman historian avowed that “it surpassed even in its ruin all powers of description;” and that was more than six centuries after Diocletian’s death.

On the south side, facing the sea, the walls were seventy feet in height, because of the sloping of the land. The outline of this stone-work was broken by a grand total of sixteen towers, only four of which, those on the corners, were higher—and that only by a few feet—than the walls themselves. There were four entrance gates to the palace and three of these can still be distinguished.

If you could have entered the north gate of the palace at a time when its builder and owner was ripening in years within its precincts, you would have looked down on a street thirty-six feet in width. On either side, graceful stone arcades dwindled into the perspective and at the farther end of the street the view was interrupted by the massive portico and dome of the vestibule to the imperial residence. At a point three hundred feet south of this gate, where you would have stood, the lines of arcades were exchanged for the beautiful columns of a peristyle, on either side of which were enclosed courts, that to the right containing the temple of Æsculapius and that to the left, the temple of Jupiter.

Near the peristyle, a street, also fringed with arcades, crossed from west to east, having its termini at the Porta Ferrea and the Porta Ænea respectively. To the south of the vestibule the nave of the palace, ninety-eight feet long and forty-five feet wide, lined with rows of columns and an aisle fourteen feet in width on either side, extended from west to east. Mosaics and multi-coloured marbles made up the decorations of the interior of the apartments, and the beauty of the courts was enhanced by the flowers and plants of this latitude.

From the peristyle, the columns of which were of Cipallino and rose-coloured granite, flights of steps led to the temples at the sides. The Temple of Jupiter, which originally stood apart in a walled court having the peristyle as a screen in front, was built by Diocletian as a prospective tomb in which he intended his body to be placed after death, but now the building serves as the Duomo of Spalato. Originally it had a projecting portico of its own in front, but this has been replaced by the campanile of the Duomo. The other of the two temples, that of Æsculapius, does duty to-day as the city’s baptistry.

Much of the walls of the palace remain to-day, and shut in the old town of Spalato built within the enclosure by the refugees from Salona. Outside of these moss-grown, inarticulate historians of Roman occupation you will find modern European dwellings, school-houses and shady little parks, and at places even on the top of the walls some sacrilegious Spalatines have built their more humble abodes. The peristyle of the famous palace now forms the town square.

After you have made many conjectures as to what a residence the palace of Diocletian must have been, and what scenes were pictured there in the days when its builder made it his home, you will walk outside the walls of the old city, which you must do in order to find a carriage, for horses are not permitted within the gates on account of the narrowness of the streets, and bargain with a _cocher_ to take you to Salona.

On the way you will pass a wonderful ruined aqueduct, which Diocletian built to supply his palace with water from the hills, and which has now been restored to the same use by the modern Spalatines. The road first rises to the top of a ridge and then stretches across the valley of the Riviera dei Castelli which extends from Salona to Traü, the ancient Tragurium of the Romans, famed for its marble, and colonized originally in 380, B.C., by Syracusan Greeks from the island of Lissa. The road is so dusty that the vegetation growing along the side is completely covered with the fine white powder; but the drive is not long and your visit to Salona will be sure to repay you fully for any slight discomforts endured on the way.

Salona is situated among the foot-hills of the Cabani Mountains on the shores of an inland sea which is shut off from the Adriatic by the island of Bua. That information-breathing emperor and historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, said that Salona was at one time half as large as Constantinople. But no matter whether it were large or small it is worthy of a brief description for, if I may make use of a rather inelegant expression in order to better convey to the reader some idea of its antiquity, “Salona was Salona when Spalato was a pup.”

Founded by Illyrian fugitives from the capital, Delminium, after the latter’s destruction by the Romans during the second Dalmatian war, Salona was taken in 117 B. C. by Cæcilius Metellus and made a Roman colony. The city was long and narrow and divided into halves by a sort of diaphragm wall, in the middle point of which was an arched portal called Cæsar’s Gate. Through the central arch of this gate the Roman chariots passed and, although the arches themselves have tumbled you may, as in Pompeii, still see the grooves and ruts in the stone pavement worn deep by the passage of many wheels. A smaller arch on either side allowed for the accommodation of pedestrians. The large Christian basilica, partly excavated in 1880, was demolished in 639 during the final destruction of the city by the Avars. A circular baptistry, with its columned portico facing the south and which marked the entrance, stood within the walls in the eastern part of the city. In the centre of this building, under the dome and sunk in the floor, was a marble fount for baptism by immersion, and from its level arose a complete circle of marble steps; at the top, an aisle with columns on either side passed around the interior of the building.

At the western end of the city can be seen the ruins of the large amphitheatre, and it is probable that this was the only building which survived the devastating fire of the Avars. At different points along the circuit of the walls, which had been battered down time and again and repaired as often, stood no less than eighty-eight towers, having been constructed to reinforce the stone-work. The remains of forty-three of these towers are plainly visible. By scraping away the dust with the toe of your shoe, ornate examples of mosaic decorations can still be distinguished on the floors over which the buildings stood, and some of the Roman sweat-baths have been preserved almost intact; the ancient methods of producing their heated vapours may be solved easily. At one point within the walls was discovered a trench holding fourteen sarcophagi lying end to end in a long row. Of these several have been transferred to the museums. When found, all had been opened and it was impossible to distinguish to whom they belonged, because only two bore inscriptions, one Christian and one Pagan.

On a slight hill back of the ruined city stands the little stone house of the care-taker, embellished with cut-stone work from the buildings of old Salona. In the garden, at the rear, a Roman pergola has been restored in its entirety and over it climbs a rose-vine covered with blooming red ramblers—an attractive modern adaptation of an ancient Roman decorative feature.

Immediately after the fall of Salona in 639 the inhabitants sought refuge on some of the neighbouring islands; then, under the leadership of Severus, they descended upon Spalato and encamped within the walls of Diocletian’s palace, finally erecting buildings and more substantial dwellings, which accounts for the material change of the interior aspect of the palace. For the very good reason that nine and one-half acres was rather a small area to accommodate any great number of people, the town of Spalato soon spread outside of its original walls. It was visited by the great Venetian expedition under Pietro Orseola II in 998, and was compelled to take the oath of allegiance. Internal religious controversies occurred from this time on, until the murderous Tartars, in pursuit of King Bela in 1241, sacked the town and put to death all whom they found in their path. But Spalato arose bravely from the blight of her misfortunes, and in 1327 revolted against Venice, was absorbed by Hungary and, thirty years later, revolted against the latter.

Notwithstanding the changes it has undergone, Diocletian’s palace has been handed down to us, and still holds its place as the most magnificent specimen of the domestic architecture of the Romans. And, strangely enough, its Temple of Jupiter has, for fourteen centuries, served as the Spalatine house of worship of the Christian religion, that religion which the builder of this same temple tried so hard to obliterate.